2007-12-31. This post has been copied to the Art of the Net Wiki. All further updates and edits will occur on the Wiki. Link

What is audience-sourcing?

Audience-sourcing is the act of people, while in the process of observing a work of art, transmitting some aspect of their observation process to others in some durable manner.

(more…)

The Web Art of the Dot Com era is a Flash widget that you click on and lots of insanely great artistic things happen. People are happy with this. It works and it’s fun. What more could you ask for?

Art marches on. Comments like “She’s wearing Balenciaga. Last year’s…” are just as appropriate about web sites as they are about the rag trade.

We have real-time googling and mash-up Web Art sites now. Are they the Web Art 2.0 sites or is there something more that will happen? Is Web Art 2.0 officially under way or is it yet too happen?

A good test case might be the existence of Web Art Widgets for FaceBook or the Google OpenSocial Widget program. Once there are several such widgets, It will be say to say that Web Art has been upped to 2.0. Are there other such tests we can think of? Probably.

It’s on the Internet, doh! The work is digital. Sourced through Google, manipulated in PhotoShop, hosted on LAMP servers. It’s the modern way of mixing pigments with oils and solvents and layering them on various media. It’s the Art of This Century.

Here’s one dilemma: Do we let this art unroll quietly, un-self consciously? Or do we double-click on it for a closer inspection. How much will we change it by measuring it so early in its development?

Taking the lead from Marinetti’s traveling exhibit of the Italian Futurists in 1913: the more artists see the revolution the they will produce revolting stuff revolutionary works. (Just as before, bad artists produce crap. So do good artists, but much less so.)

There so many cool aspects of this new digital work:

For example it does not deteriorate. In all likelihood digital works could last until the end of time. Unlike Leonardo’s stalcoes frescoes. And innumerable paper works.

The next part is starting to be interesting. It’s interactive. The viewer owns the presentation. The viewer decides what is going to be seen and when and by which route. Compare this to boring contemporary videos where it is the artists that controls exactly what the viewer sees and for too how long.

And then the new stuff is almost all open source. Being built on HTML, JPG image files and MP3 sounds, the tools to recreate the work are available to all who can view the work. Instead being locked up in a rich old fart’s house, the work is as accessible to a youngster in a remote African village as it is the slickest silicon valley web guru. The work is accessible for many purposes not applicable to traditional art viewing, improving, scratching, embedding, whatever.

And the freakiest thing of all: what benefits do ownership confer? If you own something everybody can access easily and for free, what is it that you really own? It is simply your pleasure to own it. Perhaps it’s not about ownership it may be more like a marriage. You and this work are in partnership. You put a work of art on the web and its reward to you is the number of visitors that to whom it gives pleasure.

One of the great sites for art on the Internet is deviantART.com. In operation since 2000, the site provides free access to over 41 million works of art. In comparison the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art which started in 1870 has a collection of just over two million works.

deviantART hosts works that are drawings and paintings either scanned or digital, comics, photography (motion and still). The web site enables artists to display, sell, discuss and comment on a wide variety of styles and media. It’s well organized, easy to use and well-loved by its many members - over thirty-five thousand were on when I looked.
(more…)

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1886-1968) painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. When exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times describes the work as “an explosion in a shingle factory”. This canvas was controversial, provocative and, for many people, simply upsetting. Today, hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the painting is called an ‘iconic holding’. (more…)

In 1912 Marcel Duchamp (1886-1968) painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. When exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City, an art critic for the New York Times describes the work as “an explosion in a shingle factory”. This canvas was controversial, provocative and, for many people, simply upsetting. Today, hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the painting is called an ‘iconic holding’. (more…)

The other evening I was at a wine bar thinking about my next post here. What started running through my mind were two web sites - one from 2004 and one quite recent site - where a number of people came together to create works of art. It soon dawned on me that the question I was asking was “Can social networks produce art?” and, if so, could a social network actually produce high art. I became quite excited. Wow, I’ve invented something new here: social networks producing art. And then I continued: is the art that social networks produce inevitably banal or low art? Is low art bad? Wow, this is going to be big, etc. It’s amazing how a glass of Prosecco will boost your confidence. (more…)

© 2007 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The original painting is at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This image was copied from Wikipedia.

Pablo Picasso finished painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon one hundred years ago this month. Les Demoiselles is the tipping point between old and new art. There have been some tipping points since, but none as important.

This post is a celebration of that moment. (more…)