The person who took this photo labeled it “Colors” with the following description: “Spectrum V (Ellsworth Kelly, 1969) + Tourists (2009)”(photo via flickr.com/abdijstraat)

It’s summer in New York and the focus of the city’s art fans shifts from the commercial galleries and nonprofits to museums, as many stage large tourist-friendly shows and turn up the air conditioning during the sweltering months. Visiting the museums I encounter people — often tourists — who discuss or react to art with refreshingly unfiltered opinions about what they are seeing. On a recent trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I overheard some very interesting commentary from the museum goers; commentary that sparked confusion, insight, and humor. The gallery space for whatever reason often lends itself to a different dialogue, one where the visitor feels a necessity, and sometimes a pressure, to respond to the work as if its stillness generates an uncomfortable and awkward silence.

Tourists galore in the Metropolitan Museum’s Great Hall (via flickr.com/esthereggy)

Being on almost every Top 10 list of “Must See” things in New York City, the Met is home to every kind visitor. The Museum welcomes a whopping five million visitors a year. This is not the crowd you will see at the Neue Galerie, or the Whitney Museum of Art, or even the more adventurous visitors of MoMA for that matter.

I don’t want to pick on the tourists and I don’t want to imply that all tourists are ignorant to art but the most interesting and out-of-left-field comments did come from the out of towners, particularly those decked out in white sneakers and Hawaiian-themed tops et al. They certainly add a different flavor to the museum going experience.

Listening to the tourists’ commentary was insightful, in regards to how art and artists are perceived by the masses, so I decided to write it down — and add some commentary. Thinking about it I realized that they tend to have a very 19th century outlook on what constitutes a work of art (usually something resembling paint on canvas hung on a wall). Sure their reactions to art can be naïve but they are also genuine. Part of me envies them for being able to look at art with fresh eyes — a blank slate. The world is a different place from that standpoint and informs my own ideas about art.

Robert Rauschenberg, “Canyon” (1959) (click to enlarge)

For my experiment, I chose to station my wanderings to the Modern Art department, because even though this time period is closer to us, and in my opinion more relatable, it is often the hardest kind of art to “get,” as it were.

On a crowded Friday, walking around the mezzanine level of the Modern Art wing I noticed the you-are-too-close alarms were going off every other minute. But the problem was, that one, no one noticed the noise — they probably attributed it to some annoying ringtone — and two, none of the guests realized that they were stepping too close to works of art, or that they were even art for that matter!

One woman was leaning on one of Rachel Whiteread’s white “Untitled (Pair)” (1999). Maybe confusing them for some high-class contemporary New York thingamajig made for leaning?

For example, Mother and daughter duo walk up to Rauschenberg’s Canyon (1959), daughter takes one look at it, shoots mother a look of shock and anger and storms off.

Mother:

Aw, well honey, I’m sure he didn’t kill the bird himself! (She squints at the painting) But … you never know …

Animal cruelty! A component of the work that I never realized! I know that the eagle was collected from a trash heap by a friend of the artist, but how are they supposed to know this? Are they even supposed to know anything? Let the art speak for itself! Right? The woman was clearly already very wary of the artist. You know those artist types, if anyone is going to kill an animal and lacquer him up it would be an artist! Freak.

A view of the “Masterpieces of French Art Deco” show at the Metropolitan Museum.

“Is this art?”

… or did you just walk into Ikea?

Wassily Kandinsky, “The Garden of Love (Improvisation Number 27)” (1912)

“Kandinsky? He did like, crazy amounts of art right?”

“Yeah, but, like, this is his early stuff, I think … but yeah, like so much art. What I wanna know is how he found the time to like, do it all, you know? Like geez.”

What was it, like his job or something?

Francis Bacon, “Head I” (1947-48)

“Here is that Bacon fellow. The one who took the painting of the Pope and mutilated it or something … changed it.”

“What a sick, sick man.”

Bacon is probably doing cartwheels in his grave!

Bridget Riley, “Blaze 1” (1962)

“That right there looks a mess. I’m sure he had some cleaning up to do after.”

“Which floor has ‘Starry Night’?”

“Wow! This one will throw you for a loop!”

“Yeah, take a look at it, Ron! It’s famous! This one’s famous!”

This comment was in regards to a Bridget Riley painting, but it seems strange that sitting next to this was a Warhol and Lichtenstein and this was the famous, the recognizable one. Maybe they have a copy of this on the coffee table at home? And good luck finding “Starry Night.”

Yves Tanguy, “Fantastic Construction” (1949)

“Oh my gosh, Dali! I love him. Oh wait. Tanguy? Isn’t this copycatting? Is that allowed?”

I wonder what they’d think of Sherry Levine … or Richard Prince … or Mike Bidlo … or, hell, a lot of people.

*   *   *

Homepage image via flickr.com/onlyforward

How much does an artist’s chosen font tell you?

Self-branding has become a major issue of discussion among young artists, specifically with the self-named domain (YourName.com). Young artists spend a great deal of time and energy developing the structure, design, and style of their own self-named dot com or dot net sites, simultaneously trying to distinguish themselves from other young artists while following a prescriptive format. Similar to the importance of the curriculum vitae in terms of ubiquity, which is also unanimously available on all young artist sites, an artist website not only showcases artwork, but also employs style and graphic design in an attempt to reflect (or present) a certain impression of the artist. At $12 to $15 per month, and a set up time of under an hour through Google or Yahoo, anyone can be a dot com.

Having your own domain name marks you to society at large as a “serious artist,” and puts you on the same platform with other contemporary artists (see self-named artist websites such as MartinCreed.com, OlafurEliasson.net, or even highly styled sites like Terence Koh’s AsianPunkBoy.com, which features original drawings for sale at a piddly $1,000 each.) Because of its perceived seriousness, the practice of publishing your own dot com is elevated from mere blogging; many artists have both a blog and a dot com that are often interlinked: WilliamPowhida.com and williampowhida.blogspot.com, for instance. The artist website is also elevated from social media, which many artists also frequent (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr — a whole other can of worms.). The personal domain is an easy resource for gallerists, curators, critics, art bloggers, and other artists to refer, kind of a business card that incorporates your entire portfolio.

