Executive director of Rhizome Lauren Cornell and Christopher Pappas responding surprisingly well to having had their picture taken four times.

I missed the VIP portion of Rhizome’s benefit last night, which means I have nothing but second hand reports on the honoring of artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and the founder of del.icio.us, Joshua Schachter. It’s too bad because I hear Lynn Hershman Leeson delivered an incredibly moving speech, though I do have this great photo essay in it’s place. I’m not much of a photographer, so my pictures weren’t taken with any objective in mind, though I hope by some fluke they capture the high spirits of the evening, and general convivial vibe. Photographs after the jump. MORE »

Heather Rasley, Block Me, screencapture AFC

I suspect I have at least a few readers who won’t be sold on Heather Rasley’s webpage multiplying the above [resized] screen capture, but I think it’s hilarious. For one, there are no links on the page, so HeatherRasley is the block herself, but additionally, any replication of that weird duck has to be a good idea. I don’t understand if its expression is fearful-sad or simply cute, and I don’t know why it’s an ecofriendly green, but whatever. It’s perfect.

Some forms, another web page by Rasley with something of a Miranda July feel to it, consists of a multiple choice in which a drop down menu allows the user to view fragments of the sentence I thought, that, I, was, in love with, you. Following this, a viewer can also only check either; but i, and i, which precedes another choice, was wrong, was right. In this case, the confusion expressed in the sentiment reiterates itself in the visual aesthetics of the page. At no point can a viewer read the whole sentence, and at the choices while fixed can indefinitely be changed. Additionally, unlike traditional questionaires and fill in the blanks, designed to give a result, Rasley offers no findings past your own experience.

Other favorite Heather Rasley projects include this politically minded animated gif and two particularly funny collaborations with Zac Davis; a response to net artist Borna Sammack’s statement that he prides himself in having the worst website on the internet first published on Rhizome , and Special Moments, a small sampling of the hundreds of screenshots the artist has taken over the past six months. According to Rasley, ubernerds checking out the PHP, will find the following;

#my name is heather rasley, and i’m online a lot.
#these are special moments, loosely defined.
#zac davis wrote this code to help me show them to you

Let me be the first to attest to the fact that Heather E. Rasley is indeed online a lot; I found her work due to her exceptionally active twitter feed. Though she doesn’t post daily, I also like her blog a lot. Ironically however, it was through her website that I learned she is for hire. I haven’t met Rasley, but I recommend her for anything web related based on the fact that I like her art, and she’s reliably online.

Screengrab AFC

It’s website review day here at Art Fag City! Today we discuss two sites only, Frieze, whose new site makes me very happy, and the Eyebeam reblog, a new media website, now trailing behind traditional art publications in what some might argue is their own medium of expertise. Let the reviews begin!

Frieze Magazine

Until recently, I’d been very frustrated by the Frieze Magazine website. Their publication is amongst my favorites, but it’s expensive as hell in the States, and their site barely had any content, there were next to no images, and it was difficult to navigate (the Way Back Machine only provides broken documentation of the website, so those who have never been will just have to take my word for it). Hello overhaul! RSS feeds. Check. Large images. Check. Reviews, news and color coded search functions. Check! Predictably, the content on the site is great, (as far as I can tell, it’s no different than what’s in the magazine). I like that they publish articles tangentially related to art, such as Different Thinking, an interview with Rob Janoff, the designer of Apple’s logo, along side art reviews such as Steven Stern’s excellent Whitney Biennial write-up. My one wish however, is that the site had a blog that updated at least twice a day and open comments, (UPDATE: you can comment in the reviews and comment sections which are web only). Site and magazine specific content gives readers a reason to use both publications differently, and while I’m clearly biased, I really believe blogs add life to otherwise largely static sites.

Screengrab AFC

Eyebeam’s Reblog

Only two months ago I observed that I’d stopped reading Eyebeam’s reblog, though I wasn’t overly specific about the problems past the site needing a redesign. Certainly, that’s still the case, though to be clear, this would involve rethinking the blog as a whole, since on a very basic level the technology no longer meets the needs of Internet surfers. As websites such as Buzzfeed, Rhizome and even smaller operations like c-monster have shown, web curating on its own (ie simply reposting material) generally isn’t enough; editorial comment is essential. Eyebeam’s software allows rebloggers to do this, but people rarely do because it’s a lot more work and the position is unpaid.

The publishing platform itself can be described as a customized rss feed reader that allows bloggers to republish posts at the touch of a button. Knowing that a variety of source material is essential to any good reblog, optimizing the functionality of the software they’re currently working with involves some rethinking of the recent feed pruning. There simply aren’t enough art website feeds on their list to create a of successful mix of art and technology. Frieze Magazine, Modern Art Notes, Edward Winkleman, RHIZOME, Tom Moody, Art Review.com, c-monster, MTAA-RR, James Wagner, and even myself aren’t in their feeds, and there’s no good reason for this. It’s not like these sites aren’t relevant to new media artists, and a reblogger can certainly manage searching through a few more articles. In addition to this, the only social bookmarking (del.icio.us) feed remaining is the eyebeam-reblog tag, which ensures that only active eyebeam readers have any say in the content. Surely heavy del.icio.us users such as wizardishungry, 53os, eddietainment, and cory_arcangel would add something very significant to the reblog.

In the event anyone is wondering how much progress the Eyebeam reblog has made over the last two years, I’d like to point to their bloglines subscriber numbers, which have actually decreased slightly from 104 readers to 102 during this time. Granted this isn’t empirical evidence the blog isn’t as well read as it used to be — there’s more than one feed reader out there and to be honest I’m sure their traffic has grown — but there’s also a lot more people on the web. If Eyebeam wants their reblog to remain relevant, some effort to address these issues is clearly needed.

Comic Con 2008, photo AFC

If you like automotive trade fairs, then Comic Con will be right up your alley. Though it’s a different product, you’ll undoubtedly experience the same level of crass commercialism; those wishing to purchase figurines, video games, or benign swords of some kind will have their pick of products. Sadly however, there are increasingly fewer reasons for artists to attend this fair. Whatever art is there is near impossible to spot through the crap, and I’m told, those interested in the medium should attend MOCCA this coming June, a festival with a little more focus on the craft as opposed to its sale and marketing.

Having said all this, given the increased popularity of art and comic book fairs, and what appears to be some cross over between these two fields, I thought it might be interesting to run a survey asking readers to identify these two demographics by pictures alone. See how well you do, and well discuss the results in the next few days.

