May 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.

Follow-up post to The Decline of Trolling.

Social media has broken down so many traditional categories (artist, critic, performer, "hacker," dickhead) that we obviously need a new set of definitions for online actors. I propose degrees of trolling, or fixing the place of the actor within a 4 dimensional troll continuum.

The following are markers to assist in this placement process:

-- "Who is the troll in this situation?" is a frequently asked question.

-- Is the troll the critic, or the person who gets 25 "likes" for flaming the critic?

-- A recent Q&A considers trolling in the narrow context of people who self-identify as net artists.

-- People who would now be called trolls if their activities were restricted to online interactions: Kathy Acker (copying), Elaine Sturtevant (copying), Andy Kaufman (stunts), Frank Zappa (stunts), Malcolm X (political theatre). This is retcon (retroactive continuity) working backwards from (i) being a jerk on Facebook to (ii) the Weev-like hacker-troll to (iii) the aforementioned troublemakers.

-- Ben Vickers suggests a spectral continuum on his twitter account: criticism, constructive trolling, mere trolling, straight up hurtful commentary, and abuse. Vickers distinguishes a troll from a critic as follows: the critic has an affirmative duty to host retaliatory comments on his own site. (Kind of like mandatory health care payments as a requirement of citizenship.)

-- The Vickers spectrum doesn't take into account trolling-as-art or trolling-as-social-media-strategy, however. Can these types of trolling be spoken of, not in moral terms such as constructive or hurtful, but rather critiqued for their effectiveness as theatre? If all art is performance, rewarded by coins in a tip jar, then the troll always makes the most money by "stirring things up." All art aspires to the condition of trolling.

More markers will be added as they occur to me.

Update: Jeffrey Deitch, now in a position of adult responsibility as head of LA MOCA, once gave a Flash Art interview where he described his early work as a '70s conceptual artist. He would start arguments out on the street, then duck into a building as they escalated, get his camera, and come back outside to take documentary photos of angry people shouting at each other (or fighting). This is the essence of trolling, and you can see it has a real pedigree in the art world.

This was from the website of a well-known paint store chain. Cropped, rotated, with some other tweaks to isolate the image.
Was reading some tweets recently where the stance of "blending art, life and politics" was used as a politically correct cudgel. X presumed to make a distinction between attacking art and attacking a person, so Y adopts the zen master stance and says: "Grasshopper, you think these are not one and the same? I no longer make 'art' but have recognized that all our actions are relational. Everything is a moral act." So then X says, yeah, but the attack was a mere bee-sting. So the zen master then switches to the aesthetic mode, arguing that the attack lacked balance and feng shui. And then I woke up.