In setting up your website, you must ask yourself several questions: What font best describes you and your work? Should the images be framed on a white background, or should they dominate the entire page, or should they be clearly unedited installation shots? Do you include an artist statement, or project descriptions, or do you only exhibit obtuse unmarked images? Are you a vertical-scroll, horizontal-scroll, or a one-image-per-page kind of artist? Will you develop your own branded logo, or will it just be your name? The structure of artists’ websites cannot be separated from major galleries sites; many use the same style, layout and even identical Flash applications: compare PaulaCooperGallery.com and Gagosian.com to RBleckner.com and PhilipTaafe.info. Despite the diversity of designers behind these websites they all conform to a standard system (Your Name, Projects, CV, Contact). Advertising and branding, previously left to the discretion of art dealers and gallery owners, is now the responsibility of the artist — not that artists were immune to doing their own PR.

Artist websites typically attempt to remain as neutral as possible, taking most of their design cues from commercial gallery websites. White, gray and black backgrounds are preferred, with ultra-simple and typically understated logos that consist simply of the artist’s name — not unlike a luxury brand such as Thierry Mugler, Chanel, etc. Sans serif fonts are generally preferred over serif; gray text preferred over black; the less visual noise the better. Works are typically isolated on the white background of the website itself, rather than viewed as an installation shot; this indicates that Photoshop is highly utilized. What these online formats set up is really a virtual gallery with almost all the same conceptual issues one finds in the white-box method of gallery exhibition.

The majority of artist websites also feature a “Links” section where they link to galleries that have shown their work, perhaps collections they’ve been included in, or residency programs they’ve attended. The most bizarre aspect is the other young artists they choose to link to (equivalent of exhibiting themselves with) and those websites are interlinked in a small informal network. These networks of artist websites tend to be age/school/medium specific. The “Links” section eerily reflects Facebook’s display of your Friends in your Facebook Profile, or if we were to compare it to a gallery website, it kind of resembles a stable of artists.

Artist websites are linked via a wheel-and-spoke system to other larger sites such as White Columns Registry, Art Slant, Art Net, and One Art World. If they list you, can prove to be extremely useful in getting more shows; these curated databases of active contemporary artists use artist dot coms in their decision-making processes. Less useful (because it’s still self-publishing) but visible players also include Wooloo.org, and the somewhat horrifying Saatchi Gallery Your Gallery. One wants to be written up in very serious websites or local culture blogs — including Art Fag City, ArtCat, FREEWilliamsburg … — and a website is the best way to do that. The aforementioned blogs and online magazines cite you via hyperlink back to your self-named dot com. Clearly, young artists are expected to self-brand and self-publish early in their careers.

The stakes are high for the artist website, not only in terms of PR. Among innumerable graduate programs and residencies that now have online applications, they too will use your dot com as a viable, citable resource in reviewing your work, including the design you have selected for your website. Magdalena Sawon, director of PostMasters, stated in her Q&A at Winkleman’s #class exhibition, that she uses artist websites in lieu of studio visits. Elizabeth Dee notoriously requests her artists to remove works she has available on her website, or take their website down all together.

Where does this leave the artist? Is making your own website equatable to the rite of passage that is the BFA Thesis, or is it somehow more sinister? Does an artist even exist today without a dot com and without gallery representation? The result is that an artist is not only the images he produces or a persona he adopts, but also now a complete brand with a signature font, a logo, business cards, and a copyright. The effect this phenomena has on the art world, at least insofar as it is viewed on the Internet, is now a completely matrix-style system with large hubs but more importantly a network of artist websites, platforms that serve both as advertising but also as soap boxes. Everyone simultaneously has a voice, theoretically equal in value (YourName.com = Tillmans.co.uk) but in the multiplicity of the conversation, many voices will be lost.

Digital Gets Physical … On November 2, 2009, at 4:12 pm, I was having a late lunch in Santa Monica at Cafe Crepe, just a few blocks from the beach. I remember it was pretty good, and it was a perfect day for eating outside and people watching. But if it weren’t for an application called Foursquare, which allows me to “check in” from a physical location and tell all my friends, I’d never have remembered when exactly I was there.

Foursquare is capitalizing on the “digital gets physical” trend in tech, which in turns is impacting social media art. (image via ppeach.com)

At the time, Foursquare was exclusive to major American cities, but a couple months later, it would open up the floodgates to checking in anywhere in the world. Little more than a year since it was founded, it boasts over a million users, a milestone that took two years for Twitter to achieve.

Foursquare is currently a popular example of an emerging trend toward seamlessly blending the online and offline worlds. As I write this, more and more sites are featuring geolocation services made possible by smartphones equipped with GPS. Other, online/offline technologies have included the ever-popular Zipcar, which connects its cars with the web (and, recently, iPhones) using RFID; Metro Paris Subway, the first smartphone app to utilize augmented reality to superimpose digital data onto real world images; and M-Pesa, which allows real-world, person-to-person transactions of money via SMS.

As Frog design Creative Director Adam Richardson noted in an influential talk he gave at the most recent Next Web Conference, the Internet until recently has been like the railroad, which has forced us to adapt to its rules. In the coming years, it will be more like cars, which adapt to us and our way of life.

In other words, the digital is getting physical.

Blending the Rules

Recently, more and more artists using social media have placed their art as much in online space as in physical space, presenting a vision of social media art more closely aligned with how we use mainstream social media in general — as an extension of our lives, rather than a separate practice. And interestingly, more social media artists today are surrendering a portion of their creative will to the whims of the crowd, making their practices significantly more social.

