Notes on Tight Spot/Social Media, and related phenomena
By Paul McLean But what does “democracy” really mean in this context? If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why? - Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" “You have a lot of kids graduating college who can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.” - Michael Bloomberg, quoted by Mary Bruce of CNN, "Bloomberg Warns High US Unemployment Could Lead to Riots," http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/bloomberg-warns-high-us-unemployment-could-lead-to-riots/)
As promised, here's a brief review of the Pace Gallery's shows at the 508 West 25th spaces, both indoor and outdoor. [Introduction]: For this dimensional analysis, as a pretext of context, to discuss Pace's "Social Media/Tight Spot" exhibits, we will look at several concurrent art-related (aesthetic and market) or social media phenomena, happening now or very recently in New York City and nearby. After visiting a few dozen gallery spaces on the Lower East Side and in Chelsea, and a sprinkling of other art venues, after returning from Switzerland and EGS, I feel ready to confront some of the core issues that weave through the arts topology here in New York, which is massive, complex, a matrix of micro- and macro-culture-ecologies, which variously integrate into other systems of exchange that function on local to global networks through analog and wired mechanisms. Money, power and social status bind them or unhinge them, and those factors manifest as individualized symptoms and collective conditions. As someone who for years has almost daily followed the developments that impact artistic enterprise, as an extension or even essential activity, for my specific citizen's participation in democracy, I would share with the reader that never in my experience has democratic art faced such grim circumstances. The stories that flow through the wires from Washington, DC, couldn't be worse for art. Just today, we learned that another failure in the House of Representatives to produce a budget bill that the Senate would pass threatens to bring the US Government to a grinding halt next week. When such procedural threats afflict the basic processes of government, as a result of obstructionist ideological fervor and superficial partisanship cloaking corruption, the economy for art, generally considered a dispensable item in our civilization, a luxury item, will suffer most, first. After three decades selling art, I can assure you that those in a position to purchase art will have a hard time justifying discretionary spending on stuff like art, when elected officials' malpractice could produce a massive increase in consumer interest rates. Buying a small painting with a credit card might feel imprudent, when one doesn't know what the bank will do in response to a US debt default. A spike in interest rates for consumer debt is almost a certain consequence, if Congress can't address the nation's balance sheets. Only a tiny fraction of the arts economy is immune from manmade, democracy-enabled fiscal catastrophes, or actually benefit from them. Their art market is surging forward. They shop at Maastrict, or Basel, or at Gagosian, etc. They are generally not buying social media. For them, most such conversations, about US politics and impacts of such on cultural economies from bottom-to-top, are moot. Since moving to New York City last year, I've visited galleries in most of the major arts districts, most of the major museums, the art fairs, some foundations, some corporate installations, and so on, but by no means have I formed a comprehensive sense of the thing. I think I made my first gallery hop in NYC in 1983. The city never seems the same any two days. The pervasive economic, political and social flux, which is therefore potently expressed in the "art world(s)," creates a blurring effect for any assumption about "what's happening, now." What's definitely different between the NYC art scene of 1983 and the one "existing" at this moment is technological. Art is wired and networked, today. This reality presents all sorts of weird - maybe "problems" isn't the right word - oddities for the artsy whose involvement with art in NY predates computer ubiquity. Mobile devices are further modifying the perceptual complex in which art exists for people. Today, art isn't an object, a plop or op, with a mutable subject, with clean parameters for history to attach in and on. What art is is up for grabs, and the usual players are grabbing, but there are new ones, and the game is a contest without rules, to the benefit of some, over many, although that's not the party line. The codes of art are continually hacked, and the hackers are the programmers. As with any game, who manages the selection of players for the team matters. The one thing that's clear is that the winners and losers reflect the broader political and economic factors that plague the rest of the country. Here in New York, which is so grand a mess in scale that recursion is a punch line. Reverse engineering is another matter altogether, though. The Big Apple game is taking, and, unlike LA, where failure is big business and impetus for a good Hollywood career trajectory, until recently in art, failure was a door opening into the mean streets and worse. The NYC art game, and its codes, are being re-worked to reflect asset-free derivative power, the overhang of debt, the value of failing-up as celebrity transitional process, and the Euro-born concept that exploitation and extraction are creative, technological, academic boom industries, attracting big money and lots of ink. If the game is rigged, you wouldn't know it from looking at who's selected to play in the game, and I would suggest that that's an intended rule. Following money is nowhere near as useful as following the brand, the image, the meme, through media. Byrne and Talking Heads "Road to Nowhere" serves as a good soundtrack for this study. [FIELD DYNAMICS or CONTEXTUAL SETS]: One phenomenal engagement relating to "Tight Spot/Social Media" is the "Living As Form" exhibition. The concept for LAF draws as much from the concept of data as it does from the Revolutionary movements of the 60s and 70s that subverted institutional power and cultural definition or categorization in the canonical hierarchies. Now, in projects like LAF, the Revolution is the Institution, and the means of popularizing art are manufactured from within the imaginary walls of the Ivory Tower. Although one rarely hears him brought up, John Dewey is a presence in this synthesized discourse of playful resistance. Contemporary dimensional management approaches are employed in the execution of a project on the scale of LAF, consisting of practices like shared leadership, horizontal or flat inclusive networks of knowledge workers, fast networks and distribution channels, multi-tiered marketing approaches, collaborations among government agencies, non-profits, businesses and hybrid or dark matter artist collectives, and so on. The scope of the endeavor is global, the narrative de-nationalizing, and the goals or mission insistently vague. What is the point of LAF? "...