it's meme-tastic!

Hi all,

Here are some thoughts about net art distribution and the ways in
which it influences net art as a genre.

With conceptual art and institutional critique, the 'narrative' of
the concept (including how it positioned itself in relation to
previous movements or contemporary instituions) was always a big part
of the art. Like with Hans Haacke's institutional critique in the
early 70s, some of those pieces didn't ever show in museums because
they were banned, but the story of the why they were banned became
the crux of the art. So too, with early net art in the mid-90s, a
lot of the work was necessarily conceptual because of bandwidth
limitations. A concept could be conveyed via low bandwidth text, and
via foregrounding some infrastructure or function of the network that
was already in place. Selling immaterial things on ebay or buying
certain adwords on google – these are low bandwidth, low 'aesthetic'
moves; high concept moves.

With conceptual art and institutional critique of the 70s, those
pieces had to play off and against galleries and museums in the brick
and mortar art world. Even if the pieces ultimately went out into
the street (Daniel Buren) or became site-specific earthworks (Robert
Smithson), they were always in dialogue with the gallery world and
with immediate art history. So the 'distribution mechanism' of the
'narrative' of these pieces was still via physical gallery spaces or
para-gallery publications (Artforum or whatever). If some unknown
outsider earthwork artist simply went into her backyard and made art
in the 1970s, she would have been no more in dialogue with the
conceptual and performance and process art world than some yet to be
discovered outsider artist.

The vehicle of net art distribution is different, since the network
is not just a medium but also its own kind of gallery cum
para-gallery publication. Lately this suggests that the 'narrative'
of the net art piece (or at least the conceptual net art piece) needs
to be meme-tastic. It needs to be viral. There needs to be
something about it that warrants blogging and re-blogging. These
distribution requirements subtly (and sometimes not so subtly)
dictate the kind of art being made. As an aside, there will always
be artists like Miltos Manetas who come into net art from gallery art
and bring the marketing mechanisms of the gallery world with them;
and there will always be those who who master the making of
meme-tastic conceptual net art and gradually begin participating in
the marketing mechanisms of the gallery world.

What constitutes 'successful' meme-tastic conceptual net art? The
same thing that constitutes a good urban legend. It is a specific
type of viral narrative, and its 'merits' often have much more to do
with literary convention and marketing than the merits of the
conceptual works of its predecessors in the early 70s (whose merits
were based largely on their informed dialogue with and critique of
earlier movements like abstract expressionism and minimalist
sculpture). The net art viral narrative should have a punch line or
some sort of twist, so that in its telling there is a reveal, a "ta
da," a poetic turn. There has to be something to get. "Get it?"
Like a joke. Like a concept. If it happens to be 'topical' and
'relevant' (in some sort of easily discernible, one-to-one
relationship with the spectacle of "current events"), all the better.

It can't be too complicated or subtle or nuanced. It should be terse
and its narrative should be explainable in a paragraph-long blog
post. I should "get it" without having to click on the link and
actually experience the project. Although bandwidth has now
increased to allow for a phenomenological online experience, the
meme-tastic conceptual net art piece must not explore such realms
(except in intentionally self-sabotaged, self-aware, lo-fi
retro-forms like the kooky animated gif or the wacky ascii-mation).

Such art should engender the kind of narrative that creates a buzz.
In other words, it should be spectacular. The viral net marketing
campaigns "subservient chicken" and "rubberburner" are actually great
meme-tastic conceptual net art projects. The fact that they happen
to be selling things for multi-national corporations is the only
thing that ipso facto excludes them from being successful viral
conceptual net art projects. This similarity is telling. For a
group of post-avant-garde, anti-capitalist radicals, shouldn't there
be something more that differentiates their work from the work of
clever corporate marketers? Debord, Warhol, Koons, and Hirst might
be invoked as precedences for these kinds of 'close calls' with the
spectacle, as if the irony were intended or some sort of intentional
detournement was going on. I wonder.

This is just a cursory description of the nature of such meme-tastic,
para-art narratives. Of course, the inherent, unspoken pre-requisite
for all meme-tastic conceptual net art (the elephant in the room) is
that it has to be reducible to a para-art narrative (a meme-byte).
Art as object lesson, where the real oomph is in the retelling.

Were I to write this email according to the rules of the meme-tastic
narrative conceptual net-art piece, I would have to come up with some
succinct, derogatory, buzz-worthy name for this kind of art, like
'buzz art.' The email would also have to be a lot shorter.

