a PDF of the full conference transcript

SUPERSCRIPT:
ARTS JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN A DIGITAL AGE
OFFICIAL CONFERENCE TRANSCRIPT
From May 28–30, 2015, the Walker Art Center hosted Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, an international conference on cultural publishing’s current challenges and its possible futures. All sessions of the convening were transcribed live by a stenographer; below is an edited transcript of both days of the one of the conference. To view videos of all Superscript panels and keynotes, or to read commissioned essays and live blogging by participants in the Superscript Blog Mentorship program (a partnership with Hyperallergic), visit walkerart.org/superscript-­‐reader. To report errors in this document, email [email protected]. PANEL PRESENTATIONS:
Credibility, Criticism, Collusion
Ryan Schreiber, Pitchfork I was raised in the western suburbs of Minneapolis, and as a young person, the Walker’s collection served as my first introduction to contemporary art, so it’s exciting to find myself involved with Superscript. I was lucky to grow up with access to this city’s arts community. My taste in music was strongly shaped by its influence. The alternative radio stations KJ104 and REV105 introduced me to bands like Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, Guided by Voices. KUOM at the University of Minnesota taught me about underground punk and electronic music. KMOJ introduced me to hip-­‐hop, First Avenue and the Cedar Cultural Center made me a fan of live music, and the City Pages, along with local defunct zines, such as Cake and the Squealer, inspired me to be a writer and a critic. Pitchfork began here in 1996. I was 18 and just out of high school when a friend introduced me to the Internet. I’ve always loved the idea of working for a music magazine and immediately recognized the potential of the web as a publishing platform. At that time, only a few web publications existed, but none with an eye towards independent music. I thought if I didn’t start one, someone else was going to beat me to it. So, despite having no formal writing background, I began typing up a few record reviews every day, and soon we added a new section and features, and after a few years of this, Pitchfork managed to accumulate a small readership and other larger music publications began to take note. It was around this time in the early 2000s, that the old vanguard of elite arts journalists started to take issue of the influence of young new voices on the Internet, and we weren’t alone. There were fresh film publication, arts publications and, most loathed of all, that terrible scourge known as bloggers. The general idea was that these guys weren’t really critics, because they didn’t understand what real criticism was—simplified version, but nonetheless. And fair enough, this generation of Internet opinion makers were, in many cases, not formally trained, but we knew our subjects well and we weren’t content to regurgitate the same canon laid out by our forebears. So, the idea that criticism as the world had known it was dying was totally unfounded, and as it happened, the web made room for all sorts of writers, from all kinds of different backgrounds, including those more seasoned, veteran critics and newer critics with the same kind of training. And part of the beauty of this was that, no matter who you were, you could find a voice, or several voices, that you trusted and related to. So now, as the web has expanded, there are recommendation engines, algorithms, user reviews and all kinds of other ways to discover the arts, including just going online and listening or seeing for yourself. So where does that leave criticism? Some people argue, as they have argued for years, that criticism is no longer relevant, that in an age where discovery is so accessible, so-­‐called gatekeepers are an anachronism. For those who have only ever reviewed criticism as a consumer report to guide their listening or viewing habits and find they have a higher rate of success when looking to these other avenues, there might for once be a very faint ring of truth to that. Still, the popularity of sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, which aggregate critical consensus, would seem to counter that idea. And Pitchfork itself has seen continual growth to its review section year after year and more time spent by readers on those pages. So the demand is clearly and quantifiably there. So with more media being made and released than ever before, and virtually all of it accessible online, the question readers are hoping to have answered is not so much “How should I spend my money?” but “How should I spend spend my time?” And of course, criticism is much more than a consumer guide. I read it to learn, not just about the subject at hand, but to gain insights that confirm or challenge my own, to grasp the ideologies between different scenes and movements, and to better and more capably argue my positions as a fan. As often as I disagree with reviews, even sometimes those published on my own website, I’m nonetheless educated by them. At their best, they lead me to reexamine my enthusiasm or distaste for certain artists and albums by offering an intelligent counterpoint. And like any other genre of writing, criticism is an art form unto itself. The greatest critics, Roger Ebert, Lester Bangs, Pauline Kael, Richard Meltzer, are wonderfully entertaining, educational, and thought-­‐provoking and their work remains as relevant today as it was in their own time. And yet reviews, especially negative ones, are increasingly falling out of favor with editors and publishers. Over the last decade, several major music magazines have shrunk theirs to single paragraphs or tiny capsules. Some have ceased reviews altogether. Many of the newer music publications launched without them in the first place. And why shouldn’t they? Negative reviews are often unpopular, not necessarily by metrics but by the reactions. They cause all kinds of trouble. They can break important editorial relationships, incite