[A]n online archival database of over 350 socially engaged projects from around the world has been compiled. This database, made possible by a generous grant from the *Andrew W. Mellon Foundation*, is the work of researchers, advisors, and writers, working together to create the first encyclopedic collection of social practice work from the last 20 years, categorized by a range of criteria. We hope these categories will encourage more research into the phenomenon of social practice and its possible histories, geographies, and interpretations." Is then the point of to have an archivist event that generates enough material to keep the archivists working? This isn't so different from the what some artists do with reproductions and media today. Amy Adler comes to mind. The original is only a step towards a finished product that is the art work for the collector, the gallery, the exhibit. The original is destroyed, in Adler's case, but in the case of LAF, documentation of the project is the fodder for "more research." What role does this protocol assign to the people who'll participate as a "public," as the necessary demos for the LAF intervention? This is where the dark underbelly of relational aesthetics can reveal itself, as in Enjoy Poverty, or the disgusting neo-colonial antics of Francis Alys and others, usually situated as critique, but operating as sadism, in the extreme instances. I doubt, knowing some of the individuals involved that LAF will go anywhere near the amoral or even evil fringes of relational exploitation for "art," although the measurement of usage of one by another for a unilateral benefits economy is antithetical to art, as I understand art, which is a kind of truth. Truth is not an important commodity in the descriptive materials of LAF. As a form, the LAF enterprise seems to suggest sustainability of the archive, using the event and attendees, over the concerns of truth or art. The rejection of true art as a guiding principal is as stern a subtext in the undertaking, and relational aesthetics in general, as the rejection of an object, a finished product, a unique maker, and the prevalence of craft in the Euro-tradition. Why would America buy into this? I would argue that since the US privatized the "visual" arts in the late 80s, the country ceded the field to European-based artsies like Bourriaud, setting the stage for a extensive resurgence of the continent as the prime locus for art movements, for a perceptual domination of contemporary art in the academic arena of art thinking and the studio-/non-studio-based practices of art-making. The socialization of art in the public arena in countries like Switzerland, Germany, France and others, those possessing strong publicly funded initiatives in support of provisional arts enterprise, contributed to the turnaround we've seen there, and by contrast explains the increasingly weak performance in the American art topology. Not that we haven't witnessed a huge increase in art-training programs in the United States. We have. The problem has been the absolute lack of rational outcomes and presentation systems for artist development and research. Here, as Jeffrey Deitch proclaimed, Sotheby's emerged as the power-broker of non-isms, the gatekeeper for artistic "accomplishment," the Decider for what's hot and what's not in American, and international, contemporary art. As has been amply documented, in books like the $12 Million Dollar Shark, and the Handbook on the Economics of Arts and Culture, the opportunities for American artists are not adequate to the artist-assembly-line that's evolved in both the academy and the burgeoning DIY/Outsider/Street schemes, or non-schemes. Like most American industries, the art industry is now rich in "productivity" and cheap labor, and poor in performance. Maybe it wasn't meant to go this far. Who knows? It's probably unrealistic to dismiss the fanaticism of Christian art critics like Jesse Helms, the short-sightedness or rage of their culture warrior opposition, the banality and mediocrity of corporate art patronage, and the progressive stupidity and corruption of Grover Norquist-stewarded programs for the shrinking of democracy to benefit unfettered or anarchical "free market" greed and won-at-all-costs-cultural hegemony, as anything other than the society of diminishing returns for the few over the many = government-run-like-a-business. Instead, it makes more sense to judge the phenomenon on the basis of a collective sickness, a kind of time-based, technologically-driven dimensional submission to escape fear or death or meaninglessness in the inflicting of exactly those things on the Other, whoever that might be at the moment. < "Living As Form" is a Creative Time production driven by Chief Curator Nato Thompson, of PS1/MoMA. The dimensional models of collective art production contradict Bourriaud's and others' configurations, which position the curator over the artist. The gutted staffs of long-term employed art workers have necessitated the nomadic as a precursor for the art-centric existence. Everyone dances around the issue of aggression or violence as a proper response to the status quo. Art has become a second-best avenue for social, political and economic change, because direct confrontation of the power structures of top-down exploitation and extraction have proved to be ineffective against the entrenched forces of oppression. "Living as Form is an unprecedented, international project exploring over twenty years of cultural works that blur the forms of art and everyday life, emphasizing participation, dialogue, and community engagement." /// Maybe what's needed is not a workaround. < I'm finding Claire Bishop's writings helpful in framing LAF, and surprisingly, the Pace exhibits, as emergent phenomena of relational aesthetics, although the social media as a subject comes at the social from another direction. Nicolas Bourriaud is generating an historical argument through curatorial practice, situations, and, as Liam Gillick describes them, scenarios, organizing the meaning of art in the 90s to produce the art of now. Unfortunately, Bourriaud's massively successful project is making dimensional art, driven by artists like me, into art anahistory. If I didn't consider the type of art championed by Bourriaud, and his own gestures as curator-artist to be fraudulent, I wouldn't be so opposed to the turning of art into a nothing everything proposition, that fixes society and art, by colonizing its spaces and dislocating and disenfranchising the actual artists simultaneously. My view is that relational aesthetics has nothing to do with democracy. It's neo-colonialism, globalism pointed at society's self-image, applying the protocols of psychoanalysis to the collective, and like Freud did in professionalizing his "practice," turning intervention into institutional profiteering. To call relational aesthetics derivative is not to state the obvious, which is that in practice relational aesthetics is not more than an affirmation of finitude and the network linkage system, as it is, for one in an artificial environment. This passage from Bishop's essay, featuring Jerry Saltz should help clarify: >> I dwell on this theory in order to suggest that the relations set up by rela- tional aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness. There is debate and dialogue in a Tiravanija cooking piece, to be sure, but there is no inherent friction since the situation is what Bourriaud calls “microtopian”: it produces a community whose members identify with each other, because they have something in common. The only substantial account that I can find of Tiravanija’s first solo exhibition at 303 Gallery is by Jerry Saltz in Art in America, and it runs as follows: At 303 Gallery I regularly sat with or was joined by a stranger, and it was nice. The gallery became a place for sharing, jocularity and frank talk. I had an amazing run of meals with art dealers. Once I ate with Paula Cooper who recounted a long, complicated bit of professional gossip. Another day, Lisa Spellman related in hilarious detail a story of intrigue about a fellow dealer trying, unsuccessfully, to woo one of her artists. About a week later I ate with David Zwirner. I bumped into him on the street, and he said, “nothing’s going right today, let’s go to Rirkrit’s.” We did, and he talked about a lack of excitement in the New York art world. Another time I ate with Gavin Brown, the artist and dealer. . . who talked about the collapse of SoHo—only he welcomed it, felt it was about time, that the galleries had been showing too much mediocre art. Later in the show’s run, I was joined by an unidentified woman and a curious flirtation filled the air. Another time I chatted with a young artist who lived in Brooklyn who had real insights about the shows he’d just seen. The informal chattiness of this account clearly indicates what kind of problems face those who wish to know more about such work: the review only tells us that Tiravanija’s intervention is considered good because it permits networking among a group of art dealers and like-minded art lovers, and because it evokes the atmos- phere of a late-night bar. Everyone has a common interest in art, and the result is art-world gossip, exhibition reviews, and flirtation. Such communication is fine to an extent, but it is not in and of itself emblematic of “democracy.” << The