(L-R) Christopher Knight, Ryan Schreiber, Isaac Fitzgerald, and Orit Gat. (Superscript 2015. Photographer: Gene Pittman. Courtesy the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis)

A version of this essay was initially written for a panel discussion with Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber, Isaac Fitzgerald from Buzzfeed Books, and LA Times art critic Christopher Knight at Superscript: Arts Journalism & Criticism in a Digital Age, a conference at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Watch the panel discussion here. 

Look at the title. I’m asking has, not “how.” Contemporary art is still in the early stages of the digital shift that other industries have already experienced. To better understand what might be happening to art criticism, we should look to other fields and assess the structures that have developed as a response to the internet’s effect.

There are two facets to this “internet effect”: The first is in publishing and circulation, the second in the way this dissemination shapes a discipline and the discourse around it. Music and literature experienced the digital shift in a much more extreme way than contemporary art has thus far. This experience began with circulation—the adjustment from object to mp3 and from independent, or even megachain bookstores, to Amazon—but continued with an altered discourse that poses really valid questions about the function of criticism. I’ll call it “service criticism.” In a nutshell, “service criticism” is criticism that’s discovery-oriented. Criticism that assumes the reader who is looking for recommendations.

Take Pitchfork, for example. I remember the first time I heard of Pitchfork. I was a teenager and I had a friend who spent his days reading Pitchfork reviews, then (excuse the illegality of the following) downloaded all the albums he thought he’d find interesting in order to listen to them. (The embrace of streaming technologies helps with the legality question today.) That’s a great use of criticism: as a direction, pointing to the good in the midst of overproduction.

The use of a word like “service” sounds as if  it indicates a value judgment, and one that I’m not making. I’m not making it because, as an art critic, I don’t write in an industry that has generated much service-criticism yet. When I write about an exhibition, I often write for print publications, which means the show has closed a while before the review was printed, and so I’m already writing in past tense. I also assume that whoever (and however small) my audience is, few of them—almost none—are art collectors who are reading the review as a way of assessing a given artist’s worth.

Read the full article here.

Image from Art+Tech: Virtual Reality, November 2014. Photo: CODAME.

Over the past year, San Francisco and the Bay Area have come to be defined in the national sphere by the thinkpiece. In the constant stream of articles about gentrification, the Ellis Act evictions, artist displacement, and arts nonprofits closing left and right in response to the city’s rising population and booming tech industry, it might be surprising to note that a number of tech companies are investing increasingly in artist residency programs. In fact, two of the biggest tech companies in the region—Facebook and Autodesk—maintain active residency programs. For companies without the infrastructure for such endeavors, local art and technology nonprofit CODAME offers to pair tech companies with artists for individual projects through their “Adopt An Artist” program. While there is a lot of conversation (and concern) in the Bay Area regarding the tech industry’s lack of support and philanthropy for the arts, the questions seem skewed towards trying to figure out how to cater to tech wealth, rather than thinking through art’s role in the tech industry itself. This text surveys corporate residency programs in the Bay Area which exemplify how artists engage with this industry, and begins to sketch out possible implications—or potential—for the art infrastructure and its relationship with tech creativity.

Autodesk’s Pier 9 Artist-in-Residence program is housed in the corporation’s immense facility in Pier 9 along the waterfront in downtown San Francisco. Artists apply for four-month residencies at the space, which provides access to their workshop, a stipend, and the ability to work directly with the company’s engineers on their projects. The program maintains a diverse pool of applicants who range from fashion designers to chefs, architects, and technologists as well as fine artists, who have access to Autodesk’s high-end equipment, materials, and software, plus training and skillshare programs. Although it is not an explicit part of the program, the focus on “makers” over “fine artists” benefits Autodesk as well. The company launched Autodesk 123D in 2009 as free 3D modeling software designed for the general consumer, and they acquired the DIY info sharing website Instructables in 2011. The AIR program began at Instructables before their purchase by Autodesk, who developed it into a much larger initiative. All AIR residents are required to post their projects to the website, so there is a direct tie into the site’s content. Envisioning how people create with their tools, or their competitor’s tools, in a variety of scenarios is clearly a valuable asset to the company, especially as the mainstream culture moves into a maker culture.

Read the full article here.

This week’s column features the smart, funny work of artist Justin Kemp (in particular, I love his adding to the internet project, which was too big to be included here). I found his work on the Rhizome ArtBase,”an online home for works that employ materials such as software, code, websites, moving images, games and browsers towards aesthetic and critical ends.” Check it out!

I have never approached a gallery or reached out to the art world beyond maintaining a basic website because I haven’t had a body of work I felt the least bit thrilled with–until now. Meanwhile, my best friend–a successful radio morning-show guy–spent the wee hours of his recent 40th birthday accusing me of being an ivory-tower artist and insisting that I was insane not to be promoting myself on Facebook and other social media. Any defense I could mount sounded elitist and snobby despite my best intentions. It’s been a few days and I’m still having a hard time articulating my reservations. On the one hand, of course I want vast numbers of people to see my work for its own sake and make of it what they will. On the other hand, I am repulsed by the idea of jumping into the public pool just because all the other lemmings did, naively unconcerned with the ramifications of having their lives irreversibly put on public display, just to play trite ego-games in an environment controlled by big business, monitored by government, and all of it propped up by nuclear-energy-guzzling machines made in places with questionable labor and environmental practices, whence they ultimately return on toxic waste barges.

