New Media to Social Media: The Evolution of Technology Use in the Art World

The use of technology in the art world hails back to the evolution and use of photography in the nineteenth century.  From the technological inquiries of Eadweard Muybridge's zoopraxiscope (early moving image machine, 1879) to Jean Tingueley's self-destructing kinetic sculpture entitled Homage to New York (1960), art has functioned as a reflective response to technological developments.  Postmodernism (1970-present) continued to fuel more interest in performance, photo documentation of conceptually-made art, video, and later experimentation in intermedia art (mix of tradition visual art--painting, sculpture, printmaking, etc.--mixed with television and early computer use).  Nam June Paik's inventive use of programmable television was self-evident as a predecessor for the Internet as an artistic medium,  as noted by his monumental Electronic Highway (video sculpture) as seen below.

Electronic Superhighway (1995-96)by Nam June Paik
Smithsonian Museum of Art
http://thinkvisual.wordpress.com/tag/nam-june-paiks-electronic-superhighway/

On the heels of Paik in the 1980's evolved installation art, which typically converted an indoor gallery space  into a three dimensional space mixing electronic media with traditional forms.  The even later use of the Internet in the work of electronically curious artists, proved to be an active conduit for interactive and real time projects.  International viewer access to the internet and its artistic use has some critics questioning if the internet as an artistic forum is replacing the traditional gallery space as well.

Social media is the latest investigatory forum for the 21st century artist.  Today,  artists use social media interaction as a dialectic and/or a form of documentation, such as the work of Man Battlock's use of Twitter as a form of sculptural documentation of the social media process in his piece called The People's Table.  http://www.thepeoplestable.com/  Clicking on the various Twitter pictures, links the computer user to the that person's Instagram profile.  In addition, online art journals query and critic the new use of social media as an art form, questioning its intellectual potential.  It may well be a half a century's time to determine its trajectory, but it certainly will prove to be a new threshold for cultural art production worldwide http://www.artpapers.org/feature_articles/feature1_2013_0708.htm

Lawrence Alloway's "Art and the Communication Network": the Future Basis of Social Art Media

The British art critic, Lawrence Alloway (London 1926-1990), was also an author credited with the coinage of the term "Pop Art."  As the senior curator of art at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York (1961-66) he wrote about much art that was concerned with mass media and consumerism.  As someone who was friends with artists, other critics and museum aficionados, he became very well acquainted with the art world, which he later dubbed as a communication network.

 Photograph taken by Alexander Liberman of a gathering at his home

 c.1965 (from left to right: Lawrence Alloway, Tatiana Liberman, Barnett

   Newman, Sylvia Sleigh, Helen Frankenthaler (standing), Robert Motherwell

         and Annalee Newman)

As the social media world sorts itself out as having a kind of systematic order and hierarchy, the paradigm that Alloway puts forth as that which is the art world's foundational structure, may be a suggested format.  As written about in the Tate blog http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/art-world-network-and-other-alloway-keywords Alloway saw the art world thusly:

The artwork starts its life in the artist’s studio or ‘work-place’, where it might be seen by a small audience before moving on to the commercial art gallery, a private collection, or a public collection. From either of the three transit hubs it will likely move into a museum exhibition, which will shape its entry into the ‘fourth context’, literature, in the form of exhibition catalogues, art magazine reviews or general interest magazine features. In each case, the diagnosis is not positive for the object, as it is ‘no longer substantially present as an object’ once the progression from studio to literature is enacted. For Alloway, the final stage represented a kind of flattening with the intrusion of literature. Within this progression, Alloway indicated the key players: art historians, curators, collectors, critics and dealers who, by acting out their specific role, incite a role-blurring as the need arose around the promotion of the art or the artist. Not surprisingly, the critic, or writer, has the most altered role at the mid-century because he or she is in the interpretative function of a speeded-up distribution cycle. Of this role, he remarked, ‘The typical strategy of an art critic today is to look for ways to reduce the quantity of art which the network handles so easily’.

If we superimpose today's  social media's template of blogs, micro blogs, and general social networking capabilities, the work of the artist may initially be seen online by a critic such as Alloway, shown in an online exhibition, and written about on a Museum blog or an online periodical by such a critic.  This format, which is already in use, already creates a myriad of opportunities for art exposure, but does not meet Alloway's goals to reduce the quantity of art which the network handles so easily.  Of course, it  is only a selected few artists who may grace the web pages of the MOMA, Guggenheim, Whitney or more recently The New Museum (the major contemporary art venues of Manhattan), yet the possibilities are endless.  In the future which is in its formation stages at present, there will evolve a kind of stratification system that will create a hierarchy of what may become an academic avant garde to a kitsch garde, which will be discriminated by types of readers from the most sophisticated to those who want to merely keep up with links to what is trendy.  If Alloway were alive today, he may have chuckled about how complex  and chaotic a system the web is, but it be certain that his critique of it would be smart and savvy.  We will see what the developmental future holds, and who will form and critique it.