Nic Rad's “PeopleMatter” project

When Nic Rad gave away 99 portraits of well-known New York media personalities, like Clay Shirky and Gillian Reagan, at his gallery show People Matter, he says he wanted to respond to the Internet’s current culture of free. Presented in Rare Gallery, his portraits were originally sourced by him, but soon were littered with “gamers,” (i.e., those who had used blogs, tweets, emails and other social methods to convince him to paint their portrait instead). At the same time, Rad engaged fans of his work to argue for why they deserve a particular piece for free (I made my own argument for the portrait of @MuseumNerd). In so doing, he worked to make the entire art process, from creation to sales, a social and socially-driven experience.

In the performance arena, Man Bartlett performed 24h #BestNonBuy, in which he spent 24 hours in the Union Square Best Buy (which, you might guess, is always open), tweeting about his experience but not purchasing anything. New Yorkers were encouraged to stop by to see him in action, but anyone could participate by following his Twitter feed.  Since then, Bartlett’s quickly become a social media microstar, with performances almost every month situated in New York City but made interactive online, including “#24hOpen”, tweeted during Michael Asher’s 2010 Whitney Biennial event, and #24hEcho, which received a reported 1,000 online visitors (as a very rough point of comparison, 1,400 photos of sitters have been posted to the Abramović Flickr, illustrating how much more personalized interaction an Internet performance can have).

Man Bartlett during 24h “#BestNonBuy” (via flickr.com/hragv)

And out West, appropriately set in Los Angeles, Lauren McCarthy launched “Script,” where she gave control of each day of her life to the whims of her Internet followers. Using a wiki-style format, visitors could anonymously edit the script by adding or deleting lines. Though little documentation exists of her performances outside of a few snapshots and the archived scripts, the concept of the crowd-sourced life resonates with current Internet trends: our real-world lives are increasingly being defined not only by technology but also by who’s on the other end of that technology.

These artists’ explorations interest me because of how they seamlessly blend online and offline; I wasn’t physically present for most of their shows, and yet I feel like I was there all along. Further, and perhaps more importantly, I felt like I had some level of influence in the ultimate result of their creative actions: to varying degrees of success, each artist made their social media work social.

A Defining Moment

Defining any form of art, especially while it’s still emerging, is difficult at best and harmfully restrictive at worst. The emergence of any new medium gives artists a new playground with which to work, but it can often take years before it becomes clear which pieces are the true gems that helped define a new art form and which were simply trends of the moment.

Those who follow Hyperallergic will know that I recently convened a roundtable discussion of social media artists to try to understand this emerging field. They included individual artists — Man Bartlett, Lauren McCarthy, Nina Meledandri, Christi Nielsen, Nic Rad — whose work had caught my eye, and three members of @Platea — Jonny Gray, Joanie San Chirico, and Jennifer Ng. Appropriately, we held the chat on Facebook, on Hyperallergic’s discussion boards.

Lauren McCarthy in the midst of “Script.”

As I struggled to define social media art, Nic Rad told me succinctly: “Social media art is art done on social media.” This is right. But working with him and the above artists, I’ve settled upon four helpful rules of thumb for evaluating a deceptively-simple practice.

1. The web plays a key role not just in the marketing or sourcing of the art but the *expression* of the art. The art must be adapted to the device or platform; it has to respond specifically to the online space. There’s a small but important semantic difference between art on Twitter and Twitter art. The former suggests the traditions of art moved into Twitter, while the latter suggests art in which Twitter is seamlessly integrated. I can’t help but think of the early movies coming out of Hollywood, where the camera was set still; it was simply theater brought to film. As Christi Nielsen told me, “We have to make something specific to this medium, to this space.”

2. The art involves the audience in some fashion; it is inherently a social medium. Many would disagree, but in my opinion, the most exciting social media art inspires the crowd to co-create the work in some fashion; it is inherently social. Just as the social web has opened the doors for would-be photographers, op-ed writers, and other fields traditionally restricted to those with professional training, so should social media art open the doors for would-be artists. Whether or not we want to measure success by numerical engagement is a question, I think, that’s up for debate.

One of Nina Meledandri's responses to my 1stfans Twitter project, which involved Morse code.

3. The art is accessible beyond a “typical” art world audience while still being conceptually rich. In some sense, as Jonny Gray brought up, social media art reawakens the folk art tradition: “Folk art may have recognizable (and often recognized) practitioners, but the tradition itself blurs the line between artist and audience (I mean in situ more than when it is cultural display for the tourists’ gaze). Folk art is of and by the people.” And yet, as cultural consumers, we must apply the same critical eye to social media art that we do to contemporary fine art and continue to evaluate the work against the artist’s intent. Which leads us to my final point …

4. The bottom line: it’s all about the artist’s intent. Above all, when critiquing a social media art piece, I find the same rules apply: it’s most important to understand the artist’s intent, and how successfully she or he actualized it. But, as Joanie San Chirico suggested, the audience’s influence can alter a piece: “The artist’s intent has to be fluid and may even completely transform before the completion of the work.”

Augmented Creativity

As with any new technological medium, artists like myself and the roundtable participants are coming out of the webwork to find new ways to engage these media. From Christi Nielsen’s early explorations in Second Life to Nic Rad’s socially-engaged portraiture, each individual artist finds a new and compelling way to utilize these media as tools of self-expression. And as we’ve seen, much of the current practice of social media art continues in the traditions of net.art, visual art, public art and performance art, a reflection of the different facets of mainstream social media that artists tap into.

Shots from Christi Nielsen's inter.sect art collective

What I find most exciting about social media art, then, is how it opens the doors to access, a subject thrown about regularly in the art world but which can mean little in the face of simple facts: most people don’t live in art capitals like New York, London, and Beijing, and even fewer receive an education in the contemporary art popular in those locales.

Artists like William Powhida and Jennifer Dalton, who made #class open to anyone with an Internet connection, and institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, with its online web cam of “The Artist Is Present” (2010), are pushing a new definition of access: one that doesn’t require physical proximity.