political agency of the subject, in this case, Jerry Saltz, is only as substantial as the agent. If Saltz in his network activities is rendered insubstantial by them, when measured against for instance the OWS people, then how does the supposedly transformative power of RA invest Saltz with materiality he does not possess and apparently does not care to possess? The art market in which RA is sited is only superficially political. The politics of the art world at that level are fungible. A few "politics" - feminism, anti-colonialism, gay rights, etc. - are broadly acceptable in top tier art relations, but the sale's dynamics trump the discourse as a general rule. Did Ai Weiwei's incarceration in China compel art representatives to engage in a wholesale political attack on China? What political issue has the art business, as a de-facto structured Balkanism, united to condemn or oppose? The Iraq War? Corporate malpractice, such as the BP oil spill? Conservative attacks on art funding in the US? What then is relational aesthetics and its derivations or mutant strains going to mobilize from within the art industry? The people? To suggest that art>life (art into life) is not a pre-existing condition for art is false. Relational aesthetics, sited in the art industry, must confront that its subjective qualities are subsumed into the preciousness of selection. Who relates to whom in the art business matters. Is this the soft dynamic that RA is seeking to deconstruct? Or is the deconstruction only a temporary game, or even less, a conscience-ameliorating device, an app, that temporarily divests the art business of its stout bonds with banksters, moguls, robber barons, war profiteers, torturers by proxy, drug kingpins, extraction/exploitation industrialistse, and corporate syndicates? < Thompson introduces the project with a statement that concludes: >> Site-specific and event-driven, the projects in Living as Form resist display in an archive such as this one. They address multiple audiences, and pay equal attention to the power of media. Each video, pamphlet, poster, and image remains a pale shadow of the original action. Nonetheless, we use the sheer scale, geographic range, and interdisciplinary nature of the work to illustrate that the skill sets of art are now among a series of complex social organizational methods meant to transform our world. We hope that by exacerbating the tensions that exist among the myriad forms, this archive will inspire further inquiry, and ultimately, new approaches to social practice. To that end, we have commissioned several living projects in order to encourage participation, and to provide a glimpse of the energy that surrounds this work. For the artists, activists, and engaged citizens in Living as Form, it is that energy, not the notion of art, which propels them toward the elusive goal of social justice. << - This and related quotes from the "Living As Form" website (http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2011/livingasform/index.htm) What if the economy of attention is a failure? What if the magnetism of voluntary nodal micro-change is a dead-end street, or rather, an avenue that can easily be blockaded by police in riot gear, when the change that's manifesting is perceived to be a potential threat to the managerial status quo? Does an archive really contain the power to exacerbate tensions caused by injustice or social neglect or any other kind of willful malevolence couched in standard operating procedures? The apparatus for time-based command and control is progressive and has evolved over 3500 years, to attain its present form. When dissolution is the only measure of resistance, to what extent can or should reformation be sought from the dissolved or dissolute structure, "collective" or individual. Demoralization, apathy, the sublimation of humanity in sex, drugs and pop music as quick-fixes is epidemic, wherever the society is rich enough to not require constant labor for survival. If this is the grim reality for most people today, what can art do with that? Is art supposed to staunch the bleeding? Can art offer the broken man or society the correct triage methods for his/its wholesale restitution? As for the question, "Is this art?" Thompson says, "Such efforts might not be described as artworks, but their collaborative spirit, investment in community engagement, and deployment of cultural programs as part of their operations compel us to consider what they do, not who they say they are." If we cut and paste Nato's statement "we use the sheer scale, geographic range, and interdisciplinary nature of the work to illustrate that the skill sets of art are now among a series of complex social organizational methods meant to transform our world" on to David Byrne's adjunct installation "Tight Spot" at Pace, and the literal mash-up works marvelously! The convergence of relational aesthetics and social media and celeb-art is only a realization away. Is this a problem, or a facile proof? Nato's positioning of energy, "not the notion of art," much less art in itself, which seems to be irrelevant in the LAF operation, except that the entire operation exists under the art umbrella, situates the active force of living outside the concept of art, its critical discourse, its history, its forms, and attributes to that energy the several powers the artistic citizenry needs to shove them toward social justice. What do you do, as an artist, when you get to social justice? Is it a town? A gallery? A law? What about social injustice? What happens if you take a wrong turn and end up on the business end of cop baton? What will the archive do for you then, artist? Activist? Engaged citizen? Also, Thompson's rhetoric echoes the rhetoric of "too big to fail." In the end, the question is whether organizational art is art at all. So far, we have as far I can tell no macro-instance of the art industry generating sustainable, peaceful democratic change through a program or project. I can point however to the WPA/AIA programs of the New Deal and say with certainty that those government programs did in fact have transformative effects on the nation. Why isn't the institutional art world spending its resources to argue for national public arts programs, like the WPA/AIA? Given the limits of institutional resources, especially in a period of fiscal depression, why wouldn't the resources available be devoted to lobbying and mobilizing artists in their own interests. Instead, LAF is mobilizing artists to support communities which will not mobilize for artists. And the artists are expected to volunteer for the task. < Another "Social Media/Tight Spot" concurrency is OccupyWallStreet, which is happening a short distance from the massively institutionally-supported "Living As Form" project. The September 23 communique of OWS reads: >> On September 22nd, 2011, sixteen cities from around the country and the world stood in solidarity with us, protesting the disparity of power and wealth that exists in our society. In Liberty Square, no such disparity exists. Everyone's needs are taken care for, food, medicine, water. The only need, the only right, that we cannot take care of is shelter, though this is not our choice. Mayor Bloomberg said that he would give us a space to protest but at every moment he attempts to erode us. He uses absurd police tactics – arresting protesters for using chalk on sidewalks, for wearing masks on the back of their heads in violation of a law that is a century and a half old, for... what, exactly? He uses the tactics of media suppression only available to a billionaire with a media empire. It has not worked. It will not work. We are growing. Each day more cities join us. Each day our movement grows. We demand real change. We will see it. As organized by our labor working group and outreach working group, we stood in solidarity with Teamsters local 814 and picketed Sotheby's. We are joined and will act in solidarity with the Professional Staff Congress, a union of 20,000 employees from the City University of New York. << - https://occupywallst.org/ It seems odd that LAF and OWS aren't merging, and don't appear in any way to possess or align with each other, as social movements. Bishop's essay and her Living As Form lecture present strong arguments