Access and Equity in the Fine Arts

According to Fox News this past September 2013, fifteen percent of Americans do not use the internet, with seven percent by choice.  Eight percent can't afford to, and travel to computer access in libraries and at work outside the home.  In 1995, a mere fourteen percent of people stated they went online, five years later fifty percent admitted use, and seven years later in 2007, three quarters of the American population were online.  http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/25/pew-survey-finds-that-15-percent-americans-dont-use-internet/

So where does this leave artists? It can be safe to say, that most artists prefer to be shut up in their studio spaces thinking, conceptualizing, and producing art long before the days of Vermeer's famous painting The Artist in His Studio. The idea of marketing---off the net and on---is too much of a left brain activity that interferes with the preferable right brain I-need-to-be-in-my-studio sensibility.  The most common form of marketing for artists is his or her personal artwork website which includes art documentation, art philosophies and a vitae which pales in importance to a condensed version on the webpage of a prestigious gallery.

JohannesVermeer
Year	c. 1666
Type	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	130 cm × 110 cm (51 in × 43 in)
Location	Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer

JohannesVermeer

c. 1666

Oil on canvas

130 cm × 110 cm (51 in × 43 in)

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Vermeer

Emerging artists who can barely pay their studio rent and supplies rely on library or work access, and rarely merit the free access and gallery web representation that well-established artists enjoy.  Sophisticated galleries pay administrative workers to continually update their blogs, mini-blogs as well as contacting contributing writers to well-read art journals, developing press releases for newspapers (hard copy and online),  either by phone or email.  Catalogs are produced of artists' work which coincides with group or solo shows, that can either be purchased online or seen virtually.  Exhibition mailings can also be easily sent via pdf formats to thousands of clients, museums, university art galleries and the like.

Certainly, in this world of have and have nots, artists remain a small percentage of this composite mix.  Rarely does this demographic group separate into different ethnic profiling of use (as statistics indicate for Americans in general).  Artists are generally poor, and  usually only those who have snagged academic teaching jobs as a base salary can claim middle income as their status.  Indeed, the so-called digital divide is not as straightforward demographically for visual artists as it is for other American populations inclusive of students and the workforce.  http://socialmediatoday.com/clifffigallo/439390/digital-divide-infographic

Yet, on rare occasions, artists who have applied and received stipends as well as residencies for electronic art have used the internet as an artistic medium, which can produce extraordinary statements about the internet. At other times, artists collaborate in home studios to produce critical works.  http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204619004574318373312061230
One such artistic project is called Wikipedia Art and according to its the collaborations of two artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, was originally intended to be art composed on Wikipedia, but was shut down after fifteen hours of its birth as being controversial. It is works such as this, which represents electronic media work which is both conceptual and analytical, that will become part of the oeuvre of both the marketing artist, and the artist who dares to critique the developing medium itself.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzkJ9fK68zQ&feature=player_embedded

The Rise and Fall of Art Research: The Library vs. the Web and Social Media

As a student for many years without the use of the internet, I found myself at libraries thumbing through card catalogs hoping to find the text that would give me insight to my homework,  to my thesis, and to my dissertation.  In finding my much needed book(s), I would trudge up stairs or onto elevators hoping, with crossed-fingers, that it would be on the stacks.  I'd fumble through small pieces of paper, almost memorizing the letters and numbers of the book's call codes, only to be much of the time, disappointed that it was checked out.  Trying and hoping again, I'd move on to the next scrap of paper to start my book search again.  Finally, with books stashed in knapsack, I'd hope for an empty desk or table to begin my work.  Later, as a doctoral student at New York University, I was pleased to have a study carrel and created my own micro library (after of course, I trudged down with the book weight again on my back to the check out desk and then back to the carrel)  Fondly remembering NYU's Philip Johnson designed Bobst Library (and that the art books were on the seventeen floor), I definitely got my share of exercise.