Furthermore, social media presents a fascinating new way to extend and enhance traditional arts practices, rather than replace them. Art can be done in the offline world but made available in the online world, and vice versa. It can weave back and forth seamlessly. It’s augmented art.

Hype and Access

Not exactly what the Great Firewall looks like but still … (via lostlaowai.com)

Of course, there’s something to be said against the hype around social media technologies; it can often feel hyperbolic, naive even, to think that any new technology can change the (art) world.  A decade after eBay and Etsy turned the Internet into an international marketplace, most artists still struggle to sell their work outside the gallery system, and it’s hard to imagine many artists finding critical recognition if they don’t live in a major art center, even if their work is accessible via the Internet.

And in the social media landscape, where self-described “experts” emerge left and right to promote traditional principles of marketing, artists may feel more pressure to brand themselves, thereby manufacturing an online persona with an eye toward sales and cheap attention. The social media environment in particular can also make it easy to evaluate one’s creative worth largely by the easy metrics available on most sites.

But watching the global artistic community emerging out of social media, I can’t help but think that mainstream social media present a unique opportunity to level the playing field.

Before 2004, it would have been difficult to imagine an art collective with members from as far away as Perth, Australia to Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, who hadn’t previously considered themselves artists. It certainly would have been impossible to imagine Ai Weiwei posting live updates of the aftermath of a beating he suffered in Chengdu, as he turned activism and authoritarianism into a form of art in a country kept behind the “Great Firewall.”

And Lo, There Was Much Retweeting

The “tweets,” as I’ve written before, are the new streets, giving us a rich new public landscape for exploring and expressing art to hundreds of millions and soon billions of people connected via mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, desktop PCs, and other future devices we’re only beginning to imagine.

It’s only a matter of time, I suspect, before a social media artist working largely outside established arts institutions and centers finds the same kind of success that stars like Kara Walker and Jeff Koons have found through the standard system of galleries and museums. This artist’s work would be accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, co-created, funded, and promoted primarily through social media channels.

By then, of course, we may no longer think of the work as social media art, so blurry will the distinction be between our online and offline worlds. It will, perhaps, just be art.

__________

Frontpage image caption: An Xiao’s Under the Bridge Festival project (2009)

See Part One and Part Two.

But what makes these applications so popular? There’s an innate visual appeal to the deep blue tints and blown out yellows and oranges of the Polaroid’s film itself, but I feel that these visual qualities can’t completely explain the applications’ popularity. Could it be that the social cache of the original Polaroid and its connotation of self-conscious cool and artsy-ness make the digital versions that much more appealing?

Where the original visual quirks of the Polaroid came from flaws in the camera’s instant-development process and less-than-perfect lens equipment, the digital discolorations produced by applications like ShakeIt and Polarize are wholly intentional. They are copies of the effects of imperfect technology, kind of like a forger artificially mimicking the craqueleur of an aged Old Master painting.

In the case of the art forger, there is a vested stake in making the painting look like it is actually old; the intention is to fool the viewer into mistaking the forgery for the real thing. But the iPhone apps are never going to fool anyone into thinking that your online snap is a real Polaroid. That’s not the point! The point is to make your pictures access the inherent ‘cool factor’ of the Polaroid, even though we all know the pic isn’t really one.

iPhone Polaroid, from @tfitzsimons

Where does the split happen between the aesthetic quality of a Polaroid and the way we fetishize that aesthetic? Answering this, as well as the question of what it means to make an exact copy of imperfection, is one well left to semiotics, or the study of symbols and these ‘signs’ communicate meaning. Pioneering philosophers Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes took symbols, be they linguistic, visual or otherwise, situations in which A represents B, and divided them into component parts. These parts are the “signifier,” A, and the “signified,” B.

This concept of dividing a symbol might sound complicated at first, but it is simple to introduce. Think of a normal visual sign, a stop sign or a bathroom sign. A bathroom sign tells us which bathroom to go in by the “male” and “female” logos on the doors, a skirtless stick figure represents the idea of “male” while the skirted figure represents the idea of “female.” Put another way, the skirted figure is a signifier while its signified is “female.” The physical symbol and the abstract idea are connected in our minds into a single symbolic unit. In another example, while driving we see a red octagon. We immediately know that this represents the idea to “stop.” The signifier is the red octagon, while the signified is “stop.”

Craqueleur of an old painting

Now let’s use this analytical tool to look back at the painting forger and the iPhone “Polaroid.” The painting forger wants to make something that looks old. What makes a painting look old? A dusty patina, faded colors, craqueleur — these are the visual symbols that communicate old to our brains:

Signifiers: Patina, color, craqueleur
Signified: Old

Taking it a step further, why would a forger want to mimic an old painting in the first place? Because, old things are connected with the idea of monetary value.

Signifier: Old
Signified: Valuable

This means that overall, our brains are making a connection between a visual symbol and an abstract social idea.

Signifiers: Patina, color, craqueleur
Signified: Valuable

You can see that through this three-step symbolic process, a tenuous connection is made between two things that aren’t inherently connected. The forger can take advantage of this connection, faking the visual signifiers of old, patina, color, and craqueleur, to make value pop up in your brain.

Let’s take this to the iPhone “Polaroids.” What visual cues (signifiers) characterize a Polaroid, or make us think of a Polaroid?

Signifiers: over-saturation, fading, distortion
Signified: Polaroid

This is how we visually identify a Polaroid. Then, what does the the idea of a Polaroid remind us of? The format’s use in fashion shoots, its heyday in the 60s and 70s, Pop art (think Warhol), or even its role in quick-documenting crazy parties. It also has an association with family photos and being the latest technology of the time, a status symbol of disposable income and affluence. In other words …

Signifier: Polaroid
Signifieds: Hip, retro, arts, cool

Therefore we again make the leap between a visual quality (distorted) and an abstract idea (cool) through the conduit of a real thing (a Polaroid). The process occurs so that two true symbolic connections become one false connection.

