survival imperative

having met some of the people involved in rhizome and observed it over the
years and participated a little bit, i have respect for it and the people
involved in it.

the way that it's moved from active engagement with and championing of
international web art to more emphasis on the gallery/installation forms of
digital art, particularly of a type local to new york, is not so much
dastardly to me as it is indicative of changes they've felt they've had to
make to survive.

who funds international web art? well, rhizome does, sort of, i suppose. as
does turbulence.org, another important new york organization. and a few
others around the globe, but the international is harder to fund and realize
within a local context, and everybody is in a local context, however much
they are citizens of the world. erm, think globally; write grants locally
(or something like that).

and, of course, new york has a 'local' scene that is amazing in its scope
and also international reach.

i imagine that surviving in new york art is a challenge and one that does
demand a certain attention to the infrastructure of art as commodity. if
there's no money in it, it ain't going to live in new york for long. true?
you tell me.

i just spent a week in the company of an argentine intellectual and scholar.
she wrote a book on grafitti in buenos aires, and is now studying digital
poetry. she came to digital poetry via her interests in mail art, visual
poetry, and grafitti–in general, she studies 'literature' that involves
other media additional to or other than the usual literary media. but all of
these–mail art, visual poetry, grafiti, and digital poetry–are not very
well-commodified. i wonder how many new york literary scholars are studying
mail art, visual poetry, grafiti, or digital poetry?

so, although for her, and for many others around the world, including me,
the involvement of an art in an infrastructure of commodification is not at
all important to the relevance and life of the art, we can see comments on
rhizome to the effect that things like mail art are dead because they never
'made it' into the galleries, much. and of course the same is more or less
true of net art–with the exception, of course, of the early heroes who were
angling in that direction all along.

so that net art is bound to lose its cache in places where art *must*
achieve commodification to survive. and it will be "dead" in those places,
or to people who live in environments where the pressure is intense for arts
to be bought and sold in order for art projects to even be
contemplated/completed/shown.

so it seems to me the movement in emphasis on rhizome from net art to other
forms of media art is not so much an aesthetic choice as an imperative of
survival.

or am i all wet?

ja?
http://vispo.com