Day: January 11, 2011

A few more responses to Brad Troemel's internet art history:

1. Many of those 90s "art" websites such as Mouchette, praised by Troemel for their utopian anonymity, were famously insider-y and hard to navigate. Sally McKay nailed the work of that period as "long-loading, find-the-place-to-click-me narratives packed with theoretically correct reference to the body or lack thereof."

2. Troemel suggests that after the dot-com collapse and 9/11, anonymity went out of fashion and people started identifying themselves. Yet the most talked-about sites of the "warblogging era" (on the left, at least) were Media Whores Online, Eschaton, Hullabaloo, and Billmon, all anonymous. The first art blogs, while not as covert as the political bloggers, tended to have handles such as Iconoduel, NEWSGrist, Bare and Bitter Sleep, etc. rather than proper names.

3. This is pretty, er, imaginative: "The surf clubs’ initial underdog status soon transitioned to one of institutional success for many members as venues like the Venice Biennale, the New Museum and a slew of international galleries endorsed club participants." Troemel makes no distinction between the club members's individual careers and their activities in the clubs, and greatly inflates "institutional success." A place in Miltos Manetas' "internet pavilion" is what Troemel means by "Venice Biennale"; the one-off IRL exhibition in Williamsburg is his link for "galleries" in that phrase "a slew of international galleries."

Just realized after using dump.fm and linking to posts there for several months that you can't view it on Internet Explorer. No one has exactly emailed to complain about getting the error message that "dump.fm only works with Firefox, Chrome or Safari ... (possibly Opera)." IE is famously non-compliant with international web standards but it is used by half the people in the world. It is especially likely to be used by workplace surfers during, uh, lunch breaks. Probably not worth mentioning but felt the need to make this disclaimer.