how did the troll get the portrait and not guthrie??

Here are some other propositions I don’t agree with in the article.

1. “This generation really knows the Net. They grew up with it and are, for lack of a better word, native to it.” Possibly the generation that created the net also knows something about it (e.g., Berners-Lee, Al Gore), or the generation that has been forced to use it at the office for the last, say, ten years. Anyone can surf, Jeez.

2. “One thing most of these artists haven’t solved is how to make money off work that is available to anyone online.” That is wrong–you can sell documentation of websites and you can sell DVDs of animated GIFs, video, audio, and other kinds of content. What the collector is buying is the certification of the artist that it is an artwork, just like the certification/documentation of work by Burden, Acconci, etc.

3. “[An] online group show called ‘Professional Surfer’ … took the prosaic idea of bookmarking Web pages and posited it as art.” But looking at the write-up on you, Joel, on Rhizome’s Professional Surfer page, that’s not what it says you’re doing at all: “Chillsesh. Combining original performance and video with mash-ups of all kinds, Holmberg’s site makes the line between what he’s found and what he’s originally authored difficult to decipher.”

I think it’s great this piece got slipped into the major media–I just don’t know what a reader is going to learn from it: “Oh those crazy artists, bookmarking pages and calling it art. Can you believe it, hon?”