general

Marco Rubio announced his presidential candidacy on April 13 and Naked Capitalism's Lambert Strether analyzes his speech for dog-whistle phrases, bipartisan shibboleths, equivocation, dead metaphors, "red meat for the base," and other factors. Rubio lost me with the first, inaccurate sentence:

I chose to make this announcement at the Freedom Tower because it is a symbol of our nation’s identity as the land of opportunity. And I am more confident than ever that despite our troubles, we have it within our power to make our time another American Century.

We don't call it the Freedom Tower anymore! I posted a comment to Strether's post:

April 15, 2015 at 12:48 pm
The building where Rubio made his announcement is called One World Trade Center. The “Freedom Tower” name that everyone used for years was dropped in 2009 after the building had failed to attract any tenants and the possibility loomed of a substantial lease with a Chinese real estate company. The Port Authority insisted there was no connection between the name change and prospective tenant fears of operating in a large, ostentatiously-named lightning rod for future terror attacks. The backpedaling quotes from civic leaders such as Mayor Bloomberg after the announcement were priceless. Possibly Rubio doesn’t read the New York newspapers.

See, for example, this Daily News story for more detail.
Here's what Mayor Bloomberg said:

"It's up to the Port Authority," he said. "I have no idea what the commercial aspects are, and we can say, 'Oh, we shouldn't worry about that,' but of course you have to, particularly now.

"I would like to see it stay the Freedom Tower, but it's their building, and they don't need me dumping on it. If they could rent the whole thing by changing the name, I guess they're going to do that, and they probably, from a responsible point of view, should. From a patriotic point of view, is it going to make any difference?"

There's freedom, the symbol Rubio used, and there's market freedom, which dictated the name change. Which is more valuable, as a concept?

A graduate student doing research about appropriation and authorship sent me some questions about the surf club era. She put the Q&A together into a nice interview [pdf] with illustrations and footnotes.

She felt the Surfing Club scene/period was difficult to grasp because:

(a) With the exception of VVORK, it was more an American phenomenon; “Old skool” net.art is actually more known and discussed in Europe (even today); (b) there is actually little literature available (Ramocki, Olson, Cloninger, Bewersdorf; I ended up reading all your blog entries from 2008 onwards, and chaotic discussions from the Rhizome archive of June 2008), and everybody seems to disagree on some general level and (c) With the meteoric rise of interest in Post Internet, it seems to me that Surfing Clubs have been forgotten.

In our back-and-forth discussion it became clear that current students are getting an, how can this be said diplomatically?, incorrect slant about the scene from later writers who weren't part of it, and welcomed a chance to put in (more of my) two cents.

The following is an only slightly exaggerated version of online conversations I had about Tuesday's post follower privilege, access privilege, and other things to be bitter about. A couple of interrogators are combined here as "RASG" (recent art school graduate):

RASG: You made a good critique yesterday of the Brad Troemel/Jennifer Chan position on the so-called internet surf clubs of '06-'08. You say the clubs' primary attributes weren't exclusivity and a career vehicle for members.

TM: Right.

RASG: It's personal with you, isn't it? That really weakens your argument.

TM: I don't know them. I met Troemel once. My post was basically fact-checking what I consider wrong assumptions, since I was in one of the surf clubs (Nasty Nets) and those authors are viewing the clubs with what seems to be 20/20 incorrect hindsight.

RASG: Possibly your position inside one of the clubs blinds you to what recent art school graduates face, in terms of current options. For us, it's mainly Tumblr and Facebook and you are making fun of that. That's kind of well, arrogant and hypocritical.

TM: Privilege shaming is always a good rhetorical tactic but you're assuming I had some advantage that you currently don't have. If it was 2006 you could have started a group blog and built an audience. I believe you still could, just using search traffic, word of mouth, hyperlinks from respected sites, RSS, and even social media -- without actually situating your group blog on tumblr or FB.

RASG: Oh, yeah, sure, and that's going to just get archived on Rhizome, just like that.

TM: Well, Rhizome archived Nasty Nets, but then their conservator left, so it's a half-finished project. But assuming that NN is laureled to the extent you're saying, no, there is no guarantee that an interesting group blog is going to be recognized. You have to build an audience. That was true for NN as well.

RASG: (scoffs) You already had a career before you joined NN. You can't really talk.

TM: Again, you are privilege shaming. And no, it took years of being online, blogging, before anyone thought about inviting me to be in stuff.

RASG: But you had an art career before that.

TM: That exposure didn't carry over in 2001, when I started blogging. The art world wasn't following blogs. I basically had to start over.

RASG: OK, maybe, but it takes money and tech savvy to start a blog. You had a leg up that we don't have now.

TM: I started blogging on a site called Digital Media Tree. They were hosting a small collection of blogs (still are). The webmaster was very generous with time and skill but there was no gaming the system, a la Buzzfeed. All I did was sign up and start posting -- and built a "rep," such as it is, over time. You could do that, as well. Starting a group blog outside the social media continuum isn't that hard or expensive.

RASG: You are overly romantic. Your story sounds like every one of these startups that claim to have begun penniless.

TM: I like you, as well.

Someone sent me an obnoxious quote from an obnoxious essay on post-internet art:

While early new media art communities were built on ethics of openness
 and collaboration, surf clubs and platform-based practices prosper on 
the nepotism [sic] and influence of online and regional friendships. In 2014, the internet is not so democratic and neither is the art world. Privileges of access to the art world come through unlikely cross-platform friendships with critics, academic blogger meritocracy, and follower-populism. Artists with higher follower counts become aesthetic opinion leaders, soft-capitalizing on the attention of the right gallerists, art lovers, art students, and New Yorkers. To base your art practice around any one platform is to submit yourself to the social hierarchies created by impressions of influence and popularity with the communities you build and engage with.