This is not to say that every piece of net art that gets reblogged is
simply 'buzz art' (doh! I'm already using it!). Heath Bunting's
classic "Own, Be Owned, Or Remain Invisible" (
http://www.irational.org/heath/_readme.html ), low-bandwith as it is,
is about all sorts of things other than creating a marketing buzz for
itself. Its very function critiques the net's privatization of
words. And (ironically enough), it rewards a visit and some clicking
around. It's not just the idea of it, it's the strange connections
and re-mappings that happen when you begin to click on "is.com"
"on.com" "a.com" "mission.com." Its just interesting conceptual net
art. Its deskilling is part of its conceptual point, not just
perfunctory for the genre.

Then there's an epic project like http://www.worldofawe.com that is
ongoing and not seeking immediate meme-tast-icity. Even YHC-HEAVY
INDUSTRIES is an ongoing series exploring the same basic
formal/semiotic vocabulary in deliciously compulsive iterations. The
more they pursue the same route, the less novel and meme-tastic their
work becomes. Which is good, because their work has always generally
(and sometimes specifically) critiqued the easy meme-tast-icity of
the network.

The answer is not necessarily to court galleries and offline
para-gallery publications as a way of weeding out the dross, because
they will weed out the dross based on criteria that, although
well-established, might not aptly suit the evaluation of work in this
medium. Perhaps because net art has been critiqued from uninformed
perspectives by old media critics, proponents of net art feel the
need to categorically boost it (whether it is ingenious, rote,
opportunistic, or indifferent) as a way to make up the difference.

For better or worse, blog culture courts the meme-tastic. Like CNN
24/7, if there are no real developments to report, you're still bound
to report something.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond,
Curt

Comments

, Geert Dekkers

Hi Curt

Thanks for this.

Actually I think that nowadays most art is spectacular in nature.
Most artists find out quickly though that the art of the spectacular
is impossibly hard to master – if such an art can be aquired at all.

I was wondering if you yourself are practising these methods – for
example the google adwords idea, which I like. In fact I've been
looking into adsense and adwords myself of late.



Geert Dekkers—————————
http://nznl.com | http://nznl.net | http://nznl.org
—————————————




