re net art market she shoots she scores

That's probably what it boils down too, & it kinda takes the whole point
from underneath this discussion: if you see the media as a gigantic scanning
device looking for money everywhere it can, and getting more refined at it
every day, you don't need to worry about to sell or not to sell or even
about how to sell, it's just a matter of you being picked up by it or not.
In fact, trying to get sold could be disadvantageous to your profit, 'cause
you might be pushing up the wrong parameters to the system.

It doesn't do away with the very real problem of how to finance making the
kind of art no large supporting or commercial institute is interested in,
though. You still have to bend & twist that in all directions just to be
acceptable, it's dicatorial: i mean you can write poetry with a piece of
paper and a pencil,you don't need any money, if you want to make net art or
installation art or anything involving computers, you will need your basic
infrastructure and lot's of time for research/learning.

I could manage pretty well writing/working regular jobs and have some nice
results, not caring about any commercial pressure at all and i'm pretty sure
i would have written different things when i did care about getting
published within the existing publication media. As it turned out, i have
far more people reading my poetry than i would have the traditional
publishing way, plus i've written stuff that i'm actually happy about.
Of course, the kind of poetry i'm talking about doesn't have any commercial
value at all, it's not exactly the love & romance stuff song texts are made
of…

I'm finding it very hard doing the writing/developing/net art/working
combination without starting to bend my highly poetic notions into some
stuff that's sellable. I don't like that because i feel i'm wasting time
with that kind of detour, I would like to do it the same way like i used to
do when writing & not change anything because it would give me money. I just
can't maintain my strict division of this i do for money and this i do
because it fullfills my artistic needs (i really don't care why I have
those, i have 'm so i have to do sth with it). And i do believe that i have
some meaningful things for others to say & do in this field, that couldn't
be done by people who haven't gone to the depth of how language can be
turned into poetry.
It's a rather unknown perspective, but if you'd care to check out some of
the stuff that my compatriot and much better writer Peter Verhelst is doing
with Crew Online at http://www.crewonline.org/crew.html , you'll see that
the very same perspective can lead to some amazing and very relevant art.

Well, heck, i'm just starting out with net art , i'll find a way to ram it
up the system anyway.

dv
http://www.vilt.net/nkdee


—–Original Message—–
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of
Jim Andrews
Sent: dinsdag 26 april 2005 13:10
To: [email protected]
Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: re net art market she shoots she scores

i wonder how the different financial pressures different places exert on
people shape attitudes to art, and what is 'viable' and 'of value'?

on a related though slightly digressive note, we are having a great
television hockey season. much like the net (not the one with goalposts). i
watch tv by no schedule, channel surf sporadically. i might find a game from
the swedish league on. or one from the junior leagues. or even more
junior–this season i've seen a championship pee wee game (12 year olds).
and have seen international 'under 17' games. and AHL games. And the
Canadian women's team. And local hockey on TV. And it's just as interesting
to watch as NHL games. Moreso in certain ways. It isn't bloodsport. The best
game I've seen this year was the Canadian University championship game.
Excellent! I like the net approach to televised hockey: diversity.

When professional dominance of the media fails, we discover the televised
game in a fresh way and are able to see the relevance of the professional is
highly constructed, artificial. once the strike is over, this diversity of
televised hockey will diminish, no doubt, to the previous state. but that is
not so much because it's what people want as what the machines of capitalist
media prefer as high octane fuel (to make and take money).

ja
http://vispo.com



+
-> post: [email protected]
-> questions: [email protected]
-> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
-> give: http://rhizome.org/support
-> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
+
Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php

if you see the media as a gigantic scanning device looking for money
everywhere it can

though eventually folks have figured out how to make most media marketable,
media isn't at all designed to find that market?

probably, "media" is just a vague term, but do you mean media as art
on computer screen versus print, delivered via web versus a truck, or
stored on a disc versus stored on a tape? some of these differences
have been gotten used to, are now mainstream, while some still
foreign. many are just getting used to the idea that storage on disc
is just as "real" as storage in a box. but it's taking a lot longer
to get used to the delivery methods.