Left to right: Clay Shirky, Jonathan Zittrain, Jimmy Wales, Lauren Cornell, and the arm of Tim Wu. Photo AFC

Predictably lolcats dominated Wednesday’s panel discussion Futures of the Internet at NYU, as both examples of the seemingly limitless human ability to waste time, and as a form of creative expression unique to the Internet. Moderated and organized by Elizabeth Stark, Harvard law student, and founder of the Harvard Free Culture group, panel members Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome, Clay Shirky, author of The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Tim Wu, Columbia, Professor of Law, Jonathan Zittrain , Professor Oxford University, Visiting Professor NYU, and Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia, spoke about their vision of the future Internet.

Speaking to the human tendency to waste time, Shirky cited the emergence of the sitcom in the 1950’s as the most important cultural phenomenon of that century. Not only did it transition us from the industrial age to today, but, importantly, it marks the beginning of the couch potato. lolcats, Shirky suggests, are simply another result of this freed up time. No prediction for the future was made, on account of the self described role of the academic to reflect on what’s already happened and tell others what it means. Nobody took issue with this on account of the fact that none of us know what the Internet will look like 10 years from now. Also, everything that comes out of that man’s mouth sounds like truth, regardless of its actual merit, so it takes a bit to digest what he’s said. To be honest, I’m not sure he said that much. Certainly his thoughts on today’s larger net community, didn’t go too much past identifying what we already know.

Tim Wu felt a little bit more comfortable making predictions, and talked about the collision between the ideology of decentralization, and a much more centralized media stream. In other words, he felt net neutrality was the most important issue facing Internet users today. Between him and Clay Shirky there was a lot of talk about how much change the Internet had brought, which of course, hasn’t been the case for the art world. Lauren Cornell made this point, observing that the economics of the art world remain based on scarcity, a particular challenge to artists who work with freely circulating media files, software, etc. She also noted that many artists in this field work intuitively, a particularly salient point as applied to group bloggers (many of whom were in attendance). I didn’t have the sense anyone came out with a better idea of what net artists do, but given the general audience my feeling was that even the introduction to Rhizome was probably a good start. After all, even co-panelist Jimmy Wales, didn’t appear to be overly familiar with the organization, referring to Lauren Cornell, as “her” in his own talk.

Wales used the platform to speak further on the community aspect of the web, which, predictably, he felt was growing. Almost endless debate could go on regarding the effectiveness of these communities, and did, though the conversation is so familiar at this point I wasn’t overly interested. The most engaging idea he contributed to my mind, spoke to the fact that communications would soon be cheaper than food, which meant we might be hearing a few complaints from third world countries soon. I suspect the practicalities of making such a thing happen punch a few holes in the plausibility of this scenerio, but I’d at least like to entertain the thought that these nations might be given a voice, so I’ll leave that discussion where it is.

Jonathan Zittrain after the lecture, photo AFC

On a lighter note, the majority of the comic relief for the evening, came from Jonathan Zittrain, who coincidently ridiculed Clay Shirky early in the evening for his assertion that the sitcom was of such importance, before using it as a delivery model for his own ideas. Of course, I don’t think anyone would claim this action would necessarily challenge whatever Zittrain’s objection to Shirky’s ideas might be (he never said), but I did find the coincidence amusing.

Zittrain’s talk consisted of three possible futures, complete with nick names; “The Rainbows and Buttercups/HR Pufnstuf version, a happy happy joy joy collective utopic vision of freedom, a second, less optimistic proposal, titled “the Internet Meltdown”, in which the openness of the net is eaten away by reality, (ie the net becomes “enforceable and lockdown-able), and a lastly, the “Not a Bang, But a Whimper”/Leave it to Beaver”, possibility, a pleasant but insidious environment in which our choices are prescribed to us in the form of menu bars or the iphone. The panel seemed largely in agreement with Zittrain on the thought that we would have to fight to preserve our freedoms, his talk closing on a rather depressing note once citing Amazon Mechanical Turk, as website run with the primary objective of turning our brains into server space.

I suspect the majority of the audience agreed that the third scenario put forth was the most likely, so it seemed a bit of a shame that the panel was missing an activist like Nicholas Reville of Participatory Culture Foundation, who could speak to the practicalities involved in fighting against forces that remove some of our freedoms.

In the interest in keeping this post readable in length, I won’t bother summarizing the Q&A, except to say that Zittrain’s characterization of nerds and programmers [editors note: Slashdotters] as the Simpson’s personality Nelson, was perfect (Zittrain began this caricature with the disclaimer that it was only a generalization). Obviously, the I-know-better-than-you-and-will-only-help-if-I-have-to mentality is of limited value. I also found it interesting that one audience member described the Rhizome site as authoritative and institutional. Certainly there is truth to the statement, though I think some of the comment threads currently on the site create much more back and forth between the institution and the community than this comment suggests.

IT’S
HARD TO
IMAGINE THAT
THE WORLD WAS NOT
ALWAYS IN FULL COLOR, BUT
IT’S EVEN HARDER TO IMAGINE
THAT THE FUTURE WILL ONLY BE IN CYAN

Except for black, cyan is the last color of an offset print to fade from the effects of sunlight. In this burgeoning landscape, a new aesthetic is put forth, championing blue, and showcasing products imbued with the enduring life we now associate with cyan.

Take for example, the above poster of Jordan Knight from New Kids on the Block; this image lives well past it’s expiration date thanks to cyan. Signs of growth and renewal embodied in Pross for Men, a black hair color agent, and a package of cucumber seeds, wryly suggest a new life for this media figure.

Photographers themselves will find blue dominance frees the profession from the burden of color. No more worrying over matching tones! Cyan helps create a level of uniformity these athletes couldn’t have achieved on their own.

No one is unaffected by cyan, even the world leaders, movie stars, and fashion icons above who touch the lives of millions. To these men, TimeOut aptly poses the enduring question Got Beer? Perhaps most importantly however, those in the new future of cyan must ask themselves, Now What?

This post was written in response to Private Circulation’s PDF Bulletin for Proposals. You can read the marketing call here, and download the proposal here.

