wsj on nn
Wall Street Journal article on NN etc: a concurring opinion. (In law a concurrence is where the author agrees with the result but not the reasoning.)
Props to Guthrie for slipping an idea past the Man.
Are we co-opted yet?
8 Comments »
- charles — 12/23/07 @ 8:19 pm
not yet. no. What does that mean co-opted? Co-opted by the media, institutions, or other artists? You think its too easy what we are doing, too easily co-opted? I don’t think people get the nuances enough to be able to co-opt them. Regardless, I think that a change has happened in the past year and a half. Real breakthroughs have happened and I’m glad people have been acknowledged for them.
It was a joke. I don’t think co-option is possible given the volunteer nature of this and low sums involved in selling DVDs and/or documentation at this point (now, as for JMB’s open directory viewer…). As I said, I’m concurring with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal about the importance of this site and others like it, not dissenting. I would add Paul Slocum to the props list, but I’m not sure from the article how a functioning replica of MySpace’s log-in page shows anything about how such pages “are constantly in flux,” or why that’s important. Or why the time lapse home page is important. I think it’s a good piece but not based on what Lavallee told me about it. (When it was shown in NY some wondered if Slocum faked it. The point to me seems to be personal flux, not corporate flux, and the obsessiveness of documenting it.)
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?”
- tom moody — 12/24/07 @ 12:18 am
with net.art out of the way they’ve gone on to tackle trolling: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119845369610047739.html?mod=blogs
how did the troll get the portrait and not guthrie??
I disagree with a “blanket” “anyone can surf” well actually I agree. I want to say it’s a surf style thing, but I want a better word … another word instead of style maybe intent? I like the idea of a net “native” that might have some potential like on JMB’s Diet coke ideas where he said “del.icio.us is the streets of net art” that was righteous! My skating style was often labeled “sketchy”
- charles — 12/24/07 @ 6:41 pm
yeah it’s totally skate styles… someone should point that out in an article… after the style is dead (no one doing it has time to write an article)
- Travis — 12/27/07 @ 12:10 am
surely the oldskoolers would rack it up, and call “it” temperament: peculiar to each, though our similarities must be how we found ourselves here.
- charles — 12/27/07 @ 9:37 pm
Update to my post: On his del.icio.us page Guthrie says, regarding the MySpace intro quote: “The observation about answering machines is a paraphrase of something Sean Dockray said about the MySpace vids.” Props for getting it in there anyway.
- tom moody — 1/5/08 @ 10:15 am
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