GIF made from a video by Matthew Geller [YouTube]
34th Street subway station
September 2011
WTF is a net artist
One of dump.fm's prominent chatters, a film student, frequently complains about "net artists," as in "I don't like it when net artists..."
What does he think a net artist is, exactly?
Here are some possibilities for what a net artist might be:
1. Someone with a BFA or MFA in net art (future nonexistent degrees)
2. Someone who self-consciously makes art involving web-based technology or protocols
3. Someone with a degree in studio art who posts self-identified artwork that can be found/indexed by search engines
4. Someone with no art degree who posts self-identified artwork etc
5. Someone with or without an art degree who posts any kind of visual expression, leaving it for others to identify it as art
6. Someone with/without an art degree who uses the internet for performance or agitprop, either self-identified or other-identified as art
7. Someone with/without an art degree who posts any kind of visual expression or does anything performative online, without caring whether it is called art or not
8. A shamanic presence who is doing something disturbing and art-like on the internet
9. Someone who has had online expression covered by a prominent "art and technology" website
10. Someone who works primarily offline, e.g. a painter showing in galleries, who creates a digital presence through exhaustive documentation
11. Someone who spends 20 hours a day in the social media blog-mills and believes this is a new kind of art
12. Someone in the social media blog-mills who finds collective or group validation of an art-like activity that may or may not be institutionally identified as art
13. A film or video student whose own personal greatness has yet to be recognized by any "art and technology" website
product boxes 1993-2002
Was preparing to wrap these up and park them somewhere and it occurred to me I'd never photographed them together.
The spheroids are painted directly on the boxes in acrylic - in the case of a couple of boxes the pattern is made on a computer, printed, and glued on the box.
In the '90s these were criticized as a "step back from the Brillo box" in that the packages are altered/adorned rather than just presenting the design as a found object. Since their roots are equally in folk art it seemed limiting to peg their success/failure purely in Discourse terms, but I can't control the spin.
One thing that interests me about them now is the "default" nature of the materials. The paint is premixed, straight-from-the-jar color and the boxes are about as ordinary as it gets. They hang on the wall with pins inside the box.
This work was never shown together (until now) but individual boxes made the group show/art fair rounds. One was reproduced in Art in America; another was my first pic on the Internet--a photo someone took accompanying a review on a long-disappeared '90s website. I sold one and traded another with an artist I admire.
I still believe in this work. As Socrates said, "the unexamined garbage is not worth tossing."
Update: After posting this several of these sold. Many thanks.
These are now indicated "private collection": top row (1-4); second row (1); bottom row (4)
GIF for sale, 2006
Art blogger Hrag Vartanian seemed surprised this year to discover someone selling a GIF at the Armory Art Fair. Since no one can be expected to dig through my old blog archives, I fished up this photo by Paddy Johnson, depicting Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects gallery selling an animated GIF (mine) at the DIVA art fair in Miami in 2006. DIVA's web page of the event is still up, as well. Is a DVD of a GIF still a GIF? Many might say no--you'd have to see it and judge.
In an ARTINFO column about digital art and $$$, Kyle Chayka ponders, among other things, the sales practice of "taking a GIF offline so the collector can have it locally" (which we did not do at DIVA--what was offered was an authenticated copy of the art, not the rights to the image) in light of a recent Frieze essay about the supposed differences between digital and gallery style art: "broadly speaking, the art world is vertical (escalating levels of privilege and exclusivity) whereas the web is horizontal (based on free access, open sharing, unchecked distribution, an economy of attention)." That the same person uttered both phrases is a mystery no one, including Chayka, can solve, but let's move on.
Limiting edition sizes, or selling the rights to one person, could both be means of creating what the Frieze essay calls "scarcity" and Chayka calls "artificial scarcity" that presumably enhances monetary value but is contrary to the spirit of open sharing and unchecked distribution. Which method you use is mostly a matter of optics: "having the GIF locally" provokes hoots and hollers because of the mental image of some plutocrat in his den cackling over "his" GIF while the thing circulates uncontrollably out in the real world.
Whereas an editioned DVD or data disc, authenticated by the artist, isn't so extreme and has ample precedent in the art world. But let's get back to that idea of "scarcity." Is that really what this is about? Art economics aren't classical economics. Even in the most ruthless Chelsea shops, sales aren't just about exchange value affected by laws of supply and demand. There are elements of generosity, patronage and support for artists (as well as status, ego, and loss leader financing) that don't factor into the typical capitalist dog-eat-dog scenario. Certainly rarity impacts value but limited editions are also a way of helping artists get paid when they mostly don't. Talk of "scarcity" and "escalating levels of privilege" is the art world in faux-Marxist, self flagellation mode, justifying consumption while supposedly critiquing it.
Also, contrary to Frieze, there are reasons for making art gallery-friendly besides creating a "saleable object." When a web artifact is shown in physical space, the viewer's relationship to it changes--you can walk around it, or walk through it if it is projected, and you can discuss it with other people rather than having a solitary passive encounter with it on a web page. Believe it or not, some artists are interested in these transformations for their own sake, not as an after-the-fact justification of their desperation for money.
