art as criticism

Joe Milutis, in his book Failure, a Writer's Life, asks a very qood question. Why is NYC still a place for recognition/validation of immaterial experiments that could theoretically happen anywhere? Let's let Milutis ask it:

No, I must ignore Darger and Kuchar in order to take on bigger game: the psychic space of New York City itself. Paradoxically for a city with no evident need of such, it has helped turn the world‘s attention to non-figurative atmospheres and other unprofitable immaterialities. Its literary and art worlds are premiere generators of virtual work, but it has also served as a brick-and-mortar filter that has compromised what could be an atmospherically, even cosmically expansive virtual canon. If for [William Carlos] Williams, “the local in a full sense is the freeing agency of all thought, in that it is everywhere accessible to all,“ and if, with the Internet, every “local“ is now suffused with the knowledge and activity that was once only constrained to the metropoles, why is it that New York City remains one of the best places to get recognition for one‘s unliterary ambience mapping, situationist periplum plumbing, and virtual world any-place-whatevering? Is this where the “inaction“ is? Even Robert Smithson, who celebrated his hometown Passaic as the new eternal city and explored the distinctly anonymous pleasures of the non-site in the most far flung nowheresvilles, always needed to set out from Port Authority. Is failure determined by one‘s failure to connect with the machinations of such an urban authority (as with [Marcia] Nardi) or is one more failed when one does not create new literary capital in alternative centers, hopefully where the rent is cheaper (as did Williams)? Why assert a center of cultural or uncultural capital when, owing to the virtual powers of the Internet, the center does not hold?

As a painter I always felt I needed to be here because people required physical proof of the paintings. Am sure many galleries have been dismayed when that work from LA that looked so good in jpegs was finally uncrated; whereas, if the same artist lived in the metro area, the gallery could say, "get out of here, wannabe." Now, after taking the trouble to move back here again (20 years ago), and doing other things besides just painting, I don't want to leave. It means something if the resident tastemakers don't get your work here, whereas it didn't matter if it sailed over the head of some small-pond doyen(ne). You want a certain critical mass to judge your failures (and successes). There's also the possibility that some young turk critic will enjoy challenging the resident tastemakers, whereas the leadership changes more slowly in a smaller scene. As for alternative centers, it should be remembered that Donald Judd swung a mighty compass in NY before putting Marfa on the map. But, yeah, at the end of the day, I'd say force of habit plays a large role in NY's hegemony, and the city doesn't deserve to have a culture since it's more interested these days in providing pieds-à-terre for foreign kleptocrats.

Am about halfway through Joe Milutis' book, Failure, a Writer's Life, which treats the subject of failed literature or non-literature. As in, the necessity and difficulties of adducing a theory for the vast amount of productive writing that falls outside the narrow spectrum of literature: cranks and obsessives such as Charles Fort, real-life versions of Borges' Funes the Memorious, database-compilers on and offline, etc.
I would add J.G. Ballard's favorite non-literature: office memoranda. Also books by authors who have lost and never regained publishers after being hyped as "towering talents for our age." (Several good science fiction authors fall in that category.)
Occasionally the analysis crosses over into failed art or non-art (visual as opposed to writing). Clement Greenberg once noted that we don't have a theory for failed art. Would rather read about someone like Francis Picabia, who was considered a great Dadaist who then produced decades of terrible paintings (until those terrible paintings were reassessed -- and the jury's still out) than Milutis' example of Ryan Trecartin, who, although a terrible artist, is considered a smashing success by every contemporary curator you could name.
Our interests intersect with Milutis' analysis of dump.fm [I made a pdf excerpt -- hope that's OK]. Dump is half-art, half-writing, all "failed" or "non-". The same curators who can talk you to death about Trecartin's carnivalesque inversion of blah-blah are deathly silent about Dump. Words simply fail them.
Milutis rolls up his sleeves and does the work and gets it about 85% right. An excerpt:

Dump.fm, a continuous stream of user-created or repurposed web junk, is based on the premise of “talking with images”: one can, for example, take the url of one participant‘s post, and immediately splice it with another url, with an eye to immediate commerce with images, the surprise combination, or the visual pun, rather than image-authorship strictly conceived. It is isomorphic with Flarf, in that the hastily recontextualized and modified gifs and jpgs, exchanged in a real-time semianonymous community, tend towards the cute, the cloying, the un-P.C., the “not O.K.” Yet because it is a free-floating environment, rather than a stand-alone net art “object,” it has developed in ways that complexify any notion of coherent approaches and specific ontological properties, accommodating methods and uses that do not fit under the rubric of a manifesto. [wikipedia flarf link added]

And another:

Nevertheless, in their embrace of real-time, spontaneous discourse with digital junk, Dump.fm users espouse an ambiguous relation to the enforced scarcities of the art world. On the one hand, because Dump.fm values spontaneous participation but also because, for better or for worse, it much of the time gets taken over as a teenage chat rumpus room, there is little patience with work that attempts to be too crafty, or that doesn‘t deal with bottom-barrel internet grotesques for freak-show gawking, or that seems to come from anyone over twenty with any art world cred. One racks up more “likes” in the dump rating system if the dump is a quick turn-over of another dump, rather than something painstakingly composed in Photoshop or AfterEffects: more cred for projectile than for project. There‘s a whole “genre” of dump participant who rarely, if ever, composes or recomposes images, but instead merely posts asignifying snaps from his or her webcam, exerting casual presence as a dump star, as if trying to win the slow bicycle race of artistic inactivity and unambition.

And:

Like the chat function, the webcam functions as a territorializing machine within this more deterritorialized space. That is, the webcam has an indexical function—the presence of the person behind the camera cannot easily be faked; and because no one looks over twenty-one, the frequent use of webcam stills forces unstated rules about who can participate and how. Similarly, the use or overuse of the chat function—sometimes overriding the site's raison d'être of “talking with images” for long stretches of time—tends to create boundaries, subgroups, and rivalries that would not be as evident or easy to maintain if the commerce were merely with recycled web-junk.

Milutis over-rates dump's art world connections. Am flattered to be described as a "participating éminence gris" but at this point dump does more for me than vice versa. Ditto Ryder Ripps, who rarely participates anymore in his own creation. As noted above, the part of the art world that could valorize dump through writing and analysis has been busy with far easier subjects.