Marcel Dzama, Room Full of Liars, Diorama Image Size: 64.5 x 65.75 x 46 inches

Looks like New York has grown tired of Marcel Dzama. Nearly anyone I’ve talked to on the subject of his exhibition at David Zwirner emits a low groan when I bring up his name, and Roberta Smith reviewed his 6th New York solo show this past week offering only a few good words on the subject. She’s mostly right; the three elaborate phases are progressively compelling, the war time illustrations tedious, the puppet theater dioramas over produced, and the film with piano accompaniment, actually compelling. I would add to this assessment however, greater specificity to the tedium Smith observes in the first room; too many drawings, and not enough variation therein. Smaller works on canvas would have helped add dimension to the show, as would have removing many of the drawings. They all look the same after a while and nobody likes an artist who resembles a factory; it suggests an insufficient examination of the ideas propelling the work. Indeed, Smith closes her review with the assessment that Dzama needs to think about the nostalgia driving his work.

The drawings are unfortunately placed in this show, because they are the first works seen, and leave little incentive to carry forward. Like Smith, I agree that the elaborate sets in the next room suffer from over production; such problems typically exist due to lack of resolution in subject matter. For example, The Infidels, a vignette depicting a small dead animal with bats hovering over top, is stunningly beautiful, but a little too cute to carry the insidious message it would seem to intend. As a result, the subject matter feels benign and forgettable, even if the object isn’t. By contrast, Room Full of Liars, [above] a set made up of eight puppets, each with growing noses, presents a deeply troubling scene, their perfect arrangement and construction seemingly implicated in the doll’s moral depravity.

To be honest though, I probably wouldn’t be talking about this show or Smith’s review at all, if I hadn’t seen Lotus Eaters, the silent film projected in the back of the gallery accompanied by a live piano player. However, as means of eliminating unnecessary redundancy, rather than rehash sentiments I share almost verbatim, I’ve simply quoted her words on the subject below.

The show culminates in “Lotus Eaters,” a silent film about an artist’s loneliness and the role of memory, love and companionship in the quest for self-expression. It stars Mr. Dzama’s father, and begins and ends with a dancing bear, a longtime Dzama character. It is greatly buoyed by its musical accompaniment, especially on Saturday, when the pianist David Cieri improvises to the action on screen, delivering one of the most poignant aesthetic experiences currently available in Chelsea.

Daniel Joseph Martinez, Divine Violence, 2007, installation view, The Project, New York, automotive paint on wood panel, dimensions variable

Steven Squibb writes about the Whitney Biennial, at ArtCal Zine,

Much has been made of the supposed theme of the show, ‘lessness,’ as though the works on display were trying to provincialize and impoverish themselves to the point of barely existing at all, thus opting out of the various economies currently striating the field. Quite frankly, I don’t see it. Only one artist, Seth Price, seems to be actively engaged in such a performance of self-marginalization and, given the specifics of his situation and his work, it is altogether interesting and meaningful for him to do so. The rest seem to be arguing, sometimes softly, to be sure, but sometimes quite loudly, that there might be more at stake at the present moment than a public demonstration of their own righteousness with regards an overheated market and its corresponding discourse, and that, following perhaps the rest of us need to pull over in order to check the map.

The sentiment is well received, though one minor point of descent; Squibb doesn’t explain why Seth Price is the only artist who actively engages in self marginalization.  The work in the Biennial is about as gallery ready as you’re going to get, and while I don’t dismiss his work as a whole, I haven’t been able reconcile the conflict in labeling what he does as self marginalization when he shows at blue chip galleries, and moves his work through established channels of distribution, like ubuweb, EAI. It just doesn’t make sense.

In other Biennial reviews, probably the oddest position I’ve seen taken on the Biennial comes from portfolio.com’s Alexandra Peers,

In this shaky art market, collectors are searching more aggressively than ever for confirmation of their choices. And the Whitney’s endorsement of dealers matters more than ever because, as a whole, this Biennial is going to influence artists less than in the past because they aren’t traded much. Only about a fourth of the artists shown have ever sold a work at auction, even though most are established enough to have had such a sale. (More than half are in their 30s and 40s.)

Based on the above comments I’m not any further ahead in deducing why a downturn in the economy should mean that the biennial won’t influence artists as much, or why it follows that its endorsement will be more significant to dealers. Perhaps someone can explain this these art world nuances to me, because that’s one that’s lost on me.

Cory Arcangel, Image via: Holy Fire

Ed Halter’s brief discussion of Holy Fire, Art of the Digital Age, an exhibition exploring New Media’s entrance into the art market has generated 67 comments to date on the Rhizome blog, undoubtedly the longest and most invested I’ve read to date on the site. To provide a bit of background, Holy Fire’s website divides the concepts of this show up into three parts:

• Art of Our Time (let’s stop labeling ourselves as New Media artists because the medium is familiar to everyone now)

• Collectible Artworks (Holy Fire may be the first exhibition to show only collectible new media artworks already on the art market!)

• New Economy for Autonomy, (The art market can give us freedom, and this show may be the first to help build the “new economy”!)

Clearly the conceit behind the exhibition has a few problems, even if its artist list, which includes Cory Arcangel, JODI, Olia Lialina and Dragon Espenchied, Paul Slocum, Eddo Stern and Carlo Zanni, to name just a few, suggest there will be a lot of great work. The curators themselves admit as much on the thread, Domenico Quarantax’s first response to Tom Moody’s description of the artworks-already-sold conceit as boring, being “You are right, this is a boring concept.” Naturally he goes on to defend the show, and as a curator that’s to be expected.

The discussion thread is too long to address piece by piece, but it is worth observing the reluctance of many commenters to speak substantively to the show theme of art as purchased commodity, which ultimately resulted in Moody’s visible frustration and in turn, needless hostility towards the artist, presumably for trying to push the issue. Frankly, I’m not sure why granting this point should be so difficult, after all the Joseph DeLappe comment in the thread, “Consider how uninterested we would be in a show about “paintings that sell!””, was proved this Fall with the Met’s hugely unpopular “Age of Rembrandt”. An exhibition organized by which philanthropist donated what, the Negative reviews poured in, not just for its visibly inflated institutional ego and a childish desire to awe people, but for an approach that undermines the art-historical content needed to create a successful exhibition.

In this case, a similar concern exists, because the theme of the show privileges the new materiality of an object over its content and does not provide sufficient historical background (granted, more material may become available at the exhibition, but the website is insufficient.) Perhaps the most promising aspect of the show for this reason lies in the discussion panel, because it gives the participating artists a chance to articulate this history and jump outside a set of curatorial concerns they may not share. On this thread alone, Patrick Lichty, the panel moderator has fleshed out some of this timeline and Olia Lialina, a participating artist and panelist, articulated her opposition to the integration of New Media to contemporary art, saying, “I think that position, spoken by Regine Debaty — forget media, drop new, enjoy art — is sort of reactionary. I don’t enjoy art, I enjoy some of the new media, especially WWW and I find media specificity to be the most exiting thing.”