NYU's Bobst Library Courtesy tarynmcpherson via Flickr

Years later, as I continue to spend my time teaching art in northern California, I look at the piles of slides in my office and wonder what to do with them, as I haven't used them in years.  I am seemingly married to my personal laptop, where I research still images of art from databases of museums and libraries and compose PowerPoint projection lectures.  New to using either Vista or Blackboard programs, I stumble as a self-taught professor in learning the exciting and sometimes frustrating tools of teaching online.  I have never taught a sole online course in studio art, which I think would be a bit distancing in my ability to analyze works of art, but I do enjoy the ability to find available to all readers scholarly articles, images as well as artist's videos that enrich my contact teaching.  The below video about the painter Elizabeth Murray on Art21 is an example.

Out of all the social media that I have explored, the mirco-blogger of Twitter seems the most potentially helpful to to disseminate information to students, on a regular newsfeed prototype of information.  Seemless amounts of information with links from professional artists, museums, art institutions and businesses flutter down the computer screen in appears to be overwhelming. Yet, in the process of choosing to follow this person or that institution, you create, if you will, a card catalog of information in a stylized library.  Clicking on links that lead to more links of info and even blogs, creates a maze of information. It's up to the student to single out what is pertinent to his or her research.   Yet, for the sake of nostalgia and the book as an art form, there's nothing like the look, feel and intimacy of a book. The convenience of the web serves present and future students well, yet, I pre-grieve the loss of the solemn library as a kind of religious space...filled with the physical presence of human intellectualism.

Postmodern Commercial Social Media in the Art World, Does it Work?

I stopped watching television in 1974.  Why?  As Marshall McLuhan reportedly stated, The Medium is the Message was seemingly true, and as far as I was concerned the message was Buy this, and your life will be complete.  As a young artist, I grabbed my backpack, paints, and a journal and headed for the woods on a regular basis.  The first time I worked on a computer was 1989 (graphics) and in 1990 was given an office with a computer in my now long-term professor position at a rural University in northern California.  It took me a little while to figure out my Apple turn-on button.  It has changed my life in some commonly known good ways, and has filled my mind and thoughts with that of which I can do without.  The TV commercials I eschewed now come to me while I work in constant flow of cryptic messages.

Northern Sierras, California

It's true that social media had an opportunity to communicate with its buyers.  Tempted by five dollar or 20% discounts, shoppers can sign away their email addresses to businesses to receive even more discounts.  Frugal buyers saw those opportunities as ways to balance out their monthly budget, but alas, didn't realize that they would be bombarded by, at times, with daily offers with discounts and promo codes for online shopping. To deter the bombardment, one could easily divert these promotions to one's spam folder, or in a more efficient manner, allow Google's Gmail to separate your promotions from one's regular email.  The only problem is that it's become overwhelming and seems a bit abusive.  In my experience, I've learned my lesson about disseminating my email address, and on a regular basis, put on two pairs of reading glasses to find that light colored word at the bottom of the email called UNSUBSCRIBE.

Artists who make objects versus conceptual artists who largely write, spend money to make those objects.  As an oil painter myself, I can easily spend $15 for a moderately good paintbrush, and as much as $50 for a studio sized tube of professional grade paint (gulp!).  If I don't have the time to build stretcher bars and cover them with canvas and gesso, I can seek out a pre stretched and primed commercial version for typically more than double the price.  This art-making process is costly (at least I don't make bronze sculptures), so what do I do?  Look for coupons!  Sigh. In a shrewd effort (I believe) to seduce artist buyers, art supply distributers will allow coupon codes on select items, so in some cases, for example, you may only receive a discount on some of your order.  A especially frugal artist may cost cross-analyze different suppliers, so by the time one chooses one, realizes the partial discount, tiredly hits the SUBMIT button in budgetary exhaustion.

I would surmise that all the artists in the visual arts---painters, printmakers, sculptors, ceramicists, and electronic media artists---all bargain shop, as well as other artists in music, theater, and performance.  We are not known to be especially good business people (and the ones who are, are commercially-focused, and in my opinion, in a different type caste), so we struggle with the funds we have to live on, as we are more so dedicated to getting the materials we need to produce our art forms.  I suppose that famous artists are sought to use and advertise art media so that the emerging artist feels he or she will become successful, but there are those artists, such as Andy Warhol and Lou Reed of the early Velvet Underground, who both rebelled against the social news media as young artists.  Warhol succumbed (partially as his art form and partially as a business man) to the commercial system, as the Warholian magazine, Interview, manifested in the 1980's.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interview_(magazine) 

