Day: May 16, 2012

All of these appeared on Paddy Johnson's blog. The first was addressed to Paddy and the second two to one of her editors:

on AFC at The L Magazine: What New Aesthetic? 5 days ago

[...] Hopefully what's "shining through" my notes isn't that Bridle isn't "one of us" (whoever us is) but that he's hodgepodging together critique and puffery into one of those "new and improved" commercial fairytales. (Learn to love the digital world, no matter how incompetent or intrusive it may be.) It's funny that Rob Myers is still complaining about surf clubs after all these years. Those were heterogeneous, improvisational affairs and made no claims to tie it all together the way Bridle's tumblr and lectures do.

on Okay, So Who’s Gonna Run Rhizome? 6 days ago [possibly the worst blog headline ever written. Strunk & White curl into a ball --TM]

Another possibility is the New Museum rethinks its relationship with a vaguely-defined "net art" platform and either spins it off as a tech booster site or consolidates the Artbase as a relatively low-cost collection of new media art.
Because one person has been running Rhizome for seven years it's more of a series of habits than an institution at this point. What is Rhizome? It's an art collection, but it's never been clear whether it was curated or something like an unvetted artist slide registry. It's a magazine-like blog, which wavers between attempts at criticism and straight-up press releases, and will never have any real teeth as the "house publication" of a museum. And it's a place that organizes lectures, projects such as "7 artists/7 technologists," and the occasional show. Most of this has been decided in a fairly autocratic manner: instead of a people-powered, crowd-sourced "rhizomatic" model, Rhizome for the last several years has been closer to, say, China under Mao.
Now that the cult of personality is ending, and given the vagueness of the charter at this point, why keep the thing?
This post asks the wrong question.

on “C.R.E.A.M.” at Art Micro-Patronage, Now in Excessive Detail! 6 days ago

Rhizome's notion of "taking a GIF offline so the collector can have it locally" isn't a viable business model or a particularly good way of educating people about this ill-defined term "net art."
That's what Ben Fino-Radin (who works for Rhizome) and 0-Day were "fighting" about on Twitter--none of which is not explained here. Fino-Radin said he couldn't support 0-Day because their program is rooted in a "diss" -- that is, criticism of his employer.
The entire controversy is glossed over here as "the Armory fuss last year."

Update: Minor editorial tweak.