Signifiers: over-saturation, fading, distortion
Signifieds: Hip, retro, artsy

Literally speaking, the visual quality of over-saturation has nothing to do with being hip, it just has to do with being a Polaroid. Yet this is why you can look at an iPhone “Polaroid,” which isn’t actually a Polaroid at all, and think “cool.” This is why the technology is appealing, why mimicking the distortions and flaws of a film Polaroid camera in a digital format is, in fact, desirable. Why don’t you want a perfect, clear picture? Simple — because these imperfect visual qualities carry a connotation of coolness, something that is desirable to take part in.

An untitled Polaroid phot by Andy Warhol of artist Georgia O'Keeffe, right, and her confidante, sculptor Juan Hamilton. (via latimes.com)

We look at an iPhone “Polaroid” and see what would otherwise be a normal picture as more improvisatory, more candid, more fun. iPhone “Polaroids” shortcut the symbolic circuit we have built up between real Polaroids and their cultural meaning. The digitals are fakes, but no one cares — the cool factor is still there.

The iPhone Polaroid is far from the only example of a semiotic shortcut in contemporary visual culture. Processes like digital vignette-ing or faux sepia-tone also allow our present-day photos to take on some of the cache and mystique of early photography. Some “Photorealistic” painters mimic the imperfections of photography — depth of field limits, spatial distortion, desaturated colors — to conversely make their paintings seem more “real.” They mimic the photo instead of reality; heightening the reality of their work.

Iron Man 2 featured more than a few scenes that took place on “live TV news.” Instead of seeing the action directly, viewers were shown what looked like a news presenter showing the action, a camera within a camera. Does this movie actually contain real live news? Of course not. We know it’s a movie. But because the visual qualities of a presenter and a timer at the bottom right tell us we’re watching “live news,” the footage takes on more urgency and importance in our minds. Again a visual quality reinforces an abstract idea.

I hope this essay has made it a little easier to step back and, as Olafur Eliasson loves to, make you look at yourself looking. Where does our visual perception end and our cultural perception pick up? Semiotics has some of the answers!

In November 2008, halfway around the world in Mumbai, Twitter finally reached the general public consciousness, as reports came in about its remarkable use in the rescue and reportage efforts. And earlier that summer, Facebook had reached its first 100 million users, and more established names in the art world were starting to notice. Lehman Bros. fell, a surge of newly unemployed went online to seek jobs and find solace, and America elected a tweeting, texting and YouTubing President.

A young girl looks at the 1stfans sign during their launch event in January 2008.

It was also the year, according to the New York Observer and the Brooklyn Rail, when New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz first logged onto Facebook, where he regularly engages online conversations with thousands of people by turning his wall into an open forum.

In January 2009, the Brooklyn Museum launched 1stfans, the museum world’s first socially-networked membership. As part of the program, they kicked off @1stfans, a members-only Twitter art feed curated by Eugenie Tsai, and they selected me as the first artist. Obviously a personal milestone for me, 1stfans was also an important milestone for social media art: a major arts institution not dedicated specifically to technology began commissioning social media art.

The social, Web 2.0 Internet, once the stereotyped province of angsty Livejournal-ers and geeky Usenet users, was finally and quickly entering mainstream consciousness. It only made sense that the art world would respond.

Whence the Artists Tweeteth

1stfans, of course, was both a beginning and, as we saw, a continuation. It introduced to me a wave of commissioned artists willing to utilize mainstream social media as a canvas, most frequently for performance. While some 1stfans artists seemed to dabble in Twitter as a medium, a number used the feed as part of a larger social media practice.

Eva and Franco Mattes, “Life Sharing” (2000 - 2003), Website screenshot (via 0100101110101101.org)

I was struck in particular by the work of Los Angeles-based Lauren McCarthy, who constructed a special phone for her shower performances, questioning notions of public and private, and Ranjit Bhatnagar, who adapted an early net.art project of his by crowdsourcing a sonnet via Twitter, rather than email.

I was soon inspired in March 2008 to found @Platea, a social media art collective named after the Latin word for “street.” I wanted to see the potential of social media art and explore my emerging belief that mainstream social media, particularly those that utilize a news feed as a one-stop area for updates, represent a new form of public space and therefore an opportunity to develop a new form of public art. It was through this work that I met Christi Nielsen, whom I interviewed in the previous section, when she joined the collective’s steering committee.

I also began seeing more and more social media feeds dedicated specifically to a conceptual art project. Keytweeter, which I discovered via Rhizome, continued in the vein of Eva and Franco Mattes’s “Life Sharing,” wherein literally all of the user’s keystrokes are sent out into the Twitterverse, a vision of perfect transparency.

A screencapture of The Mime (@themime),a performance feed on Twitter

Other conceptual projects like @injuries and @themime opened the door to conceptual art regularly appearing in our feeds with the same mixture of anonymity and ubiquity found in street art.

And, in the world outside Twitter, San Diego artist Brad Troemel’s “Jogging” has presented projects like “Perfo Rmanceart,” where collective members flooded the Facebook page of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and other museums with images of their work, transforming them into a sort of flash gallery online.

In the Tumblr-verse, Brooklyn-based Nina Meledandri ran a feed on 1stfans that expounded on the collective energy of digital response and reference that she built with her Tumblogs.

Heavyweights Enter the Ring

A view of Man Barlett’s performance during “#class” at Winkleman Gallery (via flickr.com/hragv‚

More established artists have begun entering the social media realm. Brooklyn artist William Powhida, well-known for his mercurial art persona expressed via his blog, joined forces with conceptual artist Jennifer Dalton to present #class. The month-long symposium at Winkleman Gallery, of which I took part, was simulcast on ustream.tv and Twitter, making it accessible and engaging to artists outside New York City.