fans to essentially riot on social media against writers—they upset people. Pitchfork has succeeded, not just because our critics have distinctive tastes and insights, but because we’re willing to assume the weight of these consequences. This doesn’t always make us well loved, but it does create an active discourse around the music we cover. Because passionate music fans hold their own convictions about the artists and albums with which they engage, and the differences between those convictions are often the basis of engaging and lightening discussions. There’s a cliche that critics use about the dialogue—that the opinions they express are essentially conversation starters, or jump-­‐off points, for a larger productive conversation, right? Well, that’s pretty true. We understand our pieces figure into a larger critical framework, and that readers and writers may identify with any number of critical resources with broadly varying takes. We throw ourselves into our work and attempt to ensure that ours will be the definitive piece on the subject, but we also acknowledge that our taste is somewhat subjective. But our insights, our knowledge of our subjects and our recommendations, gradually built trust with our readers that translated to influence, and we don’t take it for granted. Today Pitchfork is among the largest and most comprehensive music publications online. Our site sees 7.5 million unique visitors per month, we have a staff of 50 people spread between offices in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, annual music festivals in Chicago and Paris, a quarterly print journal called The Pitchfork Review, our sister site, The Dissolve, which is dedicated to film, and our video arm, Pitchfork TV. So, in an era where so many avenues exist for recommendation discovery, where you can listen to complete albums with the click of a button, or simply rely on the taste of friends or algorithms, our readers continue to turn to us to help them parse music’s ever-­‐expanding world. And our work is for them, it’s not for the artists, the managers, or the industry. We do it because we love music deeply and care intensely about its future. So, thanks again to Minneapolis for helping me find my niche and to the Walker for having me here today. It’s an honor to be here. Orit Gat, Rhizome, WdW Review I’ve been making the same joke for the past like few weeks, I think: I’m so happy to be here, because this conference is exactly everything I’m interested in, and if they didn’t invite me, I would have had to pay to come here. That said, I’m going to use this time to actually ask if the Internet has affected or changed art criticism at all. I figured I’ll use this time to work through ideas with all of you. And yeah, I’m gonna ask “has” and now “how.” I think what’s really interesting about this particular panel is that we have people from different industries, and I’m using the word industry really carefully, but not so much, because I’m going to talk about advertising and money and financial structures, so industry seems kind of fitting and see what will happen to art criticism. So, I’m going to talk about the structures of the Internet and how they changed music and literature, because those are the two other disciplines that we have here. And in case you’re really nodding off here, I’m going to tell you that my answer to “Has the Internet changed art criticism?” is “Not yet, but it definitely will.” So, when I’m asking about the Internet effect there’s two facets to it. The first is in publishing and circulation, the second is the way it shapes and affects the discipline and the discourse around it. Music and literature experience a digital shift in a much more extreme way than contemporary art has thus far. As far as I see it, they experienced this digital shift and it began with circulation, the adjustment from an object, as in a CD to vinyl to MP3, and from the independent bookstore or even the mega chain bookstore, because now we have to start caring about Barnes and Noble, too, to Amazon. But then it continued with an altered discourse that poses really valid questions about the function of criticism. I’m going to call this “service criticism.” In a nutshell, what I define as service criticism is criticism that’s discovery oriented—criticism that assumes the reader is looking for recommendations, for a way of making sense of it all. Take Pitchfork, for example, I remember the first time I heard about Pitchfork. I was a teenager in Paris and I had a friend who would read every review on Pitchfork and then he would download, and I’m going to say this even though I guess this is not a panel about law and copyrights, he would download everything he read about to see what he’s going to be actually interested in. That’s a really amazing way of discovering things, and it’s also a way of contrasting the sense of overproduction that the Internet seems to do. So, just to clarify this, the use of a word like “service” does not indicate a value judgment at all. I’m not making that. I’m not making it, because I don’t write in an industry that could produce a service criticism. Yet. When I write about an exhibition, I often write for print publications, so it means that the exhibition closed months ago. I’m always writing in the past tense, and I also know that whoever my audience is, and I know it’s small, almost none of them are art collectors that are reading the reviews as a way of assessing the artist’s worth. It’s kind of similar to the way I read food reviews. I don’t go to fancy restaurants, but I always make the joke that I really love living in New York, in a city where reviews like this makes sense: “Once in a while, this restaurant still gets a case of the ‘blahs.’ The dressing on the wax bean salad, allegedly a tahini-­‐soy vinaigrette, made no impression, and curls of raw hamachi with diced apples didn’t rise above routine.” This is from the New York Times review of a restaurant called Montmarte, or some French restaurant in Chelsea. Just saying curls of raw hamachi is ‘routine’ to some people amazing to me. I’m never going to go to this place, just the chicken costs $26, and this is the kind of research I do when I write. So why do I care about it? Because I think food criticism talks about a culture that I’m interested in and I think that focus on ephemeral in experience is actually really similar to you do when you write about art exhibits exhibitions. And, of course, the discovery oriented, or “service review” do the same thing, but we really can’t ignore the fact that in the popular imagination, they have a much more specific role. They act as a vehicle for recognition, as recommendations. Should I see Mad Max? Let me see what the paper said about this. Have you seen that review of 10:04? I really want to read it. And this is like the main point that I’m going to make here, is that search habits have only enhanced this sentiment. I’m going to go back to my example of Ben Lerner’s 10:04. I Googled it yesterday. The first response on Google is Amazon, buy the book, the next nine are all reviews. It’s the New York Times, it’s the Guardian, everything, the New Republic, Bookforum, etc. The next page on Google is the Wikipedia site. And you know that 99% of Google searchers don’t actually go to the second page of Google. So, this explains my claim that digital circulation has changed the discourse. And I’m going to go back for a second to my “not a judgment” sentiment. I think the service review comes with an immense sense of responsibility to analyze the market, to give context to what is popular beyond just bestseller lists, even though I totally acknowledge and recognize the Internet’s feelings about lists, and we all love them. I also think that a sense of responsibility is what leads this discourse around positive and negative criticism. I’m sure we’ll get back to this later. When a publication decides to focus on positive reviews, in order not to “waste paper,” a line on negative reviews, a huge part of the reason for that is the presumption that people look to reviews as recommendations. My only problem with that is that it really neglects what I consider a really important role of criticism, which is to keep the market in check. I’m going to talk about Jerry Saltz here, which I’ve never done as an art critic. But this is why the “zombie formalism” thing is so important. He coined the term that actually discusses what the market is doing right now, focusing on a certain generation of New York painters who do abstract process work. I think his argument was really weak, because he talks about sameness and not about financial structures, but I think it’s really decisive that he did that, because he recognizes that criticism generates cultural capital, which in turns generates capital, so actually keeping that market in check is really important. And the fact that it will be the same in every kind of publication. Like if you publish negative reviews on a book review site, there will be a much lower click rate through to Amazon. And if you publish negative reviews on a music site, less people will stream it. So I wonder, though, if this instinct to only publish positive reviews actually goes against the nature of the Internet. Mainly because I think negative reviews travel infinitely better. Have you ever seen a positive review that went viral? No. But I did bring my favorite negative review that went viral for you guys. It is also from the New York Times. It is also Pete Wells, because he is the star of viral content. So, this is a review of Guy Fierri’s restaurant in Times Square, which is written as a—I love that you’re laughing—it’s written as a list of questions, and it starts with, “Guy Fierri, have you ever eaten at your new restaurant in Times Square? Have you pulled up one of the five hundred seat at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar and ordered a meal? Did you eat the food? Did it live up to your expectations? And why did the toasted marshmallows taste like fish?” It ends with “Thanks,” by the way. One of the most amazing things about this review, apart from the fact that it made everyone talk about criticism for a while, is that it sparked a conversation about the nature of negative reviews. The New York Times’ opinionated blog ran bunch of op-­‐eds about the state of negative criticism. The public editor blog brought in the cultural editor to discuss negative criticism. I think this is all really, really valuable, but I’m not gonna be naive. I also know that sharing means participating in the economy of scale that is the Internet. Funny enough, even though the Internet should have been something for small scale operations, because you could all do that, this myth that audiences will self-­‐
organize online really doesn’t exist. There’s no “If you publish it, they will come.” What actually happens is that most of your audience congregates around like 10 websites, and they’re all underwritten by enormous corporations. The result is that we see a similar kind of mingling together in the culture sphere, too. I’ve been really interested in this literary site called LitHub recently. I’m gonna read you their About page: “Literary Hub is an organizing principle in the service of literary culture, a single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of contemporary literary life. There is more great literary content online than ever before, but it is scattered, easily lost. With the help of its partners—