Lou Reed, on the other hand (who I listened to with gritted honest teeth), had a disdain for media and relinquished his privacy by refuting journalistic media.  Nasty as he was reported to be, he stood his guardian dark angel position as a truthful artist for many years.  He was loved for it. http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/227588/jou rnalists-remember-interviewing-lou-reed/  Laurie Anderson, a brilliant performance artist since the 1970's is/was Reed's wife, took him home from the hospital last week to die in their home.  He died practicing tai chi while meditating on the trees seen from his window. http://music-mix.ew.com/2013/10/31/lou-reed-laurie-anderson/

He won.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Neo Socio-Political Art and Social Media Influence

In the late 1960's, artists who were staunchly remised by the bourgeois and the commercial art network, specifically focusing on Museums and their board members (who were generally deemed as corrupt), took to the streets. One of the major protesting coalitions was the Art Worker's Coalition or AWC in New York City, which demanded fairness in the gallery and the museum scene. It was a coalition of artists, critics, museum workers and filmmakers who targeted the city's museums, specifically New York's Museum of Modern Art, asking for various reforms. The posture of the group was largely multicultural and maintained a feeling of general alienation.  The seemingly overlooked artist populations of women and non-Euro-Americans also wanted a voice and artistic exposure in the top art exhibiting institutions as and to be reviewed in blue chip art journals by well-respected critics.

Protest at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 2, 
  1970, by the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), the Art 
   Workers Coalition (AWC), the Black & Puerto Rican 
Emergency Cultural Coalition. Photo: © Jan Van Raay.

Subgroups expanded, and a variety of smaller and more specific emerged over time, including that of the Guerrilla Girls (1985, feminist performance art coalition) and Gran Fury (1988, an activist gay and lesbian group that targeted public spaces as a forum for visual literacy and discussion).  Critical points of discussion pivoted upon the fact that women were generally not given exhibitions by major galleries and museums and that gays were unjustly accused in demographical society as an ill-focused malaise.

Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist poster
(1988). Courtesy of Kathe Kollwitz for the Guerrilla Girls.

Gran Fury at the Venice Biennale, 1990 (photo via cooper.edu)

Socio-political artists' groups exploded, and with the advent of the de-funding of 

US left-winged controversial artists by the American government's National Endowment of the Arts, they multiplied further.  Today, because of social 

networking, one can find cross-lists of socio-political artist causes that could 

cross one's eyes.  The media has been a convenient forum, yet, with so many 

stimuli, does the critical eye of discerning artists groups have a heard voice?  

Is there too much discourse and information on the web?  Does the current 

youth, have time beyond entertainment vices, to actually see and understand 

art politics? Do their senior generations have any real interest?

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/technology/21brain.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0  

The answer?  Yes and No.  My inference is that web reading is as selective as

 the choice-making/reading of the hardcopy information (books, newspapers, professional journals)  of the past.  You pick---even in politics---what you want 

to read.  Moreover, sifting through the myriad of museum and gallery blogs and websites, you read about what images visually catches your eye.  The process 

of learning about artists' political viewpoints can be presented in an occasional show, or what is called an alternative space, which, since the 1980's  typify a 

political arena for artistic protest.  Highways is one such performance space in 

Santa Monica, CA. Tim Miller, a veteran gay performance artist (who was also debunked one of the last NEA artist's grants), comments on gay marriage in 

his work Lay of the Land (2013).

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2009/05/review-lay-of-the-land-at-highways.html

So as his work is featured on blogs and websites in a timely fashion (and I'm 

sure tweeted on Twitter and more), so are all the protest artists who make their 

work political, or neo-socio political.  I have recontextualized socio-political as 

neo as its modus operandi has changed due to social media  and know that 

current major or minor cultural upheavals, will resultin a rage on the web 
through every social media format possible.  The question still remains, 
will the import of the message be latent or strong...as we as a culture 
pick and choose what we read or peer upon?  It's doubtful that the human 
brain can embrace all the the political voices and distill what is the most 
critical, but let us hope that social media is not only a result of an 
outpouring of voices--small and large--narcissistic or culturally empathetic--
but also an arena for reflective social consciousness.

Crowd-Source ˈkroudˌsôrs/ and Art - ɑːrt

Crowd·source

ˈkroudˌsôrs/

verb

gerund or present participle: crowdsourcing
1. obtain (information or input into a particular task or project) by enlisting the services of a number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.

I learned about crowd-sourcing today, and wasn't surprised by its definition.  We, in the competitive art world, know about this too well.  In fact, we pay to "crowd-source." Let me explain.