My own reasons for opposing the erasure of New Media as a label take a slightly different approach only in that unlike Lialina, I support contextualizing New Media within the larger fine art world (I like both). However, I similarly couldn’t be less interested in a conversation that suggests giving up a means of identifying a practice significantly different than traditional mediums, while using the increased saleability of the object as the primary support for that argument. As a sales tool, it may be of some help to gallerists, but as a larger practice it does nothing to move the field forward, because it glosses over the specific skills of the artist. What’s more, the idea that sales should some how become evidence of New Media’s acceptance into the larger fine art world is erroneous. Sure, there’s been progress, some of which has been seen in the market, but it doesn’t negate the fact that when I’ve spoken to journalists this year on the subject of New Media, most begin by asking me (off the record) why well known Fine Art critics don’t know enough to even accept a cursory interview. The fact that critics are paid to know about art and yet have only negligible knowledge of the discipline, is the most basic indicator that New Media is a still peripheral practice within the art world. And Holy Fire won’t change this. Given its location, it may introduce a few attendees of the Art Brussels international contemporary art fair to New Media, but nothing more.

Either an interest in bad television, sex and cultural criticism or the ability to consume virtually anything that comes in the form of TV led to this summer’s small obsession with Hugh Hefner’s The Girls Next Door. The show is about as stultifyingly boring as you’d expect of course, the girl’s desires frequently and obviously fabricated for the sake of some thin plot line, while each scene is largely determined by what skimpy outfit Hef’s girlfriends will wear next. However, these characteristics aren’t all that unfamiliar to reality tv, and were it not for the promise of frequently blurred out nipples I’m not sure anyone would watch.

My own interests are not limited to looking at blurry boobs but rather the larger effort to construct a particular kind of attractive woman. In stark contrast to every other reality show, the stars of this program, Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson almost never argue. In fact, they wish only the best for each other, despite the fact that they are a nationally televised and accepted harem, in which a pecking order does exist (Holly is Hef’s “primary” girlfriend, Kendra and Bridget are second and third). None of these inevitable power struggles are documented, I suspect because they make the women appear less attractive to their intended audience when they bicker.

The above animated gif comes from my favorite episode, wherein the girls have to “convince” Hef to give them individual spreads in his magazine (as opposed to one with the three of them as he had in the past.) No mention is made that Playboy would have to shell out a boat load of money for shoots Hef somehow isn’t aware of, but I guess in this show, fake power struggles are better than the real ones. Each girl choses a profession that best identifies her personality, the sets and costumes creating a nudie cartoon version of whatever kind of girl she is - sporty, creative, and uncreative. The results may be basically what you’d expect, but as anyone can see from the gif above — a photo shoot for the front and back covers of the magazine that will host their features — the kind of response it engendered is a very warm one. The camera is slowed down, the light is softened, the loss of image quality in its rendering only heightening this; it’s hard to imagine in a gif made with greater care. And this more than anything, is the inspiration for the post. Show commentary aside, the aesthetic value of the gif is, in its own right, worthy of contemplation.

Lesser Girls Next Door gifs here.

Frederick Charles photograph of Joe Bradley’s installation at the Whitney at Time.com wins the award for least representative image of the Biennial. Any other shot in the museum would have included four or five works due to the nature of the exhibition design.

Looks like it’s Whitney Biennial day here at AFC. My own write up on the show will be posted later today, but in the meantime Richard Lacayo’s recent review prompted several hundred additional words on the subject.  Part of the reason for this, is that he does an excellent job of touching on all the major talking points of the show.  The critic begins with a thorough account of the Biennial and the difficulties curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Monin were likely to encounter — namely a history begetting negative reviews — and goes on to describe the aesthetic of the show while expressing some tripidation.

Like a lot of people, I also hate what the market has done to the experience of art, substituting the verdict of cash for every other judgment. But when I first heard that this year’s Biennial would be heavy on humble art, I winced. Small potatoes is a dish that the art world circles back to every decade or so, usually out of revulsion against a gluttonous market. The go-go gallery salesrooms of the 1960s led to the rise of deliberately unsalable performance art and earthworks. And the 1993 Biennial, the first to follow the Reagan-Bush era, featured work that its catalog solemnly promised “deliberately renounces success and power in favor of the degraded and the dysfunctional.

And then there is today’s wave of success-renouncing, degradation-favoring art, much of which takes the form of listless flotsam-assemblage sculpture, things built from chunks of Styrofoam, torn cardboard or bits of twisted wire. It’s piled together with some measure of deliberation, but who can tell how much? Its heart may be in the right place, but it emits an awfully faint pulse.”

Art made with the intent of rejecting the market can suck in its own unique ways, so it’s no surprise that it’s return should see an uneasy welcome such as the one above. It may be fairly obvious to state, but I would add that, unlike 60’s performance art and earthworks, from all outward appearances, humble assemblage, installation art, and performance doesn’t represent a less salable object in 2008. Even with the Park Armory space, by my count, close to 70% of this year’s Biennial artists have gallery representation, which can only mean that dealers are finding ways to make art ephemera of almost any kind appealing to collectors.

The question Lacayo and many others have on their lips is whether the unofficial Biennial theme of “lessness” amounts to much in the end. Not that this is necessarily the case of nay sayers, but I’ll admit that if the only thing I’d seen taking this approach was The New Museum’s Unmonumental and The Whitney’s Biennial, I’d probably have a fairly grim outlook on the prospects for art. Certainly these shows have given me pause, neither effectively displaying the work or necessarily even finding the best of it. By contrast, New York’s commercial galleries have been more successful this year launching unmonumental-esque shows. While the large size of the Biennial undoubtedly makes the job a little more difficult, Bellwether’s brilliantly organized three part exhibition series curated by Becky Smith and Joao Ribas could be no better testament to the success seen within the commercial world, as was Gagosian’s Beneath the Underdog, curated by artists Nate Lowman and Adam McEwen last spring. Notably New York Times critic Holland Cotter named this show one of the best gallery shows of the year.