publishers big and small, journals, bookstores and non-­‐profits—Literary Hub will be a place where readers can return each day for smart, engaged, and entertaining writing about all things books.” I guess the assumption is that all these magazines and publications are stronger together, but it just seems to me, you can imagine more generalized, more popular, more eyeballs. That’s why aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes become so influential—they centralize the discourse. So, what does more eyeballs actually do? It means more sharing, but is sharing actual participation, and what does it mean to go viral? I’m just going to remind you about the terms of engagement before we talk about sharing and participation. Every tweet, reblog and like means another moment when the cash register makes that beautiful little bell sound for a number of companies, too, the social media platform, the publisher, the advertising agency, the actual retailer that is selling you something. When the way we interact online is already so fraught in monetary terms, for something to just go viral means to activate the system time and again. But all in all, much of what we do online is to participate and it’s parceled into two, that personal feedback, so the fav, the like, whatever, and the quote-­‐unquote useful feedback. I think it’s really telling that on Yelp when you create a review, it asks you was this review “cool,” “useful,” or “funny”? There’s nothing ever negative in that. But I’m really interested in the use value of crowdsourced criticism, because it’s one of the very few new forms that developed online, except for blogging basically. So, while crowdsourced interaction is really easily monetizable, unremunerated labor, it also messes with predetermined economic structures, especially in the art context—in the art context that’s specifically scarcity. I think when you publish criticism in general, the actual strongest claim you make be it negative positive or whatever, is what you wrote about. That’s it. After that, all you can do is a shopping list of what’s in the exhibition, because you wrote about this, and that’s what matters. For every exhibition I write about, I neglect, what, the other 600 galleries in New York? So it becomes this place where the subject is the real criticism. I think this is a really valid conversation to have right now, because the New York Times, this week, announced that they’re not going to review every film that opens in New York. Which is going to make the film criticism scene very different, but I know nothing about this. So not having a space to cover everything is definitely one of the virtues of magazines, it’s selective. Whereas Yelp could include every storefront in New York City. How do the economics of criticism change when something that’s traditionally scarce becomes so abundant? It means that reviews turn symbolic capital, which is attention, into monetary capital. That’s where the brilliance of Amazon’s introduction of user-­‐generated reviews is that the company can monetize something that it doesn’t need to take any responsibility for. While the integrity of many of the reviews, maybe even most of them, can be questioned, the effect of having original or semi-­‐original content on the site means that it sells more. It’s kind of amazing, crowdsourced criticism enhances and plays on both monetary systems that are predominant in the digital economy—scale and participation. So is this where art criticism is going? I started this talk talking about circulation and how the digital culture has modified circulation of music, literature, film. The main reason contemporary art has not been as impacted by the digital turn, is that the art object is not—sometimes, but not always—infinitely reproducible as a digital film like an .mp3, .mov, or .epub. Except for those artists who play with that. To me that’s one of the most interesting things that artists can do right now. And I follow people who do that and find it really fascinating, but that’s not what you see in most galleries in Chelsea. What you see in most galleries in Chelsea is zombie formalism. It’s this one object. So the way to deal with this one object, I think, is also to put it online. The result of that, though, is that I feel like the Internet promotes this behind kind of service-­‐oriented criticism. So even though we’re talking about stuff that’s online, what you see online is only that. So look at artform.com, for example, while Artforum publishes a great review section, many of my friends write for it, online all they publish is positive reviews. It’s only meant to basically give you an analysis of what’s up and send you there. I don’t know how that’s going to change when we start viewing more and more art online. So like right now we’re seeing this amazing proliferation of organizations, both for profit and not for profit, that are really grappling with the presentation of work online on different levels of complexity, especially moving-­‐image work. London Gallery, Carroll/Fletcher initiated Carroll/ Fletcher Onscreen, which displays different video works for two weeks at a time. The same system fuels Vdrome, which is organized by Mousse Magazine. They also commissioned a new essay on each video they show on the site. Another London-­‐based organization called Opening Times – Digital Art Commissions supports new work online, so they commission your work, they give you all the support in the world, it’s kind of amazing. And a number of museums, like the museum in Tate Modern, have begun experimenting with the presentation the work on their websites beyond just the collection tour. And on top of that, there are all these sites that are trying to sell you art online. I spend so much time grappling with what the financial model is for Artsy or Paddle8 or anything like that but there’s the sense that there’s money online, and the first company to monetize the online art marketplace will win it. Christie’s invested $50 million in building a custom built e-­‐commerce business. Sotheby’s has partnered with Ebay to make “premium art and collectibles accessible to buyers everywhere.” This is from the press release. There’s this basic assumption that there’s a market for this and that market is only going to grow. I saw in the New York Times article about the Christie’s online initiative. Josh Auerbach, who is the manager of it, and by the way came from Gilt Groupe, the luxury sale’s company, said that their research shows that about 53% of those who registered to bid online are under the age of 45. As for the most popular categories of the online auctions, get this, post-­‐war and contemporary art, fashion, followed by wine and cheese. I think it’s really telling. I think it’s really telling, also, that