The author is Jennifer Chan. The quote was in a book, which students are reading. Depressing. Let's take it line by line:

While early new media art communities were built on ethics of openness 
and collaboration, surf clubs and platform-based practices prosper on
 the nepotism* and influence of online and regional friendships.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. The dynamic content of blogging software platforms opened up "net practice" from the old days of fixed html pages dependent on collections of hyperlinks for traffic. Suddenly hyperlinks could be generated "on the fly" and conversations could happen right on the page under discussion (instead of through a guestbook or related BBS).

In 2014, the internet is not so democratic and neither is the art world. Privileges of access to the art world come through unlikely cross-platform friendships with critics, academic blogger meritocracy, and follower-populism. Artists with higher follower counts become aesthetic opinion leaders, soft-capitalizing on the attention of the right gallerists, art lovers, art students, and New Yorkers.

Authority based on "higher follower counts" is a completely different concept from authority based on personal contacts. Chan thoughtlessly mashes them together here.

To base your art practice around any one platform is to submit yourself to the social hierarchies created by impressions of influence and popularity with the communities you build and engage with.

"Blogosphere" sites that are self-hosted (which includes '06-'08 surf clubs) didn't partake of the centralized, mass-control structures of a commercial platform such as Tumblr or Facebook. Chan is voluntarily operating in a far more restrictive environment while projecting her hierarchies and elitism onto surf clubs she never participated in.

As an artist friend noted, Chan "pushes privilege shaming to such an extent that we're supposed to feel bad about being friends with other artists." Resentment is raised to a statement of high principle.

Rhizome.org has archived at least one of the surf clubs from the mid-'00s (Nasty Nets) but has never publicly announced it, or had symposia where some of Chan's revisionism could be cleared up. She was in school when all that was going on and is just fabricating theories about the era (or borrowing her bad ideas from Brad Troemel, who also wasn't there).

*nepotism means giving jobs to your relatives -- I think "cronyism" is the word she means to use here

Artforum has a fairly balanced essay [probably up for a limited time online] regarding the nascent separatist movement of young, internet-based, feminist artists. The article notes a recent women-only performance night at Transfer gallery in NYC, the private, women-only Facebook group ☆ミ [Star Wave], and the launch of the show being reviewed, an online exhibition titled Body Anxiety, on the opening night of Ryder Ripps' Postmasters show "Ho," "not as a protest per se, but as a pointed alternative."

An intriguing slant of the article is that online art politics are not the same as meat space art politics: it's more about mediation and management of images and symbols than protesting and organizing out in the streets. And image-management online is notoriously slippery (in this case, the representation of female bodies, or more particularly, the artists' bodies):

[W]hat pushing back means, and what it looks like, is pretty much up for grabs. Resistance is co-opted so quickly in our moment of screen grabs and reblogs that one obvious question is: Why fight it? It’s no surprise that for a lot of artists, gaming the system is more appealing, or simply more feasible, than changing it, and there’s no doubt that much of the work in the show walks right up to that well-trodden line between criticality and complicity, deploying “Internet babe” tropes with and without irony.

One wonders, reading the article, whether iPhone deformations of an Instagram brand model done by a female artist would have raised the same hue and cry as when Ryder Ripps did it. ("[Ann Hirsch] uses a trippy spiral warp effect on both shots, reminiscent of Ripps’s manipulations of Ho’s photos," the Artforum author mentions.) Or if a woman doing it would be called out by her peers for not doing it fairly enough. Ripps' target was a woman who had sold out to capitalist patriarchy but his crime was not so much misogyny, perhaps, as being the wrong person to be making the critique (see the last paragraph, below). Meanwhile, Frieze is still talking dated, Paglia-esque talk about Ripps not respecting that the Instagram model had empowered herself via tantalizing self-display ("... is a pointed thing to do to an image of a woman whose power hinges on her body’s appearance and her control over it." Yes, and...?)

The return of a Dworkinian "kill the oppressors" strain of feminism in our increasingly net-based art practice would certainly be new and noteworthy (and kind of exciting), but as Artforum notes, there are inconsistencies and internal conflicts:

When we spoke, [Jennifer] Chan [one of "Body Anxiety"'s co-organizers] expressed self-critical despair -- prompted in part by comments on ☆ミ [Star Wave] -- over the inadequate presence of women of color and of queer and trans artists in “Body Anxiety.” She wondered whether the focus on work that took pleasure in performances of femininity -- all those Internet babes -- played a role in the unconscious skewing of the curatorial selection toward conventionally attractive white women artists. While many of the show’s artists -- unclothed and not -- contest the appropriation of women’s sexuality in porn, mass culture, and men’s art, fewer challenge popular feminist representations of sexual liberation. Which bodies (or artists) get to be freedom’s icons and emissaries?

The Dworkin hard line we're envisioning here wouldn't just be a "women good/men bad" dichotomy but an anti-iconic practice that seeks to eradicate or at least problematize the "selfie" as a form of "identity" -- recognizing that it's no longer "empowering" (if it ever was) to voluntarily submit to a Staasi-like system of surveillance or self-surveillance based on facial recognition. Warping the Instagram model's face in this scheme is not male rage but worker rage at a prevailing quasi-voluntary control system. De-privileging the "body image" to restore powers inherent in the rest of the sensorium: hearing, smell, touch, taste. Etc Etc. Just throwing this out for thought.