Across the ocean, London-based Yoko Ono, the most popular contemporary artist on Twitter with close to a million followers, kicked up her social media efforts with #YokoQandA and participatory Facebook and Flickr albums. While rich in hashtags and invitations to engage, the lack of @replies and a personal voice give the feed a more broadcast-like quality, suggesting the work of assistants rather than the artist herself; nevertheless, her presence is notable, if only because it draws attention to how few established artists are active on Twitter.

A sample Twitpic from Ai Weiwei during his recovery.

More compelling and interactive has been the Chinese-language feed of Beijing artist Ai Weiwei, whose 40,000-follower count is all the more remarkable in a country where Twitter is formally banned (according to one estimate, there are 80,000 active Twitter users in China, suggesting Ai may reach as many as half of them). His tweets promote his work, organize impromptu gatherings (including a much-publicized one in Chengdu with New Yorker writer Evan Osnos), and lifestream his art-and-activism. This latter category pushes the boundaries of Twitter as both a collective art form and an act of defiance in an authoritarian state: Ai’s online projects have ranged from posting snapshots of his hospitalization after suffering a beating at the hands of the police, sharing the birthdays of the students who died in the May 12, 2008 Sichuan earthquake with the hashtag #512birthday, and, recently, organizing the Say Out Your Name Activity, where nearly 1,000 Chinese nationals tweeted out their real names and locations. (Aside: Lugano-based museologist Jennifer Ng and I are working on translating selected tweets into English, including #512birthday, at aiwwenglish.tumblr.com)

How the Heck Do I Know If It’s Good?

In the broader world of social media, so much has changed in the past two years. Words like “tweet,” “check in,” and “status update” have entered the vernacular. And the art world has seen an explosion of energy around these new media, which combine digital language with popular appeal. The most striking aspect of social media art is that it contains facets of net.art, by being digital; visual art, by existing on a two-dimensional surface; public art, by existing in spaces used habitually by hundreds of millions of people; and performance art, by being inherently social. Whether the aggregate is greater than its sum remains to be seen …

Next: Always Social: Right Now (2010 — ), Part Three

The opening night crowd at “Trashed” in Silver Lake (photo courtesy the author) (click to enlarge)

The first lesson was, it takes a lot of work to open an art show. It isn’t just “hang some work and open the doors.” So the first thing one learns is that an enormous amount of love and labor is put into the process of bringing art into the world. The contemporary art world is a confusing place, with misdirection, misinformation, smoke, mirrors, and characters spread across continents. It’s full of stars posing as failures, failures posing as stars, and unoriginal simpletons in artist hangouts wearing paint smeared blue jeans smoking camels. It’s talk and talk and talk and then money, more money and even more money. It’s conspiracy and insider-y, it’s worse than high school cliques. And when you find art you actually like it’s hard to really know what it is you’re buying. In museums we see art that is important, we know that because we’ve heard the names a million times … Picasso, Johns, Warhol. But, at some point those names were just names, just working artists hanging in contemporary galleries or wherever artists hang out. It’s hard to know when or how they became brands but they did.

“Works” by (left to right) Leticia Bajuyo, William Powhida, and Jennifer Faist at “Trashed.” (photo by the author) (click to enlarge)

About a year ago I started reviewing art in Los Angeles on my blog, Art Bystander. Why did I start doing this? Because when I visited the galleries I couldn’t find a critical word about what I was seeing. People seemed to like the work blindly and they spoke about it as if it were the prettiest girl in school. You know the one, the total bitch who wouldn’t talk to you except when she needed a lab partner or someone to help her understand Shakespeare. This problem isn’t just with the state of criticism in the Los Angeles art world, it’s music and books now too. It is as if anyone who puts pen to paper or fingers to keyboard are more fanboy then critic. It’s one thing to be enthusiastic, loving, and caring for a medium you believe in deeply, it’s another to be so blinded by your affection that you can no longer be honest with yourself and your audience. It’s about liking something solely based on hoping that you will be liked back.

The invitation to “Trashed.” (click to enlarge)

My solution was to start a scathing blog. I kept it up for a little bit, and got some very nasty emails and comments from people who thought I wasn’t being fair, or that I was wrong. How can an opinion on the aesthetics of a pregnant woman peeing in the woods be wrong? It can in the art world. After a while, I just got sick of going. Of seeing the same scenesters dressed like retired sailors in the 1950s nodding their heads in agreement like zombies satisfied with rabbit brains. I just couldn’t stomach it anymore, I wanted to see a show so stripped down, so raw, that I could both afford the art and also let that art speak for itself in it’s raw, unadulterated state.

At Home in the Gallery

So I opened a gallery in my house with artists who think it’s funny to laugh at the art world. Or better yet, with artists who I believe as a curator/dealer, inherently understand that art is as much about enabling people, even if for a moment, to turn their heads and see something that they couldn’t have imagined … or something that seems self-evident after it is revealed. It’s about learning, expanding, seasoning, tasting, and being displaced. It is about being distanced and embraced simultaneously, while experiencing some sort of mental harmony and physical stimulation.

Jennifer Dalton’s contribution to “Trashed.” (click to enlarge)

And that’s what Trashed is. It started as an idea on Twitter, a theoretical question, what is art and who should be allowed to own it? An artist of fine paintings, sculptures and installations is obsessed with price-point, the desire to survive solely on the prospect of making and selling more art.

Then there are collectors — fat-pocketed, corporation-owning, skinny wife-having, trust funded, art world insiders who invest in canvas and bronze. Do some collectors secretly do a dance the day an artist in his collection passes on? Is it wrong if he does? They want the critics to like what they bought, they will buy you dinner, get you drunk, and pretend to be a slick, liberal party goer un-phased by drugs, public sex, decadence, and secret trysts. That’s their image and I love that image. I, unfortunately, am not one of those people.