a major art fair didn’t step into this. Just think about Art Basel online sales, if there was a lot of money to be made there, Art Basel would have made it already. That said, I probably don’t know anything about money, because if I did, I wouldn’t have been an art critic. I can’t tell you if they’ll succeed, but I can tell you that there’s this huge leap that needs to be made for art sales online to become the kind of game changer that Amazon was. Because you’re dealing with a singular or almost singular object. Artsy and Art Space seem to think that the solution is producing editorial content. This editorial ambition reminds me of the early days of Amazon in the 90s when the company, before reintroduced user reviews, actually hired maybe 30 editors and they would publish reviews, previews, interviews, forthcoming books. A lot of the language around companies like Artsy or Paddle8 and Art Store revolves around discovery, again, so what we’re seeing is these service reviews being pushed to that kind of editorial content. But to be honest, if discovery is the way artsy imagines it, like the art genome project that maps similar works, as in “People who bought this, also bought this” but it’s based on school and subject and methodology. In that world, I kind of prefer the service criticism. But really, if we’re talking in terms of the discovery of new art, how come we don’t have a Pitchfork for contemporary art? I’d really much prefer that to Artsy. So as presentation of art online changes in a way that I find really curatorially fascinating, and that will be a huge promoter of digitally engaged work, we’re going to have to develop these new ways, or at least new outlets, to analyze it. I for example have a lot of hope for the mailing list as of a forum that we haven’t exhausted at all. Even though e-­‐flux might have a little bit. I think it’s a really promising model, mainly because it’s a way of surpassing the digital advertising revenue as we know it, by which I mean selling your data bundled to a bunch of websites. But yeah, I’m looking for these new models. Most of these structures that I discussed today relate to an ad revenue based Internet. I really hope things will change. I think there is no bigger disappointment on the Internet than free culture. If the user won’t pay, the advertiser will, the result of this is a digital economy where websites that are all aggregating and packaging the same material are hoping to attract as many eyeballs as possible and with the eyeballs come advertising revenue. It’s kind of weird that in my attempt to close on an optimistic note I’m basically telling you you’re all going to have to pull out your credit card or Paypal account or Google Wallet or whatever digital wallet we’re going to use. But I think that this will lead us to the kind of criticism that we deserve. The more the Internet veers toward paid models, the better off we’ll be, I don’t know if art criticism will catch up with this before or after. I think you can imagine what I’m crossing my fingers for. Thank you. Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times The redoubtable American writer Mark Twain once said that, “An expert is just some guy from out of town.” I’m from out of town. I imagine that my expertise, such as it is, has been requested because of all the symposium panelists, I pretty much represent the guy down at the boatyard where the ship is sailing. He’s got one foot on the dock, and one foot on the boat, and watery doom is yawning wider and wider between slowly spreading legs. The dock in this instance is print. Newspapers, old media, dead trees, or the term that I prefer, “legacy media.” The boat, of course, is digital. The Internet and its proliferating social media formats. Now, we could talk about the differences between print and digital, starting with the limited size of a news hole on a piece of paper, versus the limitless space on the web, plus a lot more, but at this late date more than a generation into the revolution, we pretty much know what most of those differences are. For me, the most interesting and perhaps the most puzzling one has always been the audience. Who is the audience for print? Who’s the audience for digital? Are they the same person? Do they read the same way? How do they come upon the writing that is before them in print or in the ether? In these kinds of discussions, the reader is often what Franklin Roosevelt once called, the “forgotten man.” The one being indifferently squashed down at the bottom of the pyramid. I think that one primary difference between most print publication and most digital publication has to do with the question of the forgotten reader. Although the situation is changing, every writer knows that before something appears in print, it will be read by an editor. An editor is every print writer’s first reader. In digital publishing, this may or may not be the case. There may or may not be an editor. The span ranges from online journals, which probably will have an editor, to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which almost never do. Social media is home to society’s raging id. And readers, including editors, are its restraining super ego. I write art criticism for one primary reason. I write art criticism in order to find out what it is I think. And my job as a professional art critic is to find ways to bring a reader into that process. Criticism is writing. If I knew what I thought before I sat down to write, I would not be writing, I would just be typing. I’d be taking dictation from my memory and transferring it through a keyboard. Now, it will probably come as no surprise to you that no one is going to pay you a salary just to allow you to find out what it is you think. For a professional art critic, that’s where the professional part comes in. The very first question posed by the folks at Superscript in putting together this symposium is this one: What is the role of the professional art critic? For me, there’s no question that’s likely to come up today that is more easily answered than that one. My role as a