>I'm finding it very hard doing the writing/developing/net art/working
>combination without starting to bend my highly poetic notions into some
>stuff that's sellable. I don't like that because i feel i'm wasting time
>with that kind of detour

from another point of view, one could also say :
my criteria is always most important to me because, well, it's mine.
it's my baby. i developed it. giving it up sucks. but i also want
to get as much (reward, even if it's just appreciation or joy
delivered) for what i do as possible. so people often assume there's
a choice between them.

but appeal isn't really even related to any particular criteria. for
instance, harpo marx, who wasn't really saying anything of public
interest (wasn't saying anything at all!) but his interests (in the
harp!?) became mainstream. not because of what his interests were
specifically, but because of the WAY he shared them. and you may
even say because he was so excited, it was infectious. later we
wonder "why did anyone sit through those harp solos?", because we
missed the pitch.

mostly, we really just sell salesmanship, out attitude, our
presentation. people get excited about and forget the actual
aesthetics so easily they aren't even relevant. get em excited and
they'll buy a used kleenex. the work has nothing to do with it.
getting in touch with what gets people excited is a separate
skill/gift. that alters peoples' memories and perceptions of the
product. the question then isn't how can i make a painting that is
good by my criteria, or saleable by another one, but how can i word
the description of it, that raises buyers blood pressure. may sound
pessimistic, but only if you think the old way is good and the new
bad. neither, just different, and probably more suited to what
peoples' brains are capable of. and then if you literally think of
the sales pitch as a sales pitch.

SO, ultimately, selling out has less effect than starving, but
feeling good about your integrity has better effects on your "pitch"
than feeling like your aesthetic is of no interest to others.
whatever lets you work/sell the most comfortably is the only ideal.

JudsoN,

When I used the word media it was in the general sense of anything that
broadcasts information, organised in commercial companies and competing to
make the most money from anything they can pick up as content. Internet used
to escape most of that infrastructure, it is now getting to be increasingly
a functioning part of it. You don't really exist as a website, unless you
get listed by it's infrastructure. Eg: if you develop an internet game on
your own, you stay offline with its potential unless you get commisioned,
inscribed, talked about in the 'media'. We Dutch ponies use the word in that
sense constantly :-)



Your Harpo example is well chosen, also because it illustrates that an
essentially poetic process, your 'pitch', is shown to be a more mundane
process than most people tend to think, that it can be dependent on
external, and therefore changeable, dynamic ways of perceiving things.
Whenever people get carried away by something like that they often say sth
like'it had a very poetic feeling about it' and they usually refer to the
logic that is behind a complex of evocations of parts of reality. If you
deal with poetry intensively, you learn how to spin that logic, make it a
repeatable process, a working method. Correlating those kind of methods to
programming practices is what I'm after, but I find that I need to find new
ways of programming because I don't see our current practice of OOP very
effective in this area, although it is a proven technique with great results
elsewhere. It's so much of a succes no one wonders any more that it still is
a choice that is being made.So it's not a critique in the meaning of saying
Object Oriented Programming is bad, it's very good actually and I don't see
how you could claim it to be other, but it could turn out to be not the
right way of programming for artistic purposes. It's just a haunting idea I
have, based on what I know from ontological discussions, and I want to
investigate it.



Oh well, o, sorry, I got on my pony again. Anyway, you're probably right
that i overestimate the importance of the sales wrap that you see as the
main divergence. Perhaps I overestimate it because in what I was doing the
subject was and is a very sensitive one. It's so sensitive because the
amount of work you put into writing 'serious' poetry is never gonna be met
with any respect or respons you could expect. You might write your guts out
in a manner of speakin and still gain less respect than any third rate
novelist. It's not a bad situation though, because you know all of that when
you start doing it.