On 4-jun-2007, at 4:34, Curt Cloninger wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Here are some thoughts about net art distribution and the ways in
> which it influences net art as a genre.
>
> With conceptual art and institutional critique, the 'narrative' of
> the concept (including how it positioned itself in relation to
> previous movements or contemporary instituions) was always a big
> part of the art. Like with Hans Haacke's institutional critique in
> the early 70s, some of those pieces didn't ever show in museums
> because they were banned, but the story of the why they were banned
> became the crux of the art. So too, with early net art in the
> mid-90s, a lot of the work was necessarily conceptual because of
> bandwidth limitations. A concept could be conveyed via low
> bandwidth text, and via foregrounding some infrastructure or
> function of the network that was already in place. Selling
> immaterial things on ebay or buying certain adwords on google –
> these are low bandwidth, low 'aesthetic' moves; high concept moves.
>
> With conceptual art and institutional critique of the 70s, those
> pieces had to play off and against galleries and museums in the
> brick and mortar art world. Even if the pieces ultimately went out
> into the street (Daniel Buren) or became site-specific earthworks
> (Robert Smithson), they were always in dialogue with the gallery
> world and with immediate art history. So the 'distribution
> mechanism' of the 'narrative' of these pieces was still via
> physical gallery spaces or para-gallery publications (Artforum or
> whatever). If some unknown outsider earthwork artist simply went
> into her backyard and made art in the 1970s, she would have been no
> more in dialogue with the conceptual and performance and process
> art world than some yet to be discovered outsider artist.
>
> The vehicle of net art distribution is different, since the network
> is not just a medium but also its own kind of gallery cum para-
> gallery publication. Lately this suggests that the 'narrative' of
> the net art piece (or at least the conceptual net art piece) needs
> to be meme-tastic. It needs to be viral. There needs to be
> something about it that warrants blogging and re-blogging. These
> distribution requirements subtly (and sometimes not so subtly)
> dictate the kind of art being made. As an aside, there will always
> be artists like Miltos Manetas who come into net art from gallery
> art and bring the marketing mechanisms of the gallery world with
> them; and there will always be those who who master the making of
> meme-tastic conceptual net art and gradually begin participating in
> the marketing mechanisms of the gallery world.
>
> What constitutes 'successful' meme-tastic conceptual net art? The
> same thing that constitutes a good urban legend. It is a specific
> type of viral narrative, and its 'merits' often have much more to
> do with literary convention and marketing than the merits of the
> conceptual works of its predecessors in the early 70s (whose merits
> were based largely on their informed dialogue with and critique of
> earlier movements like abstract expressionism and minimalist
> sculpture). The net art viral narrative should have a punch line
> or some sort of twist, so that in its telling there is a reveal, a
> "ta da," a poetic turn. There has to be something to get. "Get
> it?" Like a joke. Like a concept. If it happens to be 'topical'
> and 'relevant' (in some sort of easily discernible, one-to-one
> relationship with the spectacle of "current events"), all the better.
>
> It can't be too complicated or subtle or nuanced. It should be
> terse and its narrative should be explainable in a paragraph-long
> blog post. I should "get it" without having to click on the link
> and actually experience the project. Although bandwidth has now
> increased to allow for a phenomenological online experience, the
> meme-tastic conceptual net art piece must not explore such realms
> (except in intentionally self-sabotaged, self-aware, lo-fi retro-
> forms like the kooky animated gif or the wacky ascii-mation).
>
> Such art should engender the kind of narrative that creates a buzz.
> In other words, it should be spectacular. The viral net marketing
> campaigns "subservient chicken" and "rubberburner" are actually
> great meme-tastic conceptual net art projects. The fact that they
> happen to be selling things for multi-national corporations is the
> only thing that ipso facto excludes them from being successful
> viral conceptual net art projects. This similarity is telling.
> For a group of post-avant-garde, anti-capitalist radicals,
> shouldn't there be something more that differentiates their work
> from the work of clever corporate marketers? Debord, Warhol,
> Koons, and Hirst might be invoked as precedences for these kinds of
> 'close calls' with the spectacle, as if the irony were intended or
> some sort of intentional detournement was going on. I wonder.
>
> This is just a cursory description of the nature of such meme-
> tastic, para-art narratives. Of course, the inherent, unspoken pre-
> requisite for all meme-tastic conceptual net art (the elephant in
> the room) is that it has to be reducible to a para-art narrative (a
> meme-byte). Art as object lesson, where the real oomph is in the
> retelling.
>
> Were I to write this email according to the rules of the meme-
> tastic narrative conceptual net-art piece, I would have to come up
> with some succinct, derogatory, buzz-worthy name for this kind of
> art, like 'buzz art.' The email would also have to be a lot shorter.
>
> This is not to say that every piece of net art that gets reblogged
> is simply 'buzz art' (doh! I'm already using it!). Heath
> Bunting's classic "Own, Be Owned, Or Remain Invisible" ( http://
> www.irational.org/heath/_readme.html ), low-bandwith as it is, is
> about all sorts of things other than creating a marketing buzz for
> itself. Its very function critiques the net's privatization of
> words. And (ironically enough), it rewards a visit and some
> clicking around. It's not just the idea of it, it's the strange
> connections and re-mappings that happen when you begin to click on
> "is.com" "on.com" "a.com" "mission.com." Its just interesting
> conceptual net art. Its deskilling is part of its conceptual
> point, not just perfunctory for the genre.
>
> Then there's an epic project like http://www.worldofawe.com that is
> ongoing and not seeking immediate meme-tast-icity. Even YHC-HEAVY
> INDUSTRIES is an ongoing series exploring the same basic formal/
> semiotic vocabulary in deliciously compulsive iterations. The more
> they pursue the same route, the less novel and meme-tastic their
> work becomes. Which is good, because their work has always
> generally (and sometimes specifically) critiqued the easy meme-tast-
> icity of the network.
>
> The answer is not necessarily to court galleries and offline para-
> gallery publications as a way of weeding out the dross, because
> they will weed out the dross based on criteria that, although well-
> established, might not aptly suit the evaluation of work in this
> medium. Perhaps because net art has been critiqued from uninformed
> perspectives by old media critics, proponents of net art feel the
> need to categorically boost it (whether it is ingenious, rote,
> opportunistic, or indifferent) as a way to make up the difference.
>
> For better or worse, blog culture courts the meme-tastic. Like CNN
> 24/7, if there are no real developments to report, you're still
> bound to report something.
>
> Shine On You Crazy Diamond,
> Curt
> +
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> 29.php

, curt cloninger

Hi Geert,

I myself haven't made art using google adwords. Christophe Bruno
has done it here: http://www.iterature.com/adwords/ There may be
others.

Best,
Curt

>Hi Curt
>
>Thanks for this.
>
>Actually I think that nowadays most art is spectacular in nature.
>Most artists find out quickly though that the art of the spectacular
>is impossibly hard to master – if such an art can be aquired at
>all.
>
>I was wondering if you yourself are practising these methods – for
>example the google adwords idea, which I like. In fact I've been
>looking into adsense and adwords myself of late.
>
>
>
>Geert Dekkers—————————
>
><http://nznl.com>http://nznl.com | <http://nznl.net>http://nznl.net
>| <http://nznl.org>http://nznl.org
>—————————————