Lacayo never definitively weighs in on the value of “lessness” (though it’s clear he’s not completely convinced), preferring instead to discuss the works he responded to. The critic stumbles a bit here though, leaving out a few assessments that would have been helpful to the evaluation of the work. For example, Lacayo does a good job at describing artist Heather Rowe’s sculptures as “wooden frameworks” with bits of broken mirrors and molding, that create “memory mazes” and comparing them to Gordon Matta Clarke’s sawed houses, but doesn’t ask how they compare with her other works. The answer to that question unfortunately is poorly. Oversized, and with less interesting due to a smaller amount of her trademark molding, painted, or mirrored crannies, these works simply don’t deserve the attention her exhibition at D’Amelio Terras in the summer of 2006 received. Similarly Lacayo discusses Joe Bradley’s colored canvases arranged in the shape of men without asking how they have progressed over the years. Again, the answer is not well. Personally, I’m sad to see his sloppily stretched canvases, and awkward colored surfaces be replaced with bright colors and techniques that make references that were already there such as Ellsworth Kelly and Joel Shapiro all the more obvious. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still seeing wavy canvas lines at the corners, but the irreverence seems to have been lost.

The angle of the above photograph suggests a relatively easy viewing of Robert Bechtle’s paintings, even though my experience while there was a visually distracted one.

Lacayo also mentions painter Robert Bechtle, one of the first photorealists as a notable in show, though no word on their placement in the gallery was given. The fact that these works practically disappeared amongst the bric-a-brak placed directly in front of them is no small point.

The only art work the Time Magazine writer openly questions is Agathe Snow’s 24 hour dance party, this year’s social performance/relational aesthetics target. Coincidently, while he describes the piece, Lacayo never names the artist, nor does he adequately describe the work, failing to mention the dance lessons she holds each day prior to the event.  With that said, I too have a hard time grasping why we should think about this kind of work as art, though I suspect if this came as part of an e-flux announcement as opposed to a Biennial appendage most of us would be less likely to attack it. To her credit, curator Henriette Huldisch gives one of the most concise and easy to understand explanations I’ve read to date on this work in the second half of an interview with Lacayo earlier that week “What art does is transform ordinary materials into something else. That’s what those artists are doing. They’re just using different kinds of materials.” Also despite all appearances, like anything else, you have to experience it to be able to comment on its artistic validity. As it turns out I missed this opportunity, the last lesson taking place March 14th, the party occurring, on the 15th. Next time I’ll have to plan these write-ups a little bit more in advance so I can speak about some of the events.

To view a fragment of Torcito Project online click here.  Artist’s note: The piece requires a director shockwave plugin

Prompted by other reading material, Tom Moody observes today that Marcin Ramock’s Torcito Project provides an update to Cage whereby he instructs a performer to interpret a Marcel Duchamp profile turned 90 degrees as a continuous line of music. Describing Ramock’s piece Moody says,

Imagine a vertical line sweeping the face above. Each time it encounters a darkened pixel, a note from the “general MIDI” list (shown below the portrait) is played. The sweep begins quietly and is cacophonous by the time the cursor reaches the middle of the face. The general MIDI spec is heavy on percussion, so that’s a lot of timbales, cowbells, etc., firing at once. The Albright book credits composer George Antheil, composer of Ballet Mecanique, as a forerunner of Cage in abstracting musical notes from their normal background and function. Ramocki injects the element of kitsch through the use of outmoded software and the somewhat rigid and dated General MIDI assignments of notes to sounds. He has found a way to “play” an entire face, as opposed to just a profile.

Although I’m quite sure this observation has been made elsewhere, Torcito Project also relates to Chuck Close’s photorealist paintings, both in their construction — each using a grid to create the portraits– and their subject, which employs friends of the artists as the sitter. Personally, I’m more interested in Ramocki’s project, if for no other reason than, the fame of the sitters hasn’t yet become an important part of the content. The fact that Close first painted the now famous avant-garde musician Phillip Glass when he was his plumber isn’t a bad piece of trivia, but it’s also not all that interesting as content. The point was that these people should be anonymous, so they wouldn’t interfere with the subject of the paint. Other photorealists also bought into the idea of “the non-hierarchical accumulation of photographically engendered details” though Close largely dodges this subject matter. The cacophony of sound Moody observes around the center of Ramocki’s portrait tells us where the bulk of the visual material is located, but also suggests there is no such thing as non-hierarchical photographic details.

Even when art calls the censorship police to action, I’ve rarely found that the work itself seemed to be the underlying issue. Most of the time, it’s the same boring conversation: elitist artist shits on conservative values. In the case of Wafaa Bilal, who recently had his projected video game, Virtual Jihadi, removed from an exhibit last Thursday at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the “elitist artist” label has not been tabled, but we’re still looking at the same power struggles. Convincing a censor to listen, when their position is essentially, “your right to speak is granted, as long as long as it’s consistent with the norms of the institution” can feel like an impossible task.

Indeed it may well be since the inherent problem with censorship of any kind lies in the fact that one person refuses to participate. Such positions can be infuriating, particularly in regards to art like Bilal’s because it means to continue a conversation already occurring. To wit, the work in question comes with a hacking history three generations long beginning as a downloadable video game which asked its players to kill indistinguishable Iraqis while hunting their leader (Saddam Hussein), then mutating into the al-Qaeda version, which replaces the Iraqis with identical Americans, their leader President Bush. Bilal transformed the latter, and created a character based on himself: a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago who loses his father and brother to the war in Iraq. The player becomes an al-Qaeda recruit and hunts Bush.

Even if the game ran with a crawler underneath explaining that it proposes a questionable action in order to point out the possible consequences of our own morally depraved behavior, it’s unlikely to have phased many young republicans and bloggers like Ken Girardin. Says the co-editor of The College Republican blog, (which seems to be down: too much traffic?), “The message he’s putting forth marginalizes the seriousness of the threat of Islamic terrorism.” The FBI similarly thought this was a matter of national concern, which is why the exhibition is suspended.

Such actions make you wonder if the days when artists in this country were labeled communists but allowed to speak as means of demonstrating the moral fortitude of the country have been forgotten. It would seem we’ve lost a lot of ground since then.

Related: Newsgrist Jihadi run down

Artcal Zine

Game Politics

We Make Money Not Art

Sharon Hayes, I march in the parade of liberty, but as long as I love you I’m not free, 2007 photo copyright New Museum

I’d been hearing a lot about performance and video artist Sharon Hayes over the last few months so I attended her lecture at MoMA last week. She showed a couple of works as a means of contextualizing her latest performance; a series of interviews she made in graduate school featuring freshman who gave predictably inarticulate responses to various questions about their ideology, the now famous Symbionese Liberation Army a performance in which Hayes tries to recite from memory words delivered by Patty Hearst, a woman kidnapped by the SLA, a radical, California political organization, and Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love?, a performance sponsored by Art in General in which she read a different love letter every day in front of the USB building.