So, beyond that, we began with the simplest of ideas, send us your trash, we’ll put it up, slap a price tag on it and see if some idiot will buy it. Also, we’ll send a press release to major critics and bloggers here in Los Angeles and dare them to come, to tear us apart. They should tee off on us, we are bastardizing their system. We are showing works of art that couldn’t possibly be considered art, right? Nothing we’re doing is going to ever be in a museum because we’re nobodies, we have no money and no idea what is going on … and because it’s trash. It’s brushes and paint cans, marker on loose-leaf pages, cutouts from sketchbooks, figurines and urinals, a map and some emails informing a lover that her services will no longer be needed, and waste from large installations made of waste.

Art as Community

Never one for brevity, Wiliam Powhida has a “rant” wall at the “Trashed” wall. (photo by the author) (click to enlarge)

Trashed was rebelling against these art world ideas. Art, to us, is about fun and community. When I graduated college I went around New York City with two painters, we were always frenetic about art, writing, and drawing incessantly. Every night we would meet at a bar in the Village or in Williamsburg and would trade poems and drawings for pitchers of beer. I wanted that feeling again, art as community, as poetry, and as something that trumped convention.

And as the show grew closer, some artists were embarrassed at the prospect of showing with us, or that their work wasn’t art. Critics refused to respond or simply wished me luck, but were unable to attend. One gallery owner came by the morning of our opening, spent twenty minutes looking at the work, congratulated me, and said it looked great. He was very nice. No one else came, not the curator who I spoke with, not the Los Angeles Times, not the counter culture magazine LA Weekly, not Flavorpill, Gawker Artists, Coagula Magazine, ArtInfo, ArtObserved, LACityBeat, or LA CitySearch. TryHarderArt didn’t come and take sexy glossy art show photos and the art bloggers of LA, who seem to cover everything, were a no show. We aren’t on La Cienega or in Bergamont Station and we weren’t attracting the celebrities. We didn’t rent an abandoned TV studio like Mr. Brainwash of Exit Through the Gift Shop fame and hang gaudy quotes with pictures of our bold work. We bought wine and beer, we got burgers and hot dogs, and we fired up the barbecue. One of the artists, Jennifer Faist, brought coleslaw and two others, Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, got on Gchat and Skype in Brooklyn and spoke with people coming through the show.

Did it go smoothly? Sure. Did we sell some work? A little. Did we make waves? It’s hard to say. One art fan came on his break from work, looked through the show, smiled, thanked me profusely for putting the show on, and then tweeted about it later. We had one blogger come through, she stayed a while, engaged with the work, and she seemed to enjoy herself. A journalist from New York called me this morning and wanted to speak with me about the show, the banality of Los Angeles, and the Silver Lake crowd specifically.

But, sadly, the regulars I see in Culver City, China Town, the Miracle Mile, and in Bergamont Station stayed away. Maybe it’s because we’re in a house tucked halfway up the hill in Silver Lake. Maybe it’s because our gallery has no name and no footprint amongst the art fans of LA. Or maybe people were scared of it. Maybe if we succeeded something about the way they do things will feel false. Because at the core of what we’re doing at ByStander and with our first show, Trashed, is to challenge the infrastructure that is currently in place. How many times have you heard someone complain about a price tag at an art show? Been afraid to admit that you don’t understand what you’re looking at? How often do you look at something bloated, banal, and disrespectful to the spectator with the fear that admitting this fact would end in embarrassment or alienation? Do you feel like maybe the heart is missing these days? Even just a little?

Well, Trashed and ByStander presented heart. And our house was filled with friends and strangers, walking through my front door without ringing

In the Beginning Was the Nerd … Some time in 2004, I logged onto Facebook for the very first time. My alma mater was one of the few allowed coveted access to the Harvard-originated social network. I filled out a profile, uploaded a picture and began adding friends. A coast away, Tim O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0,” declaring a new era for the web, one defined largely by the mainstreaming of social networking services.

A screenshot of thefacebook.com, c. 2004

It was nothing new to me. I was trading freeware on floppy disks when most of my classmates had hardly touched a computer, and by high school I was surfing Usenet, MUDs and IRC and regularly updating my AOL profile. Facebook was a natural continuation of all of this, except for one key factor: my real-life, non-nerdy friends were using it.

In some ways, 2004 is an arbitrary date, but it’s also an important one, since it was the founding year of the what is now the world’s most dominant social-networking service, which eventually made “Mark Zuckerberg” a household name. That same year, iTunes reached the Windows platform, making iPods — and therefore, powerful portable computers — accessible to the majority of computer users, and the ultra-hip were sending and receiving invites to a new email service named Gmail, provided by Google, which was then largely a search engine service.

Computers and the Internet, after decades of association with nerds and misfits, were on the brink of mainstream cool.

Casting a Wide Net.Art

A screen capture from Shop Mandiberg

As in computers, so in computer art. The early net.art movement saw a lot of creative energy, with works like http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org and Chat Circles stretching the possibilities of this new, networked medium called the Internet long before “social media” became a buzz word.“ A lot of people are calling bullshit on Web 2.0,” said Michael Mandiberg, a current senior fellow at Eyebeam, one of the leading art and technology organizations in New York. “These things existed beforehand; there was just a shift in infrastructure.”

In 2001, for instance, Mandiberg founded Shop Mandiberg, in which he sold all his possessions on the Internet, an act of openness that no longer seems radical today. “eBay and Paypal were like the first moment of opening up of access to exchange,” he explained about the piece.

Screen capture of the central question that guides the work of TAGallery.cont3xt.net

I asked him about some of the important work to begin exploring this Web 2.0 idea of open access, and he pointed me to Nasty Nets. Started by Marisa Olson, John Michael Boling, Joel Holmberg, and Guthrie Lonergan, it served as a sort of proto-Tumblr where members turned Internet surfing into an art form by publicly and collaboratively documenting their Internet explorations. “It’s really important as a transitional project,” he told me.

“I think the Internet has changed significantly in the past 5-6 years,” noted Ceci Moss, the current editor at Rhizome.org, a New Museum affiliate that supports art engaging in emerging technologies. “This is in part due to social media, but also mobile phones and high bandwidth connections. There are a number of new and exciting art practices that have emerged in response to certain changes in the online platform.”