that art/activism fails as both art and activism. Over the summer I met Brian Holmes, and had the opportunity to hear his LAF lecture twice, once at Cooper Union, and once at EGS, where he was presenting. I asked him about WPA. I'll share more on this in a future essay, perhaps, but it struck me that Holmes' concepts for art activism asked much of art and artists and reciprocated nothing. In the art activist architecture, everyone is an artist, post-Beuys, and the action is situationist, and the underpinning narrative is anti-Capitalist, or Marxist, but not necessarily democratic. But it's more subtle than this. The prejudice against America by European thinkers allows always a conflation of America and Capitalism. This suits the aims of the "free market," in its parasitic relations to representational democracy, as practiced in the US, which had until the 1980s evolved into a major global military, economic and political power center. Switzerland, one of the world's international banking epicenters, Davos, and the luxury spas in the Alps - do these not register as nodes for Colonial Capitalism? The Swiss pavilion in Venice in 2012 presented a significant critique of imperialist American intervention in the Middle East. How exactly does the morality of the enterprise, sited in a state-sponsored, privately funded exhibit hall persist, given the macro-topology of Switzerland, de facto, a nation that prevails on the basis of free market capital exchange? I could go on... I guess what I'm getting at here is that the big art institutions in New York City are extensively co-opted by Continental Theorists, and Marxian aesthetes, and the administrative lineage now is aligned to straight-up "globalism," or neo-liberalism, with institutions here daily converting to profit models that encourage education to rely on investment, development, and bank support. Tuition is a lending concern, that has eclipsed consumer credit card debt in the US. Does this affect whether LAF and OWS become collaborative endeavors? Which is to say, are schools and museums, now almost wholly dependent on corporate foundations, individuals and agencies for sustenance, capable of engaging actual real-time political problems, when they do not conform to corporate agendas? If activism is so artsy, where are the thousands of artist activists during OWS? I sent a proxy, because I'm getting a little old to tussle with police in riot gear. Let the young do it. I'll cheer! But I'm wondering whether protests, or "riots," as Bloomberg calls them, are failing because they look and are now, not like the street wars the labor unions fought against Robber Barons, but like artsy parades, street parties, creativity exercises... This is perhaps a second question. What is a riot? Still, the LAF agenda can be construed not as Living As Form, but Living As Conforming, or LAC. Living, or art in life, is not the same as putting one's life at risk to re-territorialize private property, which is what OWS is about. Temporarily occupying a market, with all the right permits, with broad institutional and corporate support, is not equal to a riot. Awareness is not action. An archive does not change its subject, but is "a pale shadow" of it. When the archive presumes to be the Object, does it not transform the object energetically into a pale shadow of itself, through instrumental lack? It seems unquestionable that an action like OWS is not an opportunity for industrial networking, of the sort Saltz describes. If anything, it is an exercise in anti-industrial networking, with the potential for mayhem at any moment, incarceration, physical violence, life-long consequence. < Claire Bishop is a contributor to the book project that will emerge from the LAF initiative. More about this book: "Living as Form will culminate with a book, co-published by Creative Time Books and *MIT Press*, that will highlight projects from the exhibition archive, as well as commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists in the field, including Carol Becker, Claire Bishop, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes, Maria Lind, and Shannon Jackson. Detailing some of the most important socially engaged projects from the last twenty years, this unique archive will provide key examples, allow insights into methodologies, contextualize the conditions of site, and broaden the range of what constitutes this form. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 will be out in January 2012." Bishop will be at Reading Group Number One Sunday to discuss her critiques of relational aesthetics, as in the essay quoted above, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." It's hard to fight a cop, while documenting the action. Don't worry, though. He and his buddies will write a report later. - MILO < A book is a consumer portable product. Is the point of LAF to generate a sale item? < An art/activist happening isn't real until somebody writes a book about it that 2,000 people will read, mostly art students and professors. - MILO < At Sotheby's, Finally, the 99 Percent Were the Highest Bidder Published 2011-09-23 08:11:39 UTC by OccupyWallSt At 10 a.m. yesterday morning, activists involved in #OCCUPYWALLSTREET paid a visit to a Sotheby's art auction. Last year Sotheby's made record profits, enough so that their CEO Bill Rupprecht awarded himself a 125 percent raise. At the same time the company decided to use union-busting tactics, demanding over 100 concessions to the IBT 814 Art Handlers Union Contract. With their unionized workforce currently on lockout, Sotheby's continues to operate using scabs and a non-union subcontractor and wants all new hires to have no collective bargaining rights, no health benefits and no job security. Today's auction was held on the seventh floor of Sotheby's Upper East Side auction house—a sterile atmosphere, ripe with the stench of expensive perfume. The activists staggered their entrances and planted themselves in the crowd of businessmen and women, all gathered to witness the sale of artwork, with prices ranging from the average salary of a working American to the average cost of an American home. The first of the activists took the room by surprise, disrupting the auction and announcing that “Sotheby's made $680 million dollars last year but then they kicked their art handlers out on the street!” While making a call for security, the auctioneer read a prepared statement kept on her podium for just this sort of demonstration. “Thank you for your patience, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “I hope that is the last interruption we have today.” However, nine surprise demonstrations disrupted the two-hour auction. One protestor shouted “This is disgusting! Art is about truth.” Another, in sunglasses and a "Greed Kills" T-shirt attested that the “greed in this building is a direct example of the corporate greed that has ruined our economy.” The #OCCUPYWALLSTREET activists were there to show solidarity with the art handlers in their struggle for worker's rights and to warn of a coming increase in direct protests against the top 1 percent of New York City's economic food chain. “In addition to auctioning off these fine pieces of artwork,” said Mary Clinton, one of the demonstrators, “today Sotheby's is auctioning off the American dream.” All nine were escorted from the premise by security, shouting, “End the lockout!” and “Occupy Wall Street!” Sotheby's auctions epitomize the disconnect between the extremely wealthy and the rest of us. These are the same financial elite who were bailed out in their moment of need and who now refuse to pay their fair share in taxes. < A sub-textual acknowledgment goes to Gregory Sholette, whose book Dark Matter covers a broad swath of de-territorialized territory in the "art worlds," including the Internet, and social media, as it is used to convey or confront "art" and the apparatuses of art as they emerged in the closing years of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Sholette will also be participating in LAF. Knowing Greg and having closely read Dark Matter, which was the subject of an appearance by Sholette at Reading Group Number One, I have to answer the question directly above, regarding books arising from activities integrating art/activism, to