professional art critic at the Los Angeles Times is to sell newspapers. My role as a professional art critic at the Los Angeles Times is to generate traffic at our website. I say this not to be sensationalistic or crass, although I suspect some institution somewhere will likely pull the quote and misrepresent my position. I say it instead simply for the sake of clarity. It was in fact the first lesson that I learned when I became a journalist 35 years ago. Like most professional art critics I know, I became one pretty much by accident. I had left my prior profession of art museum curator, which I discovered I didn’t have the temperament for, when one day the telephone rang. It was an editor at the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the afternoon newspaper in town. He told me they were looking for a freelance art writer and someone had given them my name. Would I be interested? I said, “Sure, but I don’t know anything about journalism.” And he said, “Don’t worry, we do.” So I became a newspaper art critic, and I learned on the job. This was in the summer of 1980. And although the Herald had been publishing since 1903, it had never had a staff art critic before then. But it needed one now. A group of prominent and influential citizens had prevailed upon the mayor, Tom Bradley, to support the launch of a museum of contemporary art as part of a massive downtown redevelopment plan. In the face of this challenge, the old guard in town had gotten a bit nervous, so they launched a campaign of their own to build a big modern art wing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And most important of all, recently a dead man’s will had emerged from a lengthy probate, and suddenly the little J. Paul Getty museum at the edge of Malibu was the richest art museum in the nation. As an afternoon newspaper, the Herald had been struggling against the changing environment of television news and it was determined that one final push would be made for stability and success. So they did what most businesses do, they commissioned a marketing survey to analyze the competition. The LA Times. What areas of coverage did readers of the Times find to be deficient? It turned out that there were four areas that readers found to be wanting: local news, sports, Hollywood, and cultural affairs. So that’s where the Herald decided it would direct all of its assets and it began hiring a roster of critics to fill the cultural affairs part. It made for a somewhat schizy newspaper, but that’s how I got a new profession. You may have noticed that the generative impulse for bringing art criticism to the newspaper did not come from some high-­‐minded regard for these spiritual, emotional, intellectual, or otherwise tonic qualities of art. This is America we’re talking about, and in America, art has always been a minority interest. It came instead from witnessing the movement of power. Institutional power, political power, and social power within the city. It came from recognizing that engagement with power is a primary function of the power of journalism. And before I’m an art critic, I am a journalist. There are lots of different kinds of art criticism. But as a journalistic art critic, my aim is to enfold the power of art within the larger dynamic of power relationships in society. I relate all of this personal back story, because I think it illustrates something important. If you ask what is the role of the professional art critic and the context that comes to mind for that role is limited to art, then the answer is, there really isn’t one. Art criticism has no essential role. Art can get along just fine without it. Artists will do what artists do. In the body of art, art criticism is the appendix. Surgical removal of the appendix causes no observable health problems. The idea that professional art criticism has an inherent role to play in art is a fiction, and fiction is what art criticisms write. It’s a form of literary prose in which the writer’s imagination, experiences and engages with the work of art, and it invites the reader along. In other words, art criticism is social media. It always has been. Ever since Giorgio Vasari was making up stuff about Giotto and Piero della Francesca in the 16th century. Today its potential reach and interactivity are bigger, faster, and its sources theoretically endless, but I would submit that its moral and ethical conundrums are not much different than they’ve ever been. If my digital job as as a professional art critic is to generate traffic to the LA Times website, I just have to decide whether that’s best achieved by a nonstop diet of listicles and cat videos which would probably do the trick. Or by something else entirely. Thanks. Isaac Fitzgerald, BuzzFeed Books Thank you so much for coming. And thank you to the Walker Art Center for having us. I think it’s really important, and I’m really happy to be here. So I’m just going to get into it. I’m going to talk a little bit about myself, and why I came to be up here before you today. And then I’m going to talk a little bit on the subject of the discussion that we’re here to have. From the very beginning, I’m a book lover. I’ve always been a book lover. I grew up loving books. I grew up in the south end of Boston in the 1980s, before it got as ritzy as it is today. And then from there I actually moved to north central Massachusetts, which is kind of like the Kid Rock of Massachusetts. It’s a lot of trailers and beer and guns and that’s what we did with our time. When I could sneak away from the beer and the guns and the trucks, I would always grab a book. Books were kind of my escape, both in in the city and in the country. From there I got lucky. I got a scholarship. I got to go to a boarding school. A place where education was taken seriously. And that meant the world to me. From there I got to go to college, which I actually wasn’t planning on doing before that. And I didn’t know what to do with myself. The whole time, though, I was reading. Sitting in the back of the class, I had a book under a desk, in between classes, after nights out, waking