Artists are pressured to put together professional vitaes which include exhibitions, lectures, residencies, catalog publications and more so to be competitive for more of the same.  We pay fees to compete with one another, to be chosen to show, talk, work and publish to add to our vitaes.  It's quite an expensive cycle.  We are, indeed, throwing images in a metaphoric hope jar to win recognition so we don't have to pay fees and become well-recognized and legitimate and earn well-justified financial stipends.
Do we ever?  Most of us don't.  Yet, the compulsion to compete becomes a ritualistic lifestyle we all know too well.  It's a kind of dialectic that we engage in our solitary studios.  If we win, we gloat, if we don't, we scrutinize, judge, and emulate those gloaters who boast the gold jar of success.  It's part of the educational process of art-making, and spans a life time.  

Where do we look for crowd-sourcing opportunities?  There's a myriad of outlets through paid sources or arts commissions that post online ads.  We pay fees, upload digital images, and cross our fingers.  Most of the time we lose.  Yet this addictive process is the lifeline of the emerging artist art world, regionally, nationally and internationally. The  exhibition institutions who foster art crowd-sourcing, if you will, post a prospectus, outline their curatorial views, and ask you to submit at least three images by a reasonable deadline.  You pay a fee, and if you are accepted, you pay more to ship the work to the show. * If in fact you are competing for inclusion in a publication and are chosen, you sign an agreement of copyright relinquishment, and you normally collect no fees for monies earned by the institution.

So let us welcome the terminology and internet methodology of crowd-sourcing, to a twentieth century process known to all artists who once snail-mailed their dreams, now efficiently download them.


*http://bluelinearts.org/exhibits/calls.html

The Interface of Two Worlds: Art and Social Media

Listen to the words of the Canadian artist and gallery owner...

The Art World Invades Social Media - 1. How an artist and gallery owner makes the most of blogging 2. How Artists Use Facebook

September 11, 2010 at 11:34am on PodCamp Montreal 2010 [EN] Chauffer

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9501234

 ....and you will sense, as an artist, and new network of connecting artists with galleries, and vice versa.   The speaker's posture, as artist and gallery owner, is that blogging, Twitter and Facebook are new ways in which artists can market themselves.  Declaring that most artists are reticent about the process, she urges them to follow her, albeit initial timid interactions with social media, and try it.

 In 2011, artist Linda Fisler decided to poll, through a survey posed to visual artists, how they use Facebook.   Ms. Fisler learned that beyond personal use, artists use Facebook to post images of their artwork, learn from other artists, and to post arts-related events. Some artists claim that they find Facebook a social medium that helps market their work, yet Fisler warns that Facebook users may violate copyright laws and "steal" images from an artists webpage.  Ultimately, she advises artists to create a separate "fan page" to maintain more control over her interactions with viewers who look at their artwork.

Art History's Appropriation and The Web's User Generated Content

Art in mid-century felt the explosion of post WWII technology use, specifically in the consumer-oriented American market.  Artists began the experimental use of recycled technology, most noted in the case of Robert Rauschenberg, a New York transplant, who used old newspapers in his work:

Rauschenberg with a painting featuring John F Kennedy: his productivity mirrored Pop Art's obsesssion with consumerism Photo: GETTY IMAGES

                           http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1953011/Robert-Rauschenberg.html

Other artists, such as Andy Warhol, created massed-produced images of popular culture, hence contributing to what was known as "Pop Art."  The works were not hand-painted, but screen-printed in multiples in his New York studio named "The Factory".  Clement Greenberg, a well-noted critic at that time, decried imagery from pop culture, and considered it kitsch and a contributor to the dematerialization of high art.  Despite his protest, art evolved not only as pop culture derivative but also as a hybrid of cross-discipline forms, much like the work of Rauschenberg.  In the 1990's, Sherrie Levine who questioned the notion of "genius" and ownership appropriated images from well-known historical artworks and photographed them as her art.

In a Levine-like fashion, there exists, in the 21st C, an explosion of User Generator Content that appropriates from professionally created works.  According Larry Lessig, the web's most celebrated lawyers and a Harvard professor that there are pros and cons to such appropriated use of copyrighted material.  He too, predicts the timely evolution of this creative thrust of work as topically current and predictable given the advent of the web and its accessibility.  We must not forget the famous words of Marshal McLuhan---"The Medium is the Message"--- as a reference to television trumping radio...it is now the internet's hand of play in an international game of cards.