Moss pointed me to the work of Lonergan’s MySpace Intro Playlist, which captures a period in Internet history that now seems quaint, with a curatorial flair.  She also pointed me to Cont3xt’s Tag Gallery, which explores the use of a Delicious feed as an alternative gallery space.

Real Life to Second Life and Back

What gallery hopping in Second Life looked like, c. March 2007 (via flickr.com/hragv) (click to enlarge)

It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when corporations were rushing to place ads and set up shop in Second Life. Currently overshadowed by the Web 2.0 behemoths, virtual worlds are inherently social, and they visually blend the real-world aspects of exhibition and performance with all the flexibility of the virtual world.

From Cao Fei’s RMB City to Eva and Franco Mattes’s re-performances, Second Life has provided a rich playground for exploring social media art in a manner that can feel familiar and comfortable to those accustomed to traditional visual art. Even online video games like America’s Army have become a space for performance, as in Joe DeLappe’s dead-in-iraq, where he put down his weapon and recited the names of those who died in the Iraq War.

It was Los Angeles-based artist Christi Nielsen’s explorations in Second Life, with the founding of Metaverse Gallery that led her, eventually, to other social media: “It was hard to find work that was successful. People would just send pictures without consideration to the space.”

Soon afterward, Nielsen founded the inter.sect art collective, which has done art with everything from mobile phone video to the now-defunct seesmic.tv. Recently featured at the Los Angeles Downtown Film Festival and Digital Art LA, they’ve now branched out into more mainstream forms of social media such as Twitter, YouTube, and Vimeo.

“On whatever platform I’m on,” she said. “I consider it a space. Each medium becomes a venue.”

From Art to Zuckerberg

Nasty Nets - a “proto-Tumblr” by Marisa Olson

With all the hype surrounding Twitter, Facebook and the next social media-based startup, it can be easy to assume that an artist using the medium is the “first” to do what they’re doing, but precedents can be found with basic Google research or by perusing Rhizome’s rich digital archives. Even the current run of location-based apps have precedents in art projects like the Yellow Arrow Project, which swept the Lower East Side in 2004 with its mixture of mobile phones, tags, and secret notes.

I’ve inevitably left out many important works; the above survey is hardly comprehensive, and many others are more qualified to speak more fully on the topic. I write this introduction to my survey of social media art not as a historian but as a social media artist myself interested in understanding the deep traditions of net.art and the early explorations of social media art that are often overlooked.

In any case, these early practices of social media art paved the way for what I see as an important marker — 2008, which is when social media entered the mainstream consciousness in many important ways, and social media art followed suit.

__________

See Part Two and Part Three.

Daniel Larkin (far left) attended last night’s special event at WNYC to watch the “Work of Art” premiere with other art world peeps, including (in no particular order) artists Joy Garnett, Celso and William Powhida, WNYC critic & C-Monster blogger Carolina Miranda, art blogger Brent Burket, and Art News Magazine’s Robin Cembalest (photo flickr.com/hragv) (click to enlarge)

To keep it real, a reality TV show about visual artists vying to be “at the top” is way too corporate to earn serious street cred in the art world. Nevertheless, I attended multiple shoots last fall of this Bravo project to see how it was all going to play out and to get to know the contestants personally. Although the art critic is me was not thrilled with all of the work I saw (as usual), the little anthropologist inside me scored a field day observing.

All of the artists talked about how grueling and intense the process was. Imagine being plucked from your everyday life and told that you don’t have to worry about holding down your job, trying to network, or paying your bills. Imagine being told that all you need to focus on is creating art for the entire day – from morning until the late evening. And this art will be shown on national television. This opportunity was daunting.

A wild glint danced in the eyes of every artist with which I spoke. They had that beaming smile of a kid who just got a fat envelope from a good college. There was a sense (probably misplaced to be frank) that this exposure was going to finally be their big break. I bit my tongue from rehashing the tragic careers of most American Idol winners, and hypothesizing about its parallels in the art world.

The challenge for all of these artists was that good ideas cannot always be produced in convenient 48 or 72 hour increments. Contestants only had a few days between when they first learned of the next competition’s artistic theme and when they had to submit the final product. This short-time span injured the quality of their work. Many works felt like all-nighters by an eager art student. I kept thinking works would have turned out better if they would have had more time to think. Some of our best ideas simmer on our mental stoves for months – even years – until they are finally ready to be tasted by others. The eventual champion will be the artist who thinks quickest on his or her feet.

The other side of the room during the WNYC’s “Work of Art” premiere screening. Included (in no particular order) are blogger/publisher Barry Hoggard and James Wagner, artist Jennifer Dalton, the Brooklyn Museum’s tech guru Shelley Bernstein, photographer Luna Park, and NY #artstech founder Julia Kaganskiy. (via flickr.com/hragv) (click to enlarge)

The camera had a strange effect on both the artists and the audience that was wandering around the staged openings I attended. People acted chiller off camera. But, then an uncanny shift in tone of voice, body language, and facial expressions unfolded once people felt like they were being recorded.

At one point your (notoriously argumentative) commentator picked a fight with an artist. Not to be harsh, but his work did not pass the third grader test. In order for a work to justify its own existence, art must convince me that it could not have been created by an 8 year old. Our conversation started as a pleasant and intellectual exchange of ideas. But as soon as the cameras smelled conflict, we were surrounded as though a heated playground fight just broke out. Like screaming little boys forming a ring around us, the cameras provoked and galled us into a meaner fight. The catty comments flew.

To point out the obvious, quality in art is a highly controversial concept. It will be interesting to see how this reality show approaches the quality question, given that the plot for each episode inevitably leads up to the elimination of an artist for producing bad work. Under Bravo’s current press policy, I can’t divulge any spoilers. But as I came back again and again and watched the pool of artists shrink, I found myself agreeing with many of judges’ elimination choices. Perhaps, quality is not so hopelessly subjective.