Leaving my paranoia aside, I also feel that an artist today would do well to cultivate a little mystique. Despite my friend’s imploring to the contrary, I feel that yes, I will indeed be somehow rewarded someday for not succumbing to social media, because I feel that a gallerist wants to be the discoverer of the artist as a diamond in the rough, and how can you “discover” someone who already has 3,000 “likes” or “friends?” Am I an e-prude?

Golly. I can’t tell if you’ve come to the absolute right place or the wrongest of wrong places for an answer. Like you, I’ve eschewed most forms of social networking, and while I’m maybe not quite as paranoid (at least on the good days), I do share some of your concerns about privacy and what you winningly call “ego games.” So my answer might be a little bit preaching-to-the-choir, but I’ll do my best to help you puzzle through your current situation.

Justin Kemp, proclaiming my love at a scenic overlook on top of a mountain, 2010. Tree carving; video on website 1’30”

First, let’s deal with practical matters. If you really want to attempt a defense that doesn’t sound elitist, you could cite the studies on Facebook and anxiety and what it does to your self-esteem. Or you could try a more pragmatic tack by talking about how fast technology turns over (remember MySpace and Friendster?), something that the techno-pundits are already discussing. You could mention that Facebook’s IPO was miserable compared to financial projections, the site is losing users, and co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and board member Peter Thiel are dumping millions of shares of stock from their portfolios—not a good sign. And in case you thought FB was the only villain, Twitter is now going to be spamming everyone’s feed with “promoted tweets” based on their interests. Because nothing in this world is truly free, all social media moves in the direction of targeted advertising, which they accomplish by tracking your data.

But really what you need to do, instead of mounting an airtight defense, is to stop comparing yourself to your friend—and stop letting him compare his situation to yours, because they’re completely different. He has a vested interest in being a part of social media: as a radio-show host, he’s a public figure with a specific message. Radio stations are supported by advertising, which the radio station sells to businesses by telling them how many people will hear their ads. They can increase that number of listeners, and then sell ads for more money, by using social media to market the show. By tweeting his political views or NOM NOM sushi lunch, your friend could be ultimately ensuring that he has a job next month. (Just as I’m sure that my editors are reading this right now and thinking, Yes, darling, get a damned Twitter account already and help us sell some advertising so we can keep on cutting checks for this column. But I digress.)

Justin Kemp, surfing with the sand between my toes (after brian wilson), 2010. Sandbox, Mac Pro, desk and chair in living room

Of course, you are an e-prude, at least by today’s standards. If that makes you feel insufferably bad, you’re either going to have to give it up and get publicly naked on the internet or else cultivate a sense of pride and learn to wear your smug, elitist, aloof moral superiority (because that’s certainly what you’ll be accused of) as a badge of honor. If you opt for the latter, recognize now that you may never get to have a normal conversation about the Internet again. No matter how neutrally you frame it, some people will look upon your lack of social media presence as a negative assessment of their own habits and get defensive and preachy. I spent ten years without a television, and learning that fact never stopped anyone from first heartily vowing that they never really watched TV either, and then following that up by recounting the plot of some idiotic sitcom that they were convinced I would just adore. I expect it’ll be the same with social media—your obvious expression of disinterest won’t make the proselytizers go away, so if you hold your ground just resign yourself to having that chat. But you’re a creative person, right? So surely you can figure out a creative way to get people looking at your work without compromising what you believe in.

I don’t know about this mystique thing, though, or the idea of being “rewarded” for shunning social media (the reward you get from not being on Twitter is that you don’t have to receive 140-character messages about anyone’s baby or puppy or gourmet sandwich—isn’t that enough?). While I’ve never run a gallery myself, it seems to me that gallerists prefer artists who can make good work, work that they can sell, in enough quantity to keep everyone happy. It’s my impression that they could care less if you have 3,000 “friends” or not, as long as they can do their job and pay the gallery’s rent. I am sure, however, that waiting at the soda fountain to get discovered like Lana Turner is not going to do the trick; but that doesn’t mean you need to jump into a pool that you find so completely offensive. I highly recommend that you spend a day or two at your local library reading art-career books like Art/Work, Taking the Leap, and others. These books will give you some alternate ideas on how to reach out and cultivate connections in the art community.

Justin Kemp, Status Updates, 2011. 26 short performances with Nick DeMarco at Vogt Gallery

I dig that social media isn’t your scene, and I’m glad that you both know yourself and stick to your principles, but the last bit of advice I want to dole out this week is that you can always change your mind. If you think of a brilliant way to use social media as part of, or in support of, your practice then by all means dive in. And maybe the next iteration of social networking will somehow be ecologically conscious and privacy-friendly, so never say never. Artists, even stubborn ones like you and me, should be open to the possibilities. Take this great new work of yours that you’re thrilled about and get it in front of people in a way that doesn’t leave a bad taste in your mouth. Perhaps someday social media will catch up to you, instead of the other way around.

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