Great piece. I wonder where art "lives" right now. I agree that it's not in web 3, not in crypto. Ostensibly not in the capital a, capital w Art World. I am not impressed by "dissident art" and in fact am often actively annoyed by it.
But I do think there is an avant-garde somewhere. In Internet culture world, something weird I've noticed is that memes are even in a state of decay. No one has innovated on that in a long time. I can think of individual examples of things that might count, but no scene.
I’ve been operating an art movement for four years now and it’s been extremely hard to break through for many different reasons. I don’t think art is dead. There’s plenty of radical art being created. I just think that there aren't a lot of resources or desires to be seen. especially for artists who do not have a BFA/MFA + the network that comes with it. I also think that there are not many art movements because people are too focused on individualism rather than collectivism.
agree. And individual art now is not solo exhibitions. It is meditation, hiking and renovating houses. Art of being self - not institutionalized art, that is hidden from museums, catalogues and readings. It becomes more obvious, collective and institutionalized as new Merry Pranksters appear
I think the tastemakers are the ones who have real estate and those people are looking for monetary gain to sustain a business. editors, curators, A&R are the ones that have to take the risk…often times there is a publicist working to push art to the forefront. Those services cost thousands of dollars. You need to market and brand yourself to fit into a perfect pitch that is relevant to whatever trend is going on at the moment. So I’m not sure really if you can move culture by solely giving no fuck. You need money or clout or a really good publicist. At the same time I did see several cultural pieces around doxxing, cancellation and risk towards the end of this year….so it really just takes time for the mainstream to catch up.
Travis Diehl wrote a piece in Spike Magazine Summer 2024 headline was "in an era of doxxing, defunding, and cancellation nobody wants to be the culture war's next lightning rod." He writes that playing it safe may be the only option for survival. December 2024 MOMA Research & Development had a salon about Cancellation & Erasure. They briefly brought up celebrity cancellation then switched over to focus on surveillance, redacting and internet theory.
We had an exhibition of artworks at Public Works Administration in Spring 2023 "Death of the Subject explores the disturbing flow of media brainwashing and doxxing culture and suggests to break the cycle by moving offline." https://uncensorednewyork.org/arts-and-education#death-of-the-subject There was one attempt to shut the show down because we had a doxxed artist exhibiting work and there was no coverage.
My point being that risk is happening but it's on the margins so most of the art world does not know about it. Plus it's hard to sell to the mainstream unless the artist has a name for themselves... money, clout + a good publicist. Like Diehl said "it's risky for some people to exist".
We've been counteracting cancellation for four years now have had some really interesting conversations with museum directors...bookers...venues, etc. Most times the conversation ends with people saying "that's terrible, but I can't be public facing with this" and we work with artists who have gone through really terrible circumstances...it's reflective in the work they make. They have nothing to lose. We will have a book + exhibition out this spring reflective of all the work we've done.
People tend to group people into categories or identities I think partially because topics need to be easily digestible for consumers . So I do think if mainstream picks up this sort of work it will be packaged as work made by "cancelled artists" or "artists who takes risks". It's all so cringey.
In seriousness, I think Milady was the only thing truly imaginative to come out of crypto. Now Remilia is moving into some corporate surrealsist company-as-artwork which I believe will produce some interesting results.
(I also think it's appropriate that the avant-garde graph ends with Trump because he was the only Artist from 2016-2020.)
I concur with much of this, and love a Brad Troemel polemic as much as anyone, but tezos art is where things are happening, and has been for the past 3 or 4 years; a dynamic global underground outsider art community, slowly and cumbersomely being acknowledged by moma, hans ulbrich and assorted gatekeepers of the week. Objkt.com is its heart, see artists such as Sabato Visconti, Santiago Márquez and Anna Malina for a good idea of where things are at ...