suggest that documentation of art anahistorical narratives is important, not so much for the memorial aspect, but for the purposes of originating conversations on the stakes. Free speech is essential to democracy and art. It is also essential to commerce and commonwealth. For all my questioning of RA and LAF, one thing that I won't dispute is the inherent value of free speech encouraged in these all these activities. Whether I might agree with the assertions, or accept the consequences of widespread industrial adoption and ratification of RA, does not prevent me from acknowledging the free speech components thereof, and their value. The question, though, is whether it is healthy for a democratic citizen to believe that her free speech rights are contingent on an art world invention. < Also concurrent to "Social Media" and deserving noting are two commercial enterprises of a transitional nature, the Affordable Art Fair and SeaFair, the latter self-describing as "The Megayacht Venue, which pulled into port at Greenwich, Connecticut and moored there September 15-19. I won't spend much byte-time here on these two markets, though as backgrounding they are essential components in the dimensional analysis of the platform to which "Social Media/Tight Spot" belong. From a SeaFair e-blast: >> The last time the Grand Luxe pulled into Greenwich harbor, in 2007, the recession had not yet begun. Super-rich art collectors flocked to the five-story mega-yacht filled with artworks for sale with price tags as high as $8 million. The five-day art splurge was invitation-only. That was then, this is now. The Grand Luxe is coming back to Connecticut this weekend. It'll be filled again with artworks for sale, but none are more expensive than $100,000. And it's open to the public. "Back then, 2007, was a time of extravagance," said David Lester, a Florida art-fair organizer who owns the Grand Luxe with his wife, Lee Ann. "Now, it isn't a time to flaunt money or be careless." << - Susan Dunne, The Hartford Courant ("SeaFair At Art Greenwich, An Art Fair On A Yacht, Features Works By Many Legendary Artists") < Today I will visit the Essex Street Market and compare the LAF event ("exhibition") sited there to these two art market fairs. Note: I didn't travel to the MegaYacht fair. < ...Hung out with Greg Sholette at LAF market on Essex. GREAT donut and coffee, and terrific company. There were shovels ready in the entry area (msg to P. Obama), and an opportunity to do yoga with a monitor-based multi-lingual instructor. The interior design was impressive, but the small hall was thinly populated with visitors, logistics folks, experience management teams, artists and activists. The atmosphere was very friendly. The archive in Greg's booth was genuinely compelling. It's possible that the other expos were equally worthwhile. I don't know. Greg introduced me to other exhibitors, and we cross-referenced on the subject of pop stars who were/are also painters. A juicy list of LES-based musician/painters poured forth from these qualified and dedicated archivists. PJ Harvey. Lots of names I didn't recognize and a few I did. I did not see one police officer anywhere in the space or nearby. LAF's install was certainly well-assembled. The organization was more than competent, and details were attended to throughout. The impact of the market was not visual, though. One section featured piles of multi-hued fabric thingamabobs into which were nestled resting viewers. So, there were visceral components, and histories in a variety of formats, and smart, nice people ready and willing to engage any in attendance. ... Structurally, the Essex Street LAF expo was comparable to the AAF. Clearly the objectives of the two productions are antithetical. One is selling and networking. The other is ... I guess this is where the blank is for the attendee to fill in: _____________. One can do yoga. One can rest. One can eat and drink. One can peruse books and other printed documentation of past art/activist interventions and histories. One can learn more about community projects for LES. The options are available here: http://www.temporaryservices.org/MARKET/participants/. The project felt safe to me, which I was happy about. I came with my 6-month pregnant bride and friend/painter Liv Mette Larsen. Which was why I didn't take the trains to Wall Street today. As for further comparison between AAF and LAF. AAF exhibitors included gallerists and artists from around the globe. The price point was the theme. Because my LA gallery was exhibiting (Timothy Yarger Fine Art), I was comped and entered the fair for free. Tickets started at $15 for students with identification, for a day pass. LAF was free, although the summit I believe was $45 at the Skirball. No cops at AAF, but professional security was visible. The informal dress codes of AAF and LAF were not similar. The AAF was made up to suspend architectural disbelief and convince the visitor that he or she was transiting through row after row of white cubes, with a few sides missing, like a Western town in a Hollywood gunslinger movie. I didn't really notice, but my best guess is that a buyer would have no problem using a credit card to purchase artwork at AAF. I'm not so sure about LAF, but I'm not certain there was anything for sale that would cost more than what most any New Yorker would be carrying around for cash money transactions in a purse, wallet or pocket. The layout and spread of media in LAF were excellent and subtle, not done on the cheap. The media accoutrements at AAF were also high-end, which nowadays isn't all that expensive, but the array was not about information exchange; it was all point of sale at AAF. A booth at AAF cost thousands of dollars. To travel one's person and transport work from the gallerist's home base to New York City, to pay room and board during the fair, cost thousands or even tens of thousands more. My guess is that LAF participants did so on the Creative Time + partners dime (not confirmed). I think that's enough. > At least four arrested, one for shooting photos UPDATE: at least eighty arrested, five maced | RETRACTION: no tear gas used Published 2011-09-25 12:11:29 UTC by OccupyWallSt We have at least four arrests today during a community march, a fifth arrest is suspected but police will not confirm. A legal observer attempting to contact an arrested member was not allowed to due to “an emergency situation,” we are currently unsure of what this means. At least one arrest was due to a protester taking photographs. At least one protester's possessions have not been returned. Please call the first precinct, central booking and the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information and urge them to release these peaceful protesters. First precinct: +1 (212) 334-0611 Central booking: +1 (212) 374-3921 Deputy Commissioner of Public Information: +1 (646) 610-6700 NYPD Switchboard: 1-646-610-5000 UPDATE: We are now receiving reports that at least 80 protesters have been arrested. The National Lawyer's Guild puts the number at around one hundred. Liberty square is currently full with an ongoing discussion on how to respond to this unprecedented level of police aggression. Police are currently surrounding the square. There is nearly one police officer for every two protesters. Earlier today we had reports of police kettling protesters with large orange net, using tasers, at least five protesters have been maced. > From my precarious "safe harbor" loft and studio in Bushwick, with some considering of the Bushwick Open Studio Tour 2011, which event was undermined directly by the MTA/Bloomberg-directed stoppage of L Train service the weekend of the Tour, for the third year out of five, I have followed the presumptive occupation of Wall Street as a resistance action. The weekend the resistance opened, the L was shut down again, which has happened routinely over the past several months. Rather than attempt the arduous workaround to get to the OWC demonstrations, I stayed home and cooked my wife's birthday dinner. Service to Brooklyn from Manhattan since I moved here a year ago has been horrendous. Last week, apparently to succor the increasingly enraged residents of the borough, and others also put upon by the horrible management of public transportation