I'm hoping for the best.

 I feel our network as artists is so large and open that there is no one formal or conceptual movement being imposed on us. We have very little to formally rebel, and if we did find something, nobody would truly notice. 

I guess I am wondering how artists rise to the top today? How does someone do something so new and provocative to gain the attention of their peers and critics that now seem to be endless? I feel we already went through the minimal, unassuming 'unmonumental' phase. What else is really left? Or does everyone make what they want to make and hope for the best?

If our network constantly keeps shifting, and with so many people (critics, gallery owners, yada yada yada) trying to decide what is 'in', do we as artists just embrace the fluidity and abandon the idea of stability, or at least something stable enough to disagree with? 

An interesting commercial that relates to what we have been talking about

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hk8IzdwYEA

Furthering the week's discussion

During our discussion section we contrasted hierarchies to networks and narratives (personally I am more comfortable with "processes" rather than "narratives" but "narratives" will work) to databases but were unable to flesh out a clearer picture of the analogous nature of the two dichotomies. Hopefully we can take advantage of this blog space to carry on the discussion by trying to hone the concepts involved and speculate about some of the societal consequences of shifting from a hierarchical/narrative to the networked/database paradigm.

To get things rolling I wanted to throw out some ideas and ask some questions.

I am uneasy about setting hierarchies in direct opposition to networks. The same unease applies to the contrast between narratives and databases. Both of these supposed dichotomies appear to merely occupy a place on a scale of simple/strict/low entropy to complex/loose/high entropy relationships between things. Hierarchies and networks abstractly represent the structure of relationships between physical things and their interactions. Analogously, narratives and databases concretely instantiate the relationships between abstract, informational things.

It would be fine to cast either set as oppositional if they sat at polar ends of the relationship scale they occupy. However, it is unclear that the above-mentioned relationships actually do occupy the polar end of such a scale. Networks are especially easy to see as occupying a middle ground, between the super-structured nature of hierarchies and completely un-structured things like piles of trash. Networks are loose, but must maintain enough strictness to function. With hierarchies it is harder to see that they do not occupy the far end of the strictness side of the scale.

Fortunately, if networks do not occupy the other end of that scale then any opposition we set up between them and hierarchies is one based only in our desire to box things up in neat packages with clean boarders, rather than in fact. This, then, means we need to ask ourselves what is to be gained from viewing these concepts as opposed to each other rather than as specific points on a scale of relational complexity? In which cases is it valuable to hold the oppositional view and in which is it beneficial to take the larger, gradated, view into account.

Talking about this stuff in terms of entropy can help us understand the dynamic role of networks and databases in creating information. I am going to use an example from mechanical engineer Seth Lloyd to explain what I mean.

A screen can be used to illuminate the point. The lowest entropy system possible on a screen is one filled with a solid color; lets say red. This means that each pixel is registering the same bit of information, red. Low entropy systems provide so little information that they do not offer much in terms of meaning. At the opposite end of the entropy scale is a screen where every pixel registering a different color. Again we get a meaningless image, however this time the image is highly complex. Both low and high entropy confound our attempts to draw meaning from the world around us. It is only in the intermediate stage, where the pixels are registering different colors, but in a controlled enough way that a picture forms, that we can draw meaning from the image on the screen.

Hierarchies and narratives, occupying a space of less entropy will be less active in producing new information, but they are not so entropy free that they are devoid of meaning. In fact, it seems that they may have the advantage of being more directly meaningful than networks and databases. The network and database relationships are higher in entropy, and will be more active in the production of information, but lack the structure to provide as much context for making that information meaningful. I think this is why we see corporate hierarchies utilizing networks within their structures. They can use the network to generate new information/ideas, but encapsulate it within a larger hierarchical structure that provides the tools for crafting meaning and use out of that information.

I would love to hear how everyone else feels about our current world state in relation to these ideas. Entropy is always increasing, and we do seem to be stuck in a world where informational entropy is taking off at an exponential rate. Is this something we should fear? Are we in danger of playing out every information variable, so that it becomes impossible to produce new meaningful content? What new processes might be available to us, with which meaningful content could be generated when the current methods fail?

Loosely related to the above is the issue of selfhood. I am intrigued with the dissonance in our culture between the loosening of the boundaries of the self, and the idea that now more than ever we have to tools to individualize our experience of the world. Our selfhood is being dissolved with a realization of a context dependant existence yet now more than ever we are sold the idea of our individuality. Was our idea of self less entropic in time past, yet more meaningful? In current times, is selfhood in danger of becoming meaningless due to the fact that we are allowed to craft more finely detailed, more entropic identities? Can we avoid this? Is it worth avoiding?
　