up, not wanting to move—I’d always be reading. So for me, I mean again for me, books were just, they were constantly there and they were always there. But I had no idea how they got made. So going to college I said hey, you know what I should do is political science, because that makes sense, because that’s where I am. I don’t feel strongly about politics, I never carried politics with me throughout my life, but that seemed like the right decision to do. So I graduated, I went into politics, I helped get a guy into Congress, I realized I hated politics, and that I’d made a terrible decision and just wasted a ton of my life, education and time. From there I moved to New Hampshire, where I painted houses for a little while, and from there I met a girl who went to San Francisco, and like all of us who don’t know what to do with our lives, I followed a relationship. I moved to San Francisco, and I worked at a wonderful place called Buca di Beppo. It’s like the Olive Garden but worse, for those of you who don’t know what it is. But at the time I probably made more money than I’d ever made to date, if you take it as an hourly rate, and that’s the truth. That freed up 20 hours, so I basically only had to work 20 hours a week. With 20 hours a week and nothing to do, the person that I’d moved out there for grew sick of me quickly and tried to find me something to do. Look, she says, there’s this place called that’s called 826 Valencia. It says it has storytelling workshops, you love telling stories, because you wouldn’t shut up, why don’t you go to that. So, I went to this place called 826 Valencia, and five minutes into the training session there, I realized that we were talking about working with kids, it was not storytelling and book making for adults, but you can’t really get you up out of that meeting and walk away, because then you look like a big jerk who doesn’t care about kids. So that what I started to do, I started to volunteer my time there, and I started to work there, and I started to work with these kids and watched reading affect their lives and affect the way that they saw the world. And at the same time I noticed around the center, this is a creative writing center for youth and its in many different cities now, and it was started by Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s, and around the walls I saw these manuscripts, these pages from these manuscripts, and they had this scribbling all over them. And I realized that these were manuscript pages from very famous, famous people. Books that I have read, that I had grown up with. What are these? What’s this scribbling? Well, that’s to show the kids, the person in the training center said, that’s to show the kids that writing is a collaborative process, that’s to show them that no book is created by some person in a magical cave who sits down by a typewriter and just writes and prints it out perfectly and sends it out to a publisher and then it’s a book. That’s to show them that it’s an art form, that it’s a struggle, that there’s so many different voices that takes part in its creation. And I was so glad that they were teaching 8-­‐year-­‐olds that because at the age of 23, I finally found out where books came from. I finally realized that they weren’t made-­‐because that’s how I thought books worked. And I came to it very late. So from there, I got involved a lot in the literary community in San Francisco, and I got to work on this small website called The Rumpus, which is an online culture magazine. Now this was the mid 2000s, people have mentioned it here before, but what was happening in the mid 2000s is that everybody was convinced that publishing was dying, so why start an online arts and culture magazine in the middle of the sky is falling falling mentality of the mid 2000s? Well, we didn’t have a lot of money, and for the record I’d actually ended up working at a political website, and I wanted to, yet again, get out of politics. So, Stephen Elliott, the author who started The Rumpus, came to me and said, do you want to take 50% less pay and no health care and come work on this books website? And I said, absolutely, because that what you can do when you’re young and you’re dumb and you’re living in San Francisco in a one bedroom with three different people. I didn’t think it would work. I definitely didn’t think it would work for as long as it did, and still continues to after I left. But those years were fundamental to me because I got to work with some incredible writers, Roxane Gaye, Cheryl Strayed, writers who I cared deeply about, and I realized that there was this whole world of people, and not just in the San Francisco literary scene, but out there online, all across the country, all over the world who really cared about books and cared about the discussion of books and cared about getting attention for books, the books that maybe weren’t on the New York Times bestseller. And I got to be a part of that, and that was beautiful for me. At the same time, everyone like I said was saying that publishing is dying, I started to realize that publishing wasn’t dying, it was definitely transitioning, the same thing that had happened to music in the 90s, happened to publishing in the 2000s is probably happening to movies right now—the Internet was just changing the landscape. I feel like back in the day when like the printing press was invented, a bunch of monks were like, well, those new printing press books, those are not real books. These hand-­‐drawn, hand-­‐lettered books, now, these, mwah, these are the books, this is the stuff. Because that’s what the publishing industry is. We’ve always been obsessed with our own demise. Like it’s crazy. If you take a group of neurotic people who care about art and some of the darker things in life and what it means to be a human being—so weird that we end up this concept of morbid mortality, no, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. The publishing industry has always been worried about itself. That’s always the been case and it’s always been changing. The Internet is one of these