by Bloomberg and MTA, the city announced the revival of Massimo Vignelli's 70s-era, MoMA-owned map in a digital format: "The stylish digital map will be customized each weekend to reflect the myriad service changes that regularly bedevil straphangers on Saturdays and Sundays." (NY Times, "Aid for Baffled Weekend Subway Riders," http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/nyregion/new-subway-map-to-help-riders-with-weekend-service-changes.html). ... >> Weekend ridership is at its highest level in decades, but transit workers still perform most maintenance and repair work on Saturdays and Sundays; the L train, for instance, has been entirely canceled along much of its route on two weekends this month. ... The Weekender is not a panacea. Its landing page is not quite intuitive, and some users may at first have difficulty navigating it. But officials say that The Weekender is a work in progress, and that they will integrate users’ comments as they make adjustments. << Is the Mogul Mayor, fearful of an eruption of the mob against his plutocratic regime, generating creative management solutions to undermine opposition in real time, in conjunction with special operations by the NYPD, which Bloomberg characterized recently in the run-up to the 9-11 memorial celebration as a "paramilitary organization," and which we discovered through mediated revelations has active CIA operatives on its payroll? This question would seem to apply more directly to OccupyWallStreet, than to LAF, and certainly more than it does to AAF or SeaFair, or the shows at Pace. But does it? Over the past week, to follow OCW in the media, I had to read about it either on the OCW website, in The Guardian (UK), or at The Nation website. There were tiny features in other papers, including a few photos in the Washington Post's day-in-pictures section online. The NY Times, as far as I could tell, didn't cover the protests at all, in keeping with its general policy of bare-bones coverage for anything other than Tea Party protests, including the street uprisings in Greece, Israel, Italy, Spain, England and Wisconsin, which when referred to at all were sublimated to wonky reportage on the machinations of banksters dictating to sovereign governments the terms of the various "Austerity" deals. It's of course clear that major ad buyers since 2008 in periodicals and dailies like the NY Times include the major corporations that form the World Economic Forum's Strategic Partnership, or the US Chamber of Commerce. These include entities like EXXON, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, etc. The fact that these corporations are the subject of many of the most important news stories at the moment is inescapable. What constitutes soft-censorship in the corporate news industry? It's a prevalent meme that new media is decimating the analog news business. So, how do the social and monopoly media reconcile, for democracy, or truth, or art? Perhaps the overarching proposition here hinges on whether social and/or new media is being situated as a meta-privatized alternative to the for-profit monopoly media, of which Bloomberg is a prime beneficiary, for the business sector (although Bloomberg's aspirations stretch beyond the terminus of money into all aspects of society, including politics, culture, into influence, or power, from the top-down, as determinant, as "Decider" operating dimensionally through self-multiplicity, a syndicate of branded identity across the social spectrum). The role of media, or rather, the press, in a democracy, to check corruption in government and business and society at large is clearly at stake, as is the free flow of information upon which representational democracy is based. How can one exhaustively catalog the conflicts of interest Mayor/Mogul/"Art"-philanthropist Bloomberg has in his confrontation with OWS. Can the same be said of LAF? Possibly. Is it true? Bloomberg isn't the only one benefitting from the dimensional consolidation/profitization/monopolization/politicization of information flow, but his competition is at the moment in deep shit. Murdoch and News Corp are mired in a corruption scandal historic in proportion, a scandal which today threatens to spread as a "contagion" across the Atlantic to the US, where FOX and the other Murdoch-controlled media properties have emerged as power-elite forces in shaping American political discourse and outcomes. Judging from coverage of OccupyWallStreet, relative to coverage of early Tea Party events, or any of the other popular uprisings against the Iraq War, Austerity, bailouts for the Super-rich and financial sector corporations, etc., the monopoly corporate media syndicates have chosen to look elsewhere for "news." To examine the media management or managed confusion of reportage on "the Arab Spring," Wikileaks, Anonymous, and any number of phenomena unfolding in our "post-9-11 world" is to witness the fraying edge of message system control and command complexes, where they push hierarchical pragmatism as a means of artificial self-advancement. The complicity of monopoly news organizations in the past decade's worst abuses of democratic process has been at least to some degree made transparent after-the-fact. The run-up to the Iraq War, the cover-ups of warrantless wiretapping, the blatant media manipulation of American people during the health care debate by the affected industrialists, the advocacy for Wall Street over Main Street, and on and on: at least the efforts of people like Michael Moore, Julian Assange and Matt Taibbi, and others. Social media's entanglement with both governmental spying agencies, who now basically ignore the 4th Amendment here in the USA, and serially corrupt and criminal corporations like Goldman Sachs or Chase, further complicate that domain, but the apparatus for documenting and correcting the abuses are not even comparable to the minimally enforced self-regulation of the mainstream media by outliers, or critics. Myspace is after all a Murdoch-owned business. Goldman Sachs is a major investor in Facebook. Chase is heavily invested in Twitter. A quick Google of Chase Bank and Twitter reveals a very rich set of results that offer a good point of origination for investigation of the relationships developing between the Financial Industry and "social media," meaning the dimensional online-networked communication appliance attracting millions of users - to do what exactly? To expand, one can visit socialmediabanking.blogspot.com, a site devoted to industry issues involving commercial banking and so-called Web 2.0 applications, like Twitter. In one post (September 18, 2011), an article by Lon S. Cohen for Mashable.com is cited, "5 Ways Banks Are Using Social Media." What are the five ways? 1. Community Building 2. Product Research 3. Customer Service 4. Marketing and Promotion 5. Transparency The Obama Administration, which used web apps to an unprecedented extent, with tremendous benefits, for the 2008 election race, has sought to create a social media wing to the US government over the past several years, with very mixed results. The problem is, when an administration is, as Glenn Greenwald has pointed out repeatedly, engaged in anti-democratic and anti-Constitutional praxis to create a secrecy-cloaked intelligence apparatus pointed at the citizens of the nation, the admin will have some difficulty promoting "transparency." This is true for the banking industry as well. How deep has social media reached into the Federal Reserve to catalyze transparency, for instance? This is the same Fed that has escaped public audits until just now. How exactly will Twitter transform Chase, or Facebook transform Goldman Sachs, in terms of transparency? Which brings us to Pace's "Social Media." To explore the linkages between the top-tier art market with the political and economic iterations of social media, and all the myriad user sites devoted to politics and commerce in the vast flow of online "community" data exchange, would require an army of researchers, massive resources and manpower. And who is willing to do this work? I would argue the void of evaluation separating the "art world(s)" and the other social sectors is an intended effect, not rising to the level of conspiracy, because the general - democratic - public fails to recognize art as something that matters. An endeavor like LAF is a patch meant to address this disconnect, but is it a solution, or part of the problem? If one considers the supporters of LAF, or a similar "creative" production, also funded in part by Creative Time, and Goldman Sachs - The New Museum's recent "Festival of Ideas" - then the "movement" to "democratize" (as Bourriaud frames it, and whether this definition is correct or not is arguable) the schema for "art" production and presentation, for the integration of "art" in "daily life," is inescapably enmeshed in a web of players whose main concerns have nothing to do with empowering democratic constituencies. On the contrary, I would argue that the effect, if not the express goal always, of "social media" and "creative interventions" is to exacerbate the divorce between the 99% of America, which is increasingly disenfranchised politically, economically and socially, and the 1% who cling to control of the culture from the top-down. To assess the shows at Pace is really to spotlight the weak framework allocated to "artists" as representatives of the "best practices" in the domain of Web 2.0, in terms of celebrity or institutional or professional acceptability to top-tier collectors. The fact that these several artists on view in "Social Media/Tight Spot" at Pace are hardly representative of art at all, much less social media as a tool for artists, speaks mainly to the failures of galleries like Pace/MacGill, and co-opted institutions like SVA, not only to translate the medium into the Big Show market for art, but to adequately represent the problems of democratic representation adhering to the art market and social media instrumentally. It is no exaggeration to describe my feelings for "Social Media/Tight Spot" as existential nausea. Pace/MacGill, SVA, are supposedly premier organizations for art in the United States, and internationally, in the contemporary art market or "world." These "shows" demonstrate what happens when the system for art is thoroughly debased. Mega-galleries like Pace presume or are trending to replace the public museum as the cultural driver for highest expression in our society - and this is what they generate? I really don't have the stomach to itemize all the dismal failures these shows encompass. In general, the "artists," "art," content, premise, installation are what can be characterized as "professional," it's true. Is social media "professional?" Is social media art? Is social media OK as re-sample material for an "artist" to exploit and extract and re-situate, with or without the consent of the "subject?" Is there an ethics for social media "art?" Is the "work" on view in any way archival? Is social media really so concerned with sex and politics as the gallery-provided, curatorial-process-evidencing materials suggest? If not, why would sex and politics thread through the show, approaching conflation. Where are the margins, and who are the marginalized in these exhibitions? What is the audience for this work? Who are the collectors? What are the aims of the presenters? Is "Social Media/Tight Spot" a market-making venture? Is it an academic review? Is it a media-philosophy-based evaluation? Is it just "fun?" Is it "entertainment?" Or should the title have been, "Social Media Work in a Tight Spot Make You/Us/Me Free?" ...thinking of "Tight Spot" as a stupid conditional report on the state of millions of Americans in the current malaise, which arguably is a manufactured event... Is this Happy Face drivel, a distraction or escape from Depression 3.0, disguised as serious consideration of social media? Is it just masturbatory bullshit for big bucks, for no good reason? Whose purposes would *that* serve? I "It's not the first time Byrne, best known as the lead singer of the Talking Heads, has undertaken a major public artwork in New York. For his 2008 Playing the Building, commissioned by Creative Time, at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan, he attached electronic devices to pipes, pillars, beams and other surfaces, which created sound when activated by wind, touch or motion." - "Pace Inaugurates 25th Street Space With David Byrne," by Stephanie Cash for Art in America, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/news/2011-08-22/pace-gallery-25th-st/ "Better than: A designer pop-up shop." - Village Voice, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/09/david_byrne_tight_spot_september_15_review.php @ThePaceGallery ThePaceGallery Thank you!!! So glad you could check it out. Great convos generated by the intertwining of art and the internet @echohenyu - Tweet at Pace Twitter David Byrne, former lead man of Talking Heads, now corporate art star, installed a giant inflatable globe balloon, which is too big for its assigned curatorially "found" raw and unfinished Chelsea non-white-cube architectural "art" container, the improvisational, transitional, liminal, interstitial, next-door-to-the-real-gallery, meaning temporarily off-site, until the gallery renovations are completed in the adjacent lot (site). "Tight Spot" is the earth-as-blow-up-doll, and it pushes, strains, against structural columns and the brick walls, and the concrete, and the sky peeps through from above. A cool-dude gallery guard in a pale blue lab coat attends the installation. I saw artsies shooting the installation with mobile phones, and small cameras, and posing in front of it. I shot it with my Blackberry. In short, "Tight Spot" is an Idea Project, cum photo op. The vogue type, like Allora and Calzadilla's epic failed expo at the Venice Biennale. The documentary data will be better than the original. The spectacle is cool for a minute, like a screaming schizophrenic on a New York City street corner, but the allure wears out fast. It's not funny, ultimately, not when one starts comparing the balloon to art, as in sculpture, at least pre-68 sculpture. After all, Serra is just around the corner at Gagosian. Not that Serra isn't predictable at this point, and excessive by any measure, but "Tight Spot" doesn't hold up even that far. It's art-idea on the relatively cheap, coming and going, with nothing from Byrne's hand (or anyone else's) visible. This is production/fabrication, to spec. This is engineering, transportation, hired hands on deck, artist-management-as-high-profile-project, with Budget and mucho press. Byrne's "Tight Spot" also makes noises. It's sonic, and visual. Meta-. Scalable. Site-specific. Anybody with a decent artspeak vocabulary could talk this up for days. Colorful. Surprising. Thinking back to the spinning globe in grade school. A deep commentary on a world population getting too big for its limitations. Fat world. Muffintop world. World getting squeezed. LIVE world, talking to us in rhythm, but we don't understand. Sounds like a heartbeat, or a growl. Blahblahblah. It's about as deep as Stop Making Sense. This is design. Byrne is never afraid to take something iconic and/or deeply felt by believers and turn it into a catchy phrase, with sound, for $$. It's a gimmee "gift." The indebtedness to everything post-AbExNY, and I don't mean the wretched faux-show at MoMA, is effervescent in this "work." Warhol. Ikea. MTV. Flickr. (click) The critical response has been friendly, and plentiful. I particularly liked the inadvertent transparency regarding how this level of the art business works, with respect to selection. It's a poignant point, a punctum, as such. When I was leaving Pace, an African-American dreadlocked artist approached the unpaid-probably gallerina interns and asked, "How do I get my work into this place?" They both laughed, and pleasantly snarked, "We don't take submissions. I don't know of any galleries in this neighborhood who do. Showing here is by invitation." The poor guy pressed them, and said, "You're going to miss out on a lot great work that way," among other things. He didn't press hard enough to be ejected, but his overt passion made the receptionists uncomfortable. He was right, but he didn't know how right. Access. Selection. Fame. Money. He hadn't done his research. From the NY Observer (http://www.observer.com/2011/09/the-whole-world-in-his-hands-david-byrne-brings-his-art-to-chelsea/): >> After the Pace Gallery’s Marc Glimcher completed