I find the conclusion that the avant garde cannot exist in a climate of fear as quite odd given that the avante gardes of the 20th century were mostly created in periods of war, social disruption, and poverty. Even Greenberg in the post war period could strike fear in the hearts of most artists at the time and certainly had the power to ‘cancel’ their careers so to speak. I assume the fear you are referring to is the fear of being cancelled. I think its overstated. I think the avant garde is more likely a phenomenon of the 20th century and those impulses have gone elsewhere in the culture or dont really make sense anymore.
i’m sorry but this article is woefully ignorant of the incredible global and cutting edge digital art scene on Tezos -primarily minted through OBJKT. To me it’s just evidence of a lack of research. As someone educated in Art history and having spent a lifetime in the artworld the quality of work and the experimental culture is astonishing -utterly fulfills the criteria for the avant-garde—i could easily list 100 artists on Tezos from all over the world making incredible work. Do the research. Talk to the people on the frontlines.
Appreciate this, as much as I have point of critique or whatever. But what I've thought about a lot in the last year that you articulate so well here is how the website / art using net as medium ended up being the form of media art that was never successfully recuperated
Feels like to pick up the pieces we need to go back to extremely basic questions about what the internet even is, what digital technology is etc. The failure of a lot of internet art trajectories seems to be bound up in these inherited global village, information-superhighway, early internet subculture-ism frameworks, which are just plainly false.
“The primitive lived in a world in which all knowledge and skill were simultaneously accessible to all members of the group; contemporary man has created an information environment that embraces all technologies and all cultures in an inclusive experience.
The Balinese, who have no word for art, say, ‘We do everything as well as possible.’ This observation draws attention to the fact that primitive art serves quite a different end from Western art. Like the Balinese, however, Electronic Man approaches the condition in which it is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art"
Great piece. I wonder where art "lives" right now. I agree that it's not in web 3, not in crypto. Ostensibly not in the capital a, capital w Art World. I am not impressed by "dissident art" and in fact am often actively annoyed by it.
But I do think there is an avant-garde somewhere. In Internet culture world, something weird I've noticed is that memes are even in a state of decay. No one has innovated on that in a long time. I can think of individual examples of things that might count, but no scene.
post-internet to podcast pipeline, reporting in o7
I’ve been operating an art movement for four years now and it’s been extremely hard to break through for many different reasons. I don’t think art is dead. There’s plenty of radical art being created. I just think that there aren't a lot of resources or desires to be seen. especially for artists who do not have a BFA/MFA + the network that comes with it. I also think that there are not many art movements because people are too focused on individualism rather than collectivism.
"I also think that there are not many art movements because people are too focused on individualism rather than collectivism." 🎯
agree. And individual art now is not solo exhibitions. It is meditation, hiking and renovating houses. Art of being self - not institutionalized art, that is hidden from museums, catalogues and readings. It becomes more obvious, collective and institutionalized as new Merry Pranksters appear
I think the tastemakers are the ones who have real estate and those people are looking for monetary gain to sustain a business. editors, curators, A&R are the ones that have to take the risk…often times there is a publicist working to push art to the forefront. Those services cost thousands of dollars. You need to market and brand yourself to fit into a perfect pitch that is relevant to whatever trend is going on at the moment. So I’m not sure really if you can move culture by solely giving no fuck. You need money or clout or a really good publicist. At the same time I did see several cultural pieces around doxxing, cancellation and risk towards the end of this year….so it really just takes time for the mainstream to catch up.
re: cultural pieces around doxxing — were these in the form of writing or diff mediums?
Travis Diehl wrote a piece in Spike Magazine Summer 2024 headline was "in an era of doxxing, defunding, and cancellation nobody wants to be the culture war's next lightning rod." He writes that playing it safe may be the only option for survival. December 2024 MOMA Research & Development had a salon about Cancellation & Erasure. They briefly brought up celebrity cancellation then switched over to focus on surveillance, redacting and internet theory.
We had an exhibition of artworks at Public Works Administration in Spring 2023 "Death of the Subject explores the disturbing flow of media brainwashing and doxxing culture and suggests to break the cycle by moving offline." https://uncensorednewyork.org/arts-and-education#death-of-the-subject There was one attempt to shut the show down because we had a doxxed artist exhibiting work and there was no coverage.