In case that last title raised a few Miranda July, Learning to Love You More, etc. hairs, Hayes’ most recent and odiously titled performance for the New Museum, I march in the parade of liberty, but as long as I love you I’m not free, certainly seals that fate. Not that there’s anything wrong with July — her video performance telling the story of a woman who cannot decide to live or die a personal favorite — but it’s been hard to forget the endless “precious” moments in her feature length movie You, Me and Everyone We Know. More to the point, I’m not sure it benefits Hayes, an artist who describes her work as political, to be compared with her a-political counterpart.

“Dear Lover,” begins Hayes, her voice at once evoking Ms. July while speaking into a megaphone on the street;

“Why don’t you call me.? …You refuse to answer my messages, my letters, my phone calls, but I know, the ears are the only orpheus that can’t be closed. You would be surprised how different is here now. No one seems to talk about the war. It’s like we can’t find the words or we’re tired of saying the same things over and over. There’s no movement here and yet so much happens. In May I started a list of things I wanted to talk to you about. Cheney’s pompous warning to Iran, the Blackwater scandal, the bombings at the al-Ghazl market, and all this hurried talk of Baghdad returning to normal.

Sure, as Hayes tells us in her artist statement there’s a political message here, but how deep is it? Unless there’s something I’ve missed, the primary point is that the war separates lovers, and people aren’t talking about current affairs much any more. I don’t want to sound needlessly snarky, but that’s hardly a news flash. The performance smacks of politic-lite, which I suppose isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but significant meaning should appear elsewhere. Of course, in this work, as Hayes and the New Museum press release will tell us, she’s more interested in investigating the “frictions between collective activities and personal actions.” Indeed she reads aloud an engaging letter meant to be seen by only her gay lover, but I’m not convinced the performance presents any outcomes we couldn’t have predicted ourselves. Most people hear her words but walk by without remarking, others don’t buy the story and call her on it or maybe they do and they engage her. But so what? Even the more interesting crowd reactions however still fall within a prescribed set of possible outcomes. And the letter she’s written — it’s sweet, but frankly, it lacks the substance of great art.

An in depth review of the Biennial is forthcoming, but in the meantime I’d like to share a few highlights and lowlights from the show.

Not bad! An installation shot of the fourth floor, featuring the work of (from right to left) Heather Rowe, Rodney McMillian, and Olivier Mosset. Photo AFC

John Baldessari, Installation view, photo AFC

Not good. John Baldessari may be an established artist relevant to art making today, but those recent paintings above aren’t influencing anyone. At least I hope they don’t.

Omer Fast, The Casting, 2007, Production still, 14 minutes, Photo AFC

My viewing of the Biennial is incomplete because I haven’t seen the majority film program yet, but so far Fast wins my pick for best in show. His video The Casting mixes a sergeant’s compelling recollections of a bad romantic affair with the accidental shooting an Iraqi suggesting these edits might mimic the same distortions the soldier himself describes of his memories.

Kembra Pfahler, New York, New York, New York “Actresstocracy”, 2008, detail, Photo AFC

Worse in show goes to Kembra Phfahler’s baby dolls o’dread. It looks like Scope miss placed one of their artists in this Biennial.

Phoebe Washburn, It Makes for my Billionaire Status, 2007 Photo AFC

We all knew eco art would have to be included in the Biennial this year, but Washburn doesn’t do a bad job as far as that kind of investigation goes. Feeding plants with Gatorade and growing them in golf balls the artist transforms discarded materials into complex architectural forms. Of course, my own background might make me partial to this particular piece; I grew up on a farm, played a lot of golf as a teenager, and not two years ago, grew to crave Gatorade while training for a marathon. This work definitely speaks to my interests.

Sherrie Levine, Body Mask, 2007, Photo AFC

These sculptures look like inverted urinals to me, which unfortunately may be a more interesting reading than the serial gold belly and boobs Levine presents. Make this strike two for cannonical artists presenting work in the Biennial. You’d think there was some sort of mandate on the part of the Museum’s curators to chose the worst work by established artists. Richard Serra at the last biennial and Mel Bochner before him immediately come to mind.

Ztohoven’s fake mushroom cloud Image via: NYTimes.

“When people make fun of something, they are making themselves free of it.” says Jiri Rak, a specialist in Czech smallness and culture, quoted by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times last Thursday “That’s the condition of the small nation. It’s a defense for everyone today in the globalized world.” The quote attempts to explain the sensibility behind the actions of the Czech collective Ztohoven, who had hacked into Czech Television’s weather station CT2, to broadcast what appeared to be a nuclear explosion overhead the Krkonose Mountains. Now facing possible jail time for their actions, the story has become big news in Europe, such that even the Times has caught wind of it.

While the groups actions were shown elsewhere in the article to be more complex than the mere catharsis expressed by Rak, Kimmelman’s interest in the generally tepid Czech response is apt, particularly in light of Ztohoven’s distaste for comparable American art cited by Kimmelman including fake bombs in the New York Subway. In this way Kimmelman suggests some distinction between these actions and that of placing a fake explosion on a rarely watched TV station, a much stronger argument for the mild response of the nation, than the inherent character of small nations suggested by Rak later on. After all, Canada, a small nation known for its self effacing comedy and more liberal leanings, managed to produce Michael Waterman, an artist who 20 years ago, decided to bath his body in pig’s blood and fake his own death on a street corner in Calgary. He was arrested, and the public quite rightly, had little use for the piece.

Waterman now in his forties spends a lot less time making activist art (if you can call it that), which brings to mind the second quote worthy segment of the piece.

Turns out, Ztohoven includes no women. “That’s the problem of radicalism,” sighed the threesome’s 33-year-old elder statesman, who called himself Roman Tyc. (The pun works in English.) “To get together for pranks is also more difficult now that we’re getting into our 30s.”

Sadly, radicalism does tends to exclude women and people over the age of 35, a rather painful fact since it has also proven a highly effective means to incite change. Also somewhat ironic is the fact that by the time you get to your thirties, were it not for work family and other societal pressures you’ve often reached a level of maturity that would allow you to be far more effective than those in their 20’s. Not that any of this is made overly clear by the piece. Far more interesting than the basic ideas of media manipulation and public gullibility brought to light in the piece, is the story of art itself; how and why it gets made, and its reception once brought into the world.

For those who find tourists roaming around museums with their cameras obnoxious, complaints about restrictive museum photo policies by bloggers and open source freaks may not illicit much sympathy. Even I get annoyed by the constant accidental flashes and elbowing in the name of average photographs, and Art Fag City can only benefit from laxer picture taking rights.