Empowerment

Everyone in the dept who responded to the email invite to this site should now have full "administrator" control over it. I'm not sure exactly how extensive that is, but you should be able to do whatever to it, beyond creating your own posts and threads you can change the whole design of the thing, maybe even delete it. If you so wish. Click on "customize" in the upper right if you want to check it out....

Questions

What is next for contemporary painting? If I knew that I'd never have to work again.

We noticed there has been a return to tradition in painting, what could be some of the causes? Do you mean folks like Tomma Abts and Mark Grotjhan? I think their stuff looks like 1910s abstraction, talk about traditional, or maybe I should say conservative. Why this now seems prevalent is a good question. And maybe it dovetails with another question that came up about where formalism stands today. Definitely formalism today will function differently, since its appearances earlier in modernism had heavily to do with its ability to propel forward the historical project of "advanced" painting. Today few if any are going to base their practice on some idea of historical project. Also, to quote Nicos Papastergiadis, "The formal innovations of abstraction were believed to be the foundations of a new universal language." He's talking about people like Kupka, Kandinsky, Malevich. But who today believes in that idea of abstraction? I talk a little about how formalism gets situated today here. Remember the Ken Johnson quote about why Mary Heilmann looks so relevant today: "she is a postmodern scavenger but unlike Sherrie Levine and Peter Halley whose parodic abstractions deconstruct modernist myths she takes 20th-century art history as her personal toy box." Discussion? I'll bring beer.

Tomma Abts

Why is it considered necessary, by many, to live in NY to be an artist? I know a young artist, Matt Greene, who after moving from LA to Brooklyn after only one year packed up again and moved to New Mexico, just outside of Sante Fe. You can't just go anywhere, but you can now be in Santa Fe, which is amazing. But only if, like Matt, you already have a gallery or two and are well connected within networks of effective artworld operators. As I say here, in the midst of a longer discussion about painting today, "artists in New York now face the same problem as artists anywhere. Showing only in town is no longer enough; one needs to always show elsewhere. Mobility is power now, and the hierarchy that exists is not between New York and others. It's between those who can leave town - those who can travel - and those who can't."

(If Reed is reading this, I was just kidding about beer earlier on...)

One way to approach thinking about painting, and getting some clarity about what we mean by the term, is to break it down somewhat: it could refer to the current state of a certain discourse (with its own particular use of keywords and issues like abstraction, representation, edge, surface all organized in a way to give each a sense of stakes, greater and lesser urgency, etc.); it could refer to a particular history, tradition, canon (and how that's defined, who's in and who's out and why); it could be about the specifics of a situated material practice (the studio, the tools, the actual practice, which is where a lot of interest is today, Gerhard Richter is a great example, whereas as painting, his painting, used to be about theory and history, etc, now its something one/he does on a daily basis, the everyday practice of painting - but this gets interesting since sitting alone boxed up in a studio, cut off from the world, that doesn't really go with today's networking model); and then there's painting as a pop/anthro/sociological phenomenon (the reaction you get from your parents when you say you're a painter, how the image of the painter is used in ads, how you use or could use it as cultural capital, etc.). After breaking it down like this, it's easier to start putting together a more complex sense of things by seeing how all the above does or doesn't connect...

Translate current theoretical discussions regarding agency, criticality and globalization. What are the formal components and possibilities of the Internet? How do you perceive the relationship between painting and the study of informatics? Which mediums do you feel are the most relevant in contemporary art? And, how do you feel painting fits in to this? These are things I will, and hopefully already am, addressing in my lectures, discussion sessions and reading packet materials. So hopefully through those vehicles we'll get more into this. But feel free to post more specific opinions, challenges, questions on this site.

Has the importance of the market (think Damien Hirst) reduced the relevance of critical theory? As artists, how do we overcome the loss of theory or critical framework? Do you think that art PhDs would help? One argument for the PhD is that it would make the grad art program less marginalized at research universities, thus opening up more potential sources of funding through grants, etc. I don't see it, I think it's a bad idea. And that's because I think that the rise of networks and databases has increased the importance of art schools (for manufacturing professional networks for artists, which you only need two years for, at the most) and at the same time decreased the relevance of criticism (while good for networking, it's more and more of a struggle in grad programs to put together a compelling seminar). But again, this is one of the issues to be addressed in the lectures, discussions and readings.