by Paddy Johnson on July 9, 2011
Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian thinks my L Magazine column on Twitter Art is off the mark. As Vartanian tells it, the term itself indicts the author. It’s a cheap ploy for headlines that fails to accurately describe these artist’s practice. Also: Why oh why, did Johnson write a column about bad twitter art and then fail to discuss the most significant artists! I’m exaggerating here for effect – Hrag wasn’t nearly so dramatic — but you get the point. Vartanian believes the examples I chose weaken an already thin case against twitter art (Joy Garnett’s #lostlibrary, An Xiao’s The Artist is Kind of Present, and Man Bartlett’s #24hPort).
Vartanian’s probably right that I could have come up with a better term than “Twitter art”, though the idea that this was a traffic friendly hook used to bring together work with no real commonality is a little far fetched. The truth of the matter is, I don’t believe the pieces have anything to do with one another past their engagement with Twitter. I never made any claims that they did, though I doubt Vartanian would have interpreted much of the article as he did had I more clearly expressed why I chose each artist.
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by Paddy Johnson on June 16, 2011
Tomorrow marks the dawn of a new era in mail art: Presents, Three Months of Mail Art for Hyperallergic HQ an opening that promises booze AND epic results! At least those are my predictions. As many readers will have already caught wind of around the web, Hyperallergic has been collecting mail art for three months. Come tomorrow, the days of tantalizing their readers with posts of their mail art gifts online will close: The mail art show opens!
Selected from over 100 submissions, the show includes artists such as Bo Bartlett, J.D. Hastings, Tim McCool, Austin Thomas, Audra Wolowiec, and many more (a full list of the participating artists can be found at the bottom of this post). Storefront’s Kate Wadkins and Hyperallergic‘s founding editor Hrag Vartanian are responsible for the curation of the show. Yesterday, I drilled Vartanian on the connections of this show with the blog Post Secret. That didn’t go very well, but I got an interview out of it regardless.
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