That said, I still have little patience for museums and galleries who don’t allow photography. Generally the press is excluded from this policy, but since you basically need to be wearing a hat with a flashing red light reading blogger to keep the guards from harassing you, it seems to me much easier to just let people take pictures as they please. The concerns of the museums are much more complicated than this however, and while I tend not to have too much sympathy for museum stores worried about the loss of postcard sales when they are charging Louis Vuitton rent, the issues they raise need to be discussed. A recent conversation on the icommons list serve did just this so I’m reposting some of the thought expressed in that thread for consideration.

Fred Benenson

After having many conversations with people working at museums who are concerned about photography, the really clear point is that they don’t care about copyright or respecting patrons so much as preserving the income of their gift shops. A museum that prohibits the public from taking home a snapshot of a work they love is also a museum that can charge 1.99 Euro for a postcard of that work, regardless of whether or not it is in the public domain or whether or not they’re trying to assert copyright over it. Museum gift shops are incredibly lucrative and are viable business models that non-profits can depend on, so when something comes along that might appear to threaten their primary source of income, they get defensive. This probably explains why there is such confusion over the rights of museum patrons — some, not all, museums will use any excuse possible to prevent patrons from reproducing the work on their walls.

So museums have the right to grant you access to their (presumably) private property so they can tell you what you can and can’t do on their property. There are exceptions to this (e.g., white folks use this bathroom, etc.) but it doesn’t look like anyone is fighting for the digital-photographer’s bill of rights in the same way other public rights have been established in private spaces.

Jimmy Wales

This is a fascinating point. If correct, then museums really should have “photographer times”, perhaps charging an extra fee. If the idea is that the main income they get is from the on-premise gift shop, this changes my thinking a lot.

I tend to think of museums as wanting to control digital reproductions as an effort to prevent competition from online poster shops, bookstores, etc., i.e. they want royalties from bogusly copyrighted quality reproductions. But if that is not the main point, if the main point of photography restrictions is to get money out of the customers on the premises of the museum (an understandable objective) and also concern about flashes and bothering other people…

An official photography time with an extra fee for a permit would mean a controlled setting, i.e. when you pay your extra $25 to be allowed to take pictures, maybe you have to put down a $75 deposit and if you use a flash (which arguably could damage the works, though I think that’s a pretty dodgy idea) you lose your deposit. [Editors note: I think that fee is WAY TOO HIGH for practical purposes, but the idea is a good one.]

This could actually be a money maker for the museum if they get a professional photographer to teach a class to people wanting to do this. And it would not interfere with gift shop revenues for the bulk of customers who would not be allowed to photograph. And the resulting works would, quite properly, be freely distributable by the photographers if they wanted to do that.

Fred Benenson

My understanding is that flashes do about 10x damage to a work as a flash of sunlight and that this is a very real concern for many works. Even contemporary photography can be degraded with constant exposure to harsh light like a strobe flash.

But the idea of granting a priori access to photographers seems like a great compromise. Along with ‘photo times’ people could also purchase photo passes. Hopefully determining the price point won’t be too difficult, though $25 per museum might get pretty steep for some.

I think this will work the best with museums that have purely public domain works, because works that are protected by copyright would obviously present serious issues.

On the other hand, photography may be seen as a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy and some museum curators won’t want to formally instantiate any kind of program promoting the photography of their carefully preserved acquisitions, even if it helps with a bottom line. I think that as long as we can make the argument that museums are created and maintained for the public good (there are plenty of exceptions to this, I know) we should be able to find some who are relatively open to this idea.

The Louvre might be a good place to start.

Screengrab from Fia Backtröm’s, Productive Failure in No Copy No Paste

As a word of warning, I’ll issue the disclaimer that I normally don’t recommend interviews comprised of all the things I hate. Fia Backström’s September conversation with Nick Stillman on NYFA Current, is hard to read, nothing can be copied or pasted, the media works have no easy to grab unique urls, some of the videos don’t play properly, and it makes use of the horrid pop-up window, a popular browser feature in 2001. However, everything about this work looks and feels like net art, so naturally I’m interested — even if it does happen to fall into a category of art with which I have a love hate relationship — institutional critique.

Screengrab from Fia Backtrom’s, No Copy No Paste

In as much as many of us, including myself, tire of such topics, the interview and work appeals to me nonetheless because it succeeds where so much art today fails; it is well put together, packs a few surprises, and most importantly, doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is. As such, despite non-traditional formating [captured above], a standard interview structure remains basically in tact. Nick Stillman more or less begins by asking Backström how she defines her practice, she responds, and they proceed to discuss her work. The interview itself, of course, is also an artwork, an observation that can be made on aesthetics alone, or by virtue of the fact that she describes her practice as at least in part about locking down and stabilizing parameters, and proceeds to illustrate this point throughout the text. Backström also identifies an interest in investigating economic and social dimensions within images or events both of which are discussed in the interview.

Screengrab from Fia Backtröm’s, Tablecloths For Commercial Galleries in No Copy No Paste

Such was the case in regards to her tablecloths and fliers featuring graphically appealing arranged gallery names [see above]. On the surface, it’s hard to know why there should be too much distinction between the investigations of gallery marketing by Dan Levenson, and those of Fia Backström, apart from the fact that the former creates branding for a fictional gallery inspired by the real world, while Backström makes products for pre-existing businesses. Both seem interested in the idea of creating image branding on unlikely materials, neither claiming any more or less substance than what you see. “Their content is their circulation.” dictates a male voice reading Backström’s essay on table clothes thereby separating the work. Perfectly defining the perimeters of her project, she similarly claims nothing critical in her rearrangement of art forum ads purely on formal considerations. The viewer is left to decide upon the significance of distribution and Backström’s self described “love for images” as subject material. Backed by Madonna’s Vogue, the fact that the interest is so well expressed, leads me to believe that if nothing else, such concise articulation of those concerns holds importance.

Screengrab from Fia Backtröm’s, Productive Failure in No Copy No Paste

Backström goes on to speak about the inherent problem in finding ways to make failure productive, since action typically requires the awareness of potential deficiency. Subscribing to the belief that no refusal should be made without proposing solutions, the artist flashes an image of a happy business man, presumably representing a problem efficiently solved. Conversely he may simply represent structural insanity, as do the children in Swedish artist Peter Theilgaard’s painting titled either “Are You Productive Little Friend?” or “Are You Profitable Little Friend?”