On the other hand I watched myself going through the first building stages
of my first net art project and I noticed that from the moment I started
applying for commisions and such, there were heaps of microdecisions that I
let be influenced by the very fact that I applied for those commisions.
Knowing that I hardly stood a chance of getting any (it would have been a
small miracle), I still didn't want to blow my changes and I was very
prudent about lay-out decisions, exact wordings and such. I got increasingly
annoyed by this, in so far that I now am very glad I didn't score anywhere
and I feel freed now, back to square 1, free to not care about anything else
and just let the process grow on itself. Somehow I seem to have made the
project's not-for-sale part an essential basis of it. The only thing I do
sell is what I call dead processes, objects, garbage that is left after the
act. But that's more of a joke, critisizing today's 'traditional' art market
prizes, where the value of a painting is decided by whether your work is
taken up in the elite circle of commercial speculation objects or not. Once
you are there, you can scribble away anything you want, it will still fetch
prizes a tenfold of the allready exuberant prices I ask for my horridly
amateuristic varnish covered layers of water paint. Traditional painting in
that respect is a prime example of how commercial structures and value
attribuations dictate the market, in so far it has nothing to do with art
anymore imho. Painting is pretty much killed by the painting market and
financial speculation there.



So yes there is a difference if you add up all the small choices to how a
net art work comes into being, especially so with net art 'cause you get
immediate feedback: your economic value is as good as equal to how many
pageviews you get, and you can watch new users clicking away from you if you
add or delete an element that does or does not 'compile' in your viewers
conception of your work. Off course this is true also when you're not
focussing on economical value, but you I think are more easily satisfied
with something that scares some of your audience away, when you don't focus
your pageviews. I deal with my project as something that changes every day,
so I just can't let the sales wrap take over. I think I just lost my 'pitch'
as you call it the moment I started applying for commissions, it made me
think too much, and hesitant.



Don't know if this is still clear or even related to what you were saying.
I'm sorry that I keep referring to my own work, but it's the only thing I
feel I can make general remarks about that make any sense

Greetings,

dv



_____

From: Plasma Studii - judsoN [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: dinsdag 26 april 2005 18:41
To: [email protected]
Cc: Dirk Vekemans
Subject: RE: RHIZOME_RAW: re net art market she shoots she scores



if you see the media as a gigantic scanning device looking for money
everywhere it can



though eventually folks have figured out how to make most media marketable,

media isn't at all designed to find that market?



probably, "media" is just a vague term, but do you mean media as art on
computer screen versus print, delivered via web versus a truck, or stored on
a disc versus stored on a tape? some of these differences have been gotten
used to, are now mainstream, while some still foreign. many are just
getting used to the idea that storage on disc is just as "real" as storage
in a box. but it's taking a lot longer to get used to the delivery methods.







>I'm finding it very hard doing the writing/developing/net art/working
>combination without starting to bend my highly poetic notions into some
>stuff that's sellable. I don't like that because i feel i'm wasting time

>with that kind of detour



from another point of view, one could also say :

my criteria is always most important to me because, well, it's mine. it's
my baby. i developed it. giving it up sucks. but i also want to get as
much (reward, even if it's just appreciation or joy delivered) for what i do
as possible. so people often assume there's a choice between them.



but appeal isn't really even related to any particular criteria. for
instance, harpo marx, who wasn't really saying anything of public interest
(wasn't saying anything at all!) but his interests (in the harp!?) became
mainstream. not because of what his interests were specifically, but
because of the WAY he shared them. and you may even say because he was so
excited, it was infectious. later we wonder "why did anyone sit through
those harp solos?", because we missed the pitch.



mostly, we really just sell salesmanship, out attitude, our presentation.
people get excited about and forget the actual aesthetics so easily they
aren't even relevant. get em excited and they'll buy a used kleenex. the
work has nothing to do with it. getting in touch with what gets people
excited is a separate skill/gift. that alters peoples' memories and
perceptions of the product. the question then isn't how can i make a
painting that is good by my criteria, or saleable by another one, but how
can i word the description of it, that raises buyers blood pressure. may
sound pessimistic, but only if you think the old way is good and the new
bad. neither, just different, and probably more suited to what peoples'
brains are capable of. and then if you literally think of the sales pitch
as a sales pitch.



SO, ultimately, selling out has less effect than starving, but feeling good
about your integrity has better effects on your "pitch" than feeling like
your aesthetic is of no interest to others. whatever lets you work/sell the
most comfortably is the only ideal.