his recent purchase of prime real estate beneath the High Line between West 24th and 25th streets—it abuts one of Pace’s two branches on 25th Street—he faced a dilemma: what to do with the empty space before construction began on the new gallery he plans to open there in fall 2012? “I thought, O.K., we need the old demolition party, or something like that,” Mr. Glimcher, Pace’s president, told The Observer. But then Mr. Glimcher’s wife, Andrea, the gallery’s communications head, who he said had been the driving force behind the acquisition of the space (“As usual, she got what she wanted”), had another idea. “She thought that this would be the perfect place to do a project with David,” he explained, referring to David Byrne, the former lead singer of the new wave band Talking Heads who has since ventured into the art world. “I first encountered David’s work in the 1970s,” Mr. Glimcher said. “The fact that I waited at the stage door, trying to get an autograph from Dave back then is not important to the story.” He laughed. “Actually, I just found my pin from the concert they did in Central Park, which was nice. But I digress.” When The Observer visited Mr. Byrne’s Soho studio recently, a drawing of the artist’s proposal for under the High Line hung on one wall: a giant light-blue globe squeezed underneath, pushing up against the bottom of the park and the two side walls, as if it had just popped in from another dimension, or an elementary school classroom. “You couldn’t hang art on the walls because it’s too messy,” Mr. Byrne, 59, told us. << Failure is success in this genre, the more expensive and vacuous, the better. David Byrne thought it, somebody else made it, and the fabrication-art-evocative-of-a-Macy's-Day-Parade-float-that-took-a-wrong-turn-and-got-stuck, "Tight Spot, aligned with Bernaysian principles of self-identifying, promotes not only one big air-filled designer plastic planet, but one very ambitious new media, social media, consumer portable, Deitchian celeb spectacle producer, Gaga-before-Gaga, David Byrne. David Byrne. His world is so contingent it will sell like Texas hotcakes, not in editions of 50000, like the Rauschenberg-illustrated "Stop Making Sense" vinyl, but something smaller, like an edition of 5, like art prints by Old Masters, or something. RISDee, and decades in NYC, and world traveling and stardom, and extensive market research and self-promotion, have educated Byrne's adherence to form, if not his obligation to quality. Why should that surprise? Like a relational aesthetic on two-legs, David Byrne is open-ended. Actually, in the normative celeb-art Deitch-art/media-mainstream, Byne IS the medium. The globe is a branded identity piece, a creative symptom of dimensional celebrity, a temporal dispersion of social force of influence, driven by consumer portable power over time, into the most specific of regions, the art milieu. Like Tim Burton, Lady Gaga (Ronald Reagan, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Bloomberg in politics, as correlates, or precursors), Byrne is the practitioner of the art of fame, as Gaga put it. If David Byrne thinks it, if it emerges from his creative flow, then, by this measure, the output will have social value. Craft is unimportant, now. Koons, in antithesis, has seen to that, or Hirst, and others... The whole contraption comes full circle with Banksy, and "street art," the flipflop, if you will, which validates Deitch and celeb-practitioners like Byrne, when their top-down assumptions flounder, as with the Hopper show. If a show can't stand up to quality control, follow it with one that will break attendance records. < Frank Sinatra was a good painter, too. I would argue, better. Also Captain Beefheart. - MILO < Byrne also has several pieces in the presumptuously titled "Social Media," all of which demonstrate nothing remotely resembling artisanship on Byrne's part, which in the new curatorial paradigms is fine. One wonders what the draw to the "Social Media" exhibit would have been to the weekender Chelsea art crowds, if Byrne had not been crowbar-ed into the scheme. As mentioned above "Social Media" is a collaborative curatorial venture, involving selectors from Pace, MacGill and the School of Visual Arts. Whose idea was it to mashup Byrne with the others? I wasn't aware of David Byrne's social media inclinations, prior to this exhibit, although I was aware of his ranging PoV on America, from jaundiced to ambivalent, as evidenced in his movie True Stories. Well, David Byrne is, as I suggested above, a social medium, a two-legged network application, so we can move on. He will, too. I think the bicycle project occupies much of his schedule currently. Now, I did a little research for this note, which included watching Byrne's interviews, videos and video-taped performances as a solo musician and with TH. Also visits to his official web site, and a scan of the many reviews, in big-time papers and industry mags, from WSJ to AiA, and dozens of blogs. Full disclosure: I met David Byrne in 2001 or so, at the Armory Show, back when his pop star career was petering out, and he was initiating the metamorphosis to celebrity artist (and author, bicycle rider, theorist of sound, etc.). He was wearing a Russian-style fur hat with the ear covers. We rode the elevator from the top level to the street together. He saw my press pass, and seemed very enthusiastic to engage me, until he figured out who I was representing (Santa Fe's THE Magazine, which evidently Byrne had never heard of). Then he turned off like an automatic garage light, once the electric-robot door shuts. I did tell him how much I'd liked TH. Which was true, but qualified. I don't value irony, or cleverness over substance, or easy and superficial critique. Others share my sensibility (see Huffington Post review of Tight Spot). After our brief encounter, I subsequently followed Byrne through the awful PowerPoint phase. I don't see that as social media. And the much-pushed audio-architectural installation, paid for by Creative Time. Go with what you know, as they say, I guess. If one can't contrive to image-make, then stick with sound, maybe Byrne realized, at least until the next project and press event. Now social media and the balloon globe. The imaginary clever apps, with badly painted icons, on digital prints. UGH! THOSE HANDS! I tried to figure out which fake app, or "joke" as NY Magazine Vulture blog called Byrne's "art," had the claw hands - it wasn't "Childster," or "Invisible Me," or "Weaselface," hahaha LOL... < On David Byrne's democracy. As Claire Bishop points out, "Rosalyn Deutsche has argued that the public sphere remains democratic only insofar as its naturalized exclusions are taken into account and made open to contestation: “Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.” What then should we make of Byrne's mediated scenes in the screen array in "Social Media," depicting politician brawls and branded "democracy?" Is Byrne propagating a subtle distortion of democracy, to put it kindly, illustrating Deutsche's point, or is he pushing an anti-democratic propaganda disguised as one-liner, to be a bit more specific, arguing that democracy is no more noble than your typical Jerry Springer show? "A dim view of the grand Democratic experiment," writes Brian Gesko in his Huffington Post review of the show. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-gresko/social-media-exhibit-david-byrne-miranda-july_b_966564.html) Given the OccupyWallStreet protests, and the violent arrests and police intimidation documented there, modus operandi under Bloomberg, I think Byrne's depiction of democracy in action all over the world is going to be a hit with the Davos/TED collector set. Was there something else by Byrne I'm forgetting in "Social Media?" I don't think so. "Social Media" and "Tight Spot" are boring and ugly exhibits, which one might expect, given the nature of the work presented. The content seems to have been selected with some lite attenuation to the sensational, with sexy or torpid memes-as-neat-ideas woven into the mix. Porn is here, kind of. Grunts. Politics. Technology. Craig's List. Google. YouTube. Extraction. Exploitation. Assignments. I'll dig a little bit into the rest of the show next week.
- Brooklyn, September 24, 20:56