“Anyhow, I’d rather have structural insanity looking like unproductive refusals.” Backström explains obliquely after offering up the loose title translation above. Assuming this means she’d prefer a negative reaction to unhealthy economic models than whatever that placid smile above actually means I can’t say I blame her. That said, the statement intentionally opaque, leaves room for the message to fail completely in delivering any meaning. This too is acceptable within the set perimeters of the essay — “let’s play failure” — she tells us, admitting that she’s not sure how positive results might be achieved. I’m fairly certain there won’t be any if that’s the game, but you have to hand it to Backström for not being afraid to try.

Dan Levenson at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Image courtesy of the artist

You’ll have to excuse the sparse posting on Art Fag City over the last two days. I’ve been working on a couple of long form pieces, one of which is now up on ArtCal Zine. The interview I conduct with artist Dan Levenson of Little Switzerland may not be quite as exhaustive as his investigation of gallery and artist branding, but with close to 2000 published words, I feel I’ve at least given it a shot. A teaser below:

“This is hilarious” I told artist Dan Levenson, pulling out a thong ornamented with the floral Little Switzerland gallery logo. The sale of t-shirts not to mention exhibition branded lingerie falls considerably short of common within fine art circles, though so do corporate identities with no tax id numbers, bank accounts or regular hours of operation. Without knowing Little Switzerland’s background as a conceptual art project about the branding and marketing of art, it might be just as easily confused for a front of some nefarious business enterprise.

Those familiar with the artist’s activist efforts during MoMA’s grand reopening however, would not make this mistake. Protesting the museum’s raise in admission price from 12 dollars to 20 in 2004, Levenson’s FreeMoMA.org campaign consisted of a wearable human sized currency, extended protests outside the museum, and informational fliers describing the problem. Since the high profile days of FreeMoMA, Levenson has continued creating work that addresses similar ideas, while maintaining lighthearted approach. “I have an interest in all the ways art work is disseminated that is extraneous from the object” Levenson explained, “the marketing, the advertising, the word of mouth, the hype… and just the business of the art gallery is fascinating to me and a lot of what Little Switzerland is about.”

ArtCal Zine: And I imagine your position as an art maker gives you an important and unique perspective…

Dan Levenson: As an artist I am trying to co-opt that business and make it part of my artwork. So I’m interested in the postcards that galleries send out, I’m interested in the catalogs that they print, the essays that are in those catalogs. I love art gallery logos, I love art gallery letterhead, I love printed art gallery advertisements.

AZ: Speaking to this, can you talk about how you feel Little Switzerland identifies itself as an emerging artist gallery?

DL: Well, it’s flexible in terms of the forms it could take, but the story that I have now is that it is a gallery that began in Zürich in 1996 and then moved to Berlin in 1997 where it ran through three seasons and then closed in 1999. So it was an emerging artist gallery that represented a group of emerging Swiss artists. They were all young, they all knew each other, they all went to the same art school and they were all sort of “true believers” in my mind.

AZ: What are true believers?

DL: That’s something that I have a hard time explaining but I guess I divide artists along a spectrum of iconoclasts and true believers, and Little Switzerland is a gallery more for true believers than for iconoclasts. It’s an emerging gallery, so it was a little bit too loud and a little bit too promotional, the way that emerging artist galleries tend to be. We’ve spoken before about Bellwether and how their early graphic identity was a little bit louder and kitschy-er.

AZ: Yeah, their website was an illustrated storefront with someone walking in…

DL: Yea, that’s right! Which I thought was very very cool. And I loved that when they moved to Chelsea they had that pink neon sign that had their logo, which was Bickham Script, a very florid, font. And of course they’ve toned it down now…I think they are aspiring to something a little bit more respectable and upscale and more Chelsea than Williamsburg. So Little Switzerland is more downtown and they have this kind of loud downtown logo, and then they print t-shirts and they have a kind of whole promotional merchandizing aspect that I’m not aware that any real gallery has ever done. I don’t think that galleries generally sell t-shirts and coffee mugs and beer steins and stickers and that kind of stuff, but Little Switzerland does. And more than that, they sort of force their artists in the compromising position of having to model the clothing. So these are the artists modeling.

To read the full piece click here.

Related: James Wagner on Dan Levenson at EFA

10. Damsels in Success

Finally, a professional networking site designed to give women a leg up by eliminating 60% of the work force. That’s right, no dudes allowed here. Claiming to provide an alternative to the traditional content provided to women, the biggest problem this site needs to address is the fact that the sentiment suggests that job opportunities and self help advice were never available in the first place. Damsels in Success founder Harleen Kahlon might also rethink her choice of corny girl power name — it may very well be the worst I’ve seen to date.

From left to right: Lis Martin, Dr. T.F Chen, Mikael Vojinovic

9. Gawker Art Banners

Publishing mogul Nick Denton contributes to fine art by putting together an ad program that slots art work in empty ad spaces, and then squandering the idea with a roster of artists so embarrassingly bad any artist with a wit of sense would refuse their chance at “exposure”. Gawker curator Liz Dimmitt of Gumshoe LLC attempted to address the issue of quality earlier this year in a mass art blogger solicitation for advice, though we can’t imagine she received too much response. She clearly hadn’t bothered to look at anyone’s archives, an easy first step before asking someone for charity professional advice. We haven’t noticed much improvement in Gawker’s featured artists since then.

8. DesignSponge and Apartment “Art”

As a whole, DesignSponge and Apartment Therapy aren’t bad sites, but the willy nilly labeling of illustration, craft an anything else you might mount on a wall in your home as art could stand rethinking. Vintage bathing suits in a frame enjoy the elevated to the status of art at DesignSponge, as do illustrations of men raking leaves at Apartment Therapy. People who consider old clothing in a frame aren’t doing any one any harm of course, but with all the bad work the sites feature, readers with any kind of art background end up wishing for either a little more curation or a little less art.

7. ArtWorld Salon

Truth be told every so often these guys break a story or produce a strong comment thread so we debated a little before granting these guys a slot in our Worst in the Web countdown. However, reading the blog again solved this problem, as we were reminded of the seemingly endless supply of dull and pretentious posts the website produces. Of course, by the tone of András Szántó’s piece pondering Vuitton handbag sales in Museums or The Transom discussing national markets and race you’d think there were all kinds of fresh thoughts on the table. One only need refer to last January’s post and comments on ArtReview’s myspace blog to see just how far this new perspective takes us.

To the best of my knowledge, ArtWorld Salon hosts the only art blog in which professional qualifications are vetted prior to comment approval. In September