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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?> <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>unlike-us-reader-23</title> <link href="css/unlike-us-reader.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body id="unlike-us-reader" xml:lang="en-GB"> <div> <h1 id="toc_marker-22" class="article-title"><a id="Art-After-Social-Media--as-a-Rejection-and-Reflection--of-Free-Market-Conventions" />Art After Social Media as a Rejection and Reflection of Free Market Conventions</h1> <p class="slash">/</p> <h2 class="author-name"><a href="unlike-us-reader-34.xhtml#troemel">741</a></h2> </div> <div> <p>While the music, film, television, and print industries have each been radically overturned by digital technologies, fine art remains locked in a transitional period, negotiating a complex and relatively new relationship with social media. On one hand exists a utopian vision for art on the internet: a world where intellectual property is part of a commons, where authorship is synonymous with viewership, and where the designation between art and everyday life is fluid. On the other hand is an unprecedented rise of artists applying managerial strategies to themselves, of artists conceiving their identity as a brand to be developed through Facebook, for instance. This is a world where today’s 17-year-old creative arguably has a better handle on advertising techniques she can use to direct traffic to her Tumblr than our presidential candidates needed to have 70 years ago. Art after social media is both a shattering of art’s traditional relationship to capitalism and the hyper-charged embodiment of it.</p> <p>To qualify the idea that social media poses a challenge to the norms of art history, I’d like to start by identifying three conventions that are most threatened by art existing through social media.</p> <h3 class="text_subtitle">1. Authorship must be attributed to a work of art<strong></strong></h3> <p>The last time in history authorship was unimportant was prior to the printing press. Marshall McLuhan said,</p> <p class="quote">The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property. The rising consumer-oriented culture became concerned with labels of authenticity and protection against piracy. It was at this time the idea of copyright was born.<sup><a id="footnote-307605-1-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-307605-1">1</a></sup></p> <p>Art’s history is now a series of aesthetic accomplishments abbreviated to first and last names.</p> <h3 class="text_subtitle">2. Art is a form of property<strong></strong></h3> <p>Whether owned as a luxury investment, a civilizing tool for the middle class, a demonstration of aristocratic power, or a visual guide for religious narrative, art has always had an owner since the introduction of patronage.</p> <h3 class="text_subtitle">3. Art must be placed in a context that declares it to be art<strong></strong></h3> <p>As many writers and theorists have suggested, art exists for discourses and people who recognize it as such. To this day, in museums and galleries we still cling dearly to the sanctity of all that appears in those buildings as being art and all that occurs outside of them as being part of everyday life. Artworks that are not found within institutions carry with them the formal and conceptual codes created by those institutions, just as dogs that run away from home can now be apprehended through invisible tracking devices beneath their skin.</p> <p>These three mutually reinforcing conventions are what keep art tethered to being a commodity: all things that have an author are automatically a form of that author’s property, property must be recognized in private contexts, and context is guided by authorship.</p> <p>Then, like photography before it, social media was introduced and disrupted these rules by complicating where art exists. Postmodern theorists have long advocated an understanding of reality where there is no uniform vantage point, but a multiplicity of co-existing perspectives. This theory has real applicability when nearly every undergraduate art school student has a blog they are using to insert themselves in a historical discourse by creating online displays of their own work next to that of artists from the past forty years. Sometimes the perceptions of these different blog audiences overlap, though sometimes they remain separate. Online there is no more home base, no building or context that contains and describes art in a way that uniformly attributes meaning for all.</p> <p>After photography, it became apparent that more people were viewing images of physical artworks in magazines, books, and videos than they were seeing in person. Similarly, through social media the majority of views an artist’s work gets is not through her own website, but through the accumulated network of reblogs, links, and digital reproductions that surround it. One can think of this as the long tail of art’s viewership. Unlike the previous mode of authorship, the divide between artist and viewer becomes negligible when viewers of social media are able to more powerfully define the context (and thus the meaning) of a work than the artist herself. To be an author isn’t a fixed status but now a temporary role played alongside curator, promoter, and Wikipedia archaeologist.</p> <p>The ease and speed of reblogging allows art to travel as far and quickly as its audience commands it to. Throughout this process the first bit of information to be lost from the artwork is often the name, title, and date. This information is occasionally omitted on purpose; a way for the savvy Tumblr owner to wink at her historically informed audience who are able to identify the work without textual description. Other times contextual information is omitted from art images because it was never included in the source, or because the image is being used for a purpose entirely unrelated to the artist’s intentions. Here art is appropriated by non-artists as entertainment, office humor, a music video, or pornography. Murphy’s Law dominates: art images will be used for whatever they can possibly be used for when placed online. Through social media, art is reintroduced as an object of everyday life, creating an infinite loop between the two distinctions.</p> <p>Art’s relation to property has changed not only in the sense that it is able to be used for a variety of new everyday purposes, but also in the way that an infinite number of alterations can be made to a digital file. Art historians are used to the slow, responsive process of Rauschenberg erasing de Kooning, but through image editing and social networks the speed artists can respond to one another is at that of a real-time conversation. Portions of a work may be edited, added to, or re-arranged without destroying the original. Due to the balkanization of viewing audiences, many will inevitably interpret responsive artworks as originals – there is no home base.</p> <p>To sum up this idea, the utopian potential for art online most idealistically views the near-infinite world of digital images as a kind of commons, a place where the value of art is not located in its ability to be sold or critically praised but in its ability to continue to be reused, remade, or reblogged for whatever purposes its network of viewer-authors find significant.