My point being that risk is happening but it's on the margins so most of the art world does not know about it. Plus it's hard to sell to the mainstream unless the artist has a name for themselves... money, clout + a good publicist. Like Diehl said "it's risky for some people to exist".
We've been counteracting cancellation for four years now have had some really interesting conversations with museum directors...bookers...venues, etc. Most times the conversation ends with people saying "that's terrible, but I can't be public facing with this" and we work with artists who have gone through really terrible circumstances...it's reflective in the work they make. They have nothing to lose. We will have a book + exhibition out this spring reflective of all the work we've done.
People tend to group people into categories or identities I think partially because topics need to be easily digestible for consumers . So I do think if mainstream picks up this sort of work it will be packaged as work made by "cancelled artists" or "artists who takes risks". It's all so cringey.
"you cannot produce an avant-garde in a climate of fear"! nice! damn!
Milady
In seriousness, I think Milady was the only thing truly imaginative to come out of crypto. Now Remilia is moving into some corporate surrealsist company-as-artwork which I believe will produce some interesting results.
(I also think it's appropriate that the avant-garde graph ends with Trump because he was the only Artist from 2016-2020.)
Thank you for the great reflections
The return to consistently seeing your takes has been very nice.
I concur with much of this, and love a Brad Troemel polemic as much as anyone, but tezos art is where things are happening, and has been for the past 3 or 4 years; a dynamic global underground outsider art community, slowly and cumbersomely being acknowledged by moma, hans ulbrich and assorted gatekeepers of the week. Objkt.com is its heart, see artists such as Sabato Visconti, Santiago Márquez and Anna Malina for a good idea of where things are at ...
Nice graphic at the top. Looks like it all went downhill after the Soros Center for Contemporary Art opened. 2014-24 was a dark age, we need to Make America Fun Again like 1994-2014: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/make-america-fun-again-tech-culture-golden-age
I find the conclusion that the avant garde cannot exist in a climate of fear as quite odd given that the avante gardes of the 20th century were mostly created in periods of war, social disruption, and poverty. Even Greenberg in the post war period could strike fear in the hearts of most artists at the time and certainly had the power to ‘cancel’ their careers so to speak. I assume the fear you are referring to is the fear of being cancelled. I think its overstated. I think the avant garde is more likely a phenomenon of the 20th century and those impulses have gone elsewhere in the culture or dont really make sense anymore.
i’m sorry but this article is woefully ignorant of the incredible global and cutting edge digital art scene on Tezos -primarily minted through OBJKT. To me it’s just evidence of a lack of research. As someone educated in Art history and having spent a lifetime in the artworld the quality of work and the experimental culture is astonishing -utterly fulfills the criteria for the avant-garde—i could easily list 100 artists on Tezos from all over the world making incredible work. Do the research. Talk to the people on the frontlines.
Appreciate this, as much as I have point of critique or whatever. But what I've thought about a lot in the last year that you articulate so well here is how the website / art using net as medium ended up being the form of media art that was never successfully recuperated
Feels like to pick up the pieces we need to go back to extremely basic questions about what the internet even is, what digital technology is etc. The failure of a lot of internet art trajectories seems to be bound up in these inherited global village, information-superhighway, early internet subculture-ism frameworks, which are just plainly false.
Like and comment for the last line, it was quite fine.
Unironically incellectuals was the last and latest post internet art phenomenon
“The primitive lived in a world in which all knowledge and skill were simultaneously accessible to all members of the group; contemporary man has created an information environment that embraces all technologies and all cultures in an inclusive experience.
The Balinese, who have no word for art, say, ‘We do everything as well as possible.’ This observation draws attention to the fact that primitive art serves quite a different end from Western art. Like the Balinese, however, Electronic Man approaches the condition in which it is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art"
— Marshall McLuhan