</p> <p>Without a traditional conception of property, authorship, or context in place, the work of artists using social media has transformed from a series of separated projects to a constant broadcast of one’s identity as a recognizable brand. This is to say that what the artist once did by creating externalized products has been swapped for an internalization of artistic commodification, using tagged images and text to highlight one’s self through humor, intellectualism, or camaraderie in social networks. The need to socially orient oneself has now been reversed from its normal position: today’s artist on the internet needs an audience to create art, as opposed to the traditional recipe that you need to create art to have an audience. Posting work to the internet with no social network readily in place is synonymous with the riddle ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ For young artists on the internet the answer to the forest question is ‘no’ – their work will easily go unnoticed, making their participation as a social brand an a priori necessity to contextualizing what they do as art. If Anton Vidokle suggested we are entering a period of ‘art without artists’, I’m instead suggesting we are present in a moment of artists without art.<sup><a id="footnote-307605-2-backlink" class="footnote-link" href="#footnote-307605-2">2</a></sup> </p> <p>Due to the foregone conclusion that once released images of one’s artwork online will be taken and used in whatever way possible, the new strategy of recognition is to contain conversation on one’s <em>own</em> Facebook wall, Twitter feed, or YouTube comments. ‘Follow me’, ‘Friend me’, ‘Subscribe and Comment’ – these are the endless pleas of a branded generation of artists struggling to gain the greatest amount of attention as capital. While digital images make for a lousy form of private property, the attention an artist can accrue around herself through branding can be leveraged into a more traditional notion of paid success as seen through gallery exhibitions, magazine features, books, and speaking engagements.</p> <p>The shrinking difference between social networking for the betterment of your art career and social networking as an art project unto itself may be part of a greater trend in our contemporary understanding of celebrity. Prior to reality television, the distinction between a celebrity’s private and public life was tenuously kept but widely believed. Gossip magazines served to satisfy our lust for celebrities beyond the brief screen time we were able to spend with them as public figures. Though the narrative arcs created by gossip magazines intentionally resembled the plot lines of the movies and television shows their subjects starred in, the sensationalized nature of these publications – disparagingly referred to as ‘rags’ – maintained an air of uncertainty over whether the private information being revealed in their pages was actually true or not. Reality television effectively banished these borders between public and private for the celebrities it created, ideally establishing a constant stream of people behaving as they would privately for the viewing of the public. The purportedly objective, documentary-style filming of people in everyday situations made the grainy, decontextualized still images of gossip magazines second rate material. The lure of real embarrassment, secrets, sex, violence, and all else quickly eclipsed the fictional characters portrayed by celebrities on sitcoms and other fictions, establishing a new dominance in cable television. Actors who once devoted time to projects, sets, and the performance of characters separate from themselves now increasingly choose to have the camera follow them in their day-to-day lives as celebrities. Similarly, artists who at one point may have made art now primarily spend time publicly exemplifying their lifestyle as an artist through Facebook.</p> <p>Art after social media is paradoxically the simultaneous rejection and reflection of capitalist logic, though I believe these two developments are reconcilable because they each contain parts of the other. For all that is communal about a decentralized network of artistic peers sharing and recreating each other’s work, the dispersion of this work takes the shape of free market populism, of the free exchange of information sorting itself out among those willing to produce and consume it. Without a bureaucratic establishment imbuing art with value, the art is free to be valuated in any way possible. This is a set up not unlike the secondary art auction market, where art critics’ opinions of work for sale mean little to nothing, and the bidding power of a room of collectors takes precedence.</p> <p>Oppositely, one can look at the highly individualized pursuit of brand recognition among artists employing social media as a constantly communal effort. Unlike the reality television star brand, young artists employing social media are not connected to a behemoth like Viacom or NBC and need to generate their popularity on a grassroots level. Brands are more often than not defined in relation to each other, and imply the ongoing support of a devoted audience. There is no successful artist brand built on an island, each requires a level of collaboration with viewers willing to share, follow, friend, and comment on the object of their interest. In other words, what is communal about the commons is run by an every-man-for-himself free market ideology and what is individual about personal branding is bolstered by a need for community. It’s very fitting that the Silicone Valley-based forefathers of social media, the California Ideology technologists who juggled utopianism and capitalism in each hand are the ones who are responsible for a generation of media obsessed artists who are now doing the very same thing.</p> <p><em>This text is a transcript of a lecture held on a Sunday Session at MoMA PS1, New York, on 18 March 2012.</em></p> <h6 class="references_title">References</h6> <p class="references">Fiore, Quentin and Marshall McLuhan. <em>The Medium is The Massage</em>, Berkeley: Gingko Press, 1967.</p> <p class="references-last">Vidokle, Anton. ‘Art Without Artists’, e-flux 16 (May, 2010), <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-artists/">http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-artists/</a>.</p> <div class="footnotes"> <h6 class="references_title">Notes</h6> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-307605-1" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-307605-1-backlink">1</a>.	Quentin Fiore and Marshall McLuhan, <em>The Medium is The Massage, </em>Berkely: Gingko Press, 1967.</p> </div> <div class="footnote"> <p class="xfootnote"><a id="footnote-307605-2" class="footnote-anchor" href="#footnote-307605-2-backlink">2</a>.	Anton Vidokle, ‘Art Without Artists’, <em>e-flux </em>16 (May, 2010), <a href="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-artists/">http://www.e-flux.com/journal/art-without-artists/</a>.<em> </em></p> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html>