new changes. But there’s always been these different parts of it, these different things. It’s a marketplace, it’s capitalism, like Christopher was saying, it’s about getting attention for books-­‐I mean it is. It’s all part of it. So, after four years at The Rumpus, McSweeney’s actually needed a director of publicity, and after four years of championing books, I decided to actually start working on helping promote them, and at McSweeney’s I had the distinct pleasure of working on a book by Hilton Als called White Girls. And I bring it up because not only is it a fantastic book, and like I said, I love to champion books, and if you haven’t read it, and I think especially this audience it’s an important book for you to read, it’s this incredible mixture of memoir and criticism and it’s beautiful, and I got to work on that book, and it meant a lot to me, and to be honest I’d always read book reviews that I’d definitely come to approach it more from the you know, help me figure out what I need to buy approach that was being talked about earlier. But to see cultural criticism on that level, to see that it itself can be this art form was inspiring and incredible, and my job, though, was just to make sure that it got as much attention as it possibly could. And working in publicity was an eye-­‐opening experience, because I realized how hard it is out there. This is a roomful of critics, not a room full of publicists. But I think it’s a room full of critics, and all of us are probably guilty of ignoring a lot of emails from a lot of publicists. And that’s fine, because if you were to answer every single one of them that would be insane, but it did show me the other side of things, to have a little more empathy. But I did. What I missed was talking about books online. What I missed was getting in the mix and that’s when the book section at BuzzFeed was announced, that they were going to have an editor, and so many friends wrote to me about the job description and they said, you have to take it. You have to try for it. It’s—you miss talking about books online, and that’s absolutely true. And that’s what I did. So I said a couple of dumb things when I was hired. I hadn’t actually started working. I hadn’t actually built anything, but like we like to do, we wanted to talk about it first. So there was a big discussion about it, and I’m going to open it up in this room. Something that I usually only tell in private. But it was hard being at the center of that, there was a day when I turned off all my lights in my bathroom and I crawled into my bathtub fully clothed. I didn’t turn on the water. It wasn’t as dramatic as all that. But I laid there for a little while, because it was hard. There were people that I loved, respected, and read on the regular telling me that, just because I said that I wanted to be nice about books, that I was full of shit. And when people you care about and respect say that about it, you it can be very difficult. So I decided to step away from it, which I think is a good approach sometimes on the Internet. Not always. Sometimes you’ve got to fight for it. But I realized I hadn’t even done anything yet. So I stepped away from the fray, and I started working on it. So that was almost a year and a half ago, and BuzzFeed Books now gets—I mean I don’t want to talk exact traffic numbers, but gets a huge amount of eye, so much more I’m allowed to do for books than I was doing at The Rumpus. We have a mix of different things that all of which I’m very proud of. One is quizzes. One is recommendation lists. Another way that we try to draw attention to books is a if there’s a book coming out, and there’s an author I’m really excited for, and I think the book is really great, I’ll approach them and ask them to write something for the site, not about their book, not so it’s a commercial, just something that is beautiful and unique, so that I can take this author whose work I think is really meaningful, I can put it in front of our massive audience, if they write something really good, it will do well on its own. I do believe that some of the cream does rise to the top. And there at the end of the piece is an announcement that their next book is coming out. So if one person who doesn’t know about this writer gets to read this wonderful piece that moves them, then they discover that book at the bottom, they buy that, they read this, maybe they discover this person—all their work. That means the world to me. So that’s another way we do it, how we get out there. Another thing we do is 6-­‐Second Book Reviews. I was told, play around with Vine, I’m like how can I play around with Vine for book reviews? That seems insane. So as a joke I started yelling at the camera about how great Kelly Link’s new short story collection Get in Trouble is. People actually really liked it. And that’s how I view these things. Those things are a launching off point. If somebody hears something, as I say a couple of quick sentences about a book, if it sparks their interest then maybe they go and they look up a review. Then maybe they go to their friends and ask, hey have you read this Kelly Link stuff. Talk about it. And that’s what I want to be doing, sparking interest. Now, the lists, recommendations, the quizzes, the books entertainment as it were, a lot of people say oh, it’s a two-­‐pronged attack. You have this high-­‐minded stuff and you have this which Bronte sister are you stuff, and that supplements that, right? No, it doesn’t. For me it’s all part of the mix. It’s all part of what makes that little site work. It’s all part of my little slice of the Internet, which is going to get to our discussion now, today. I really view this all, what we all do, as a giant garden party. And I think a while ago, especially before the Internet, that it was a pretty exclusive garden party, and there was champagne and people dressed certain way and had to be really, really nice and there were certain things talked about and things that are not. And what the Internet did was this still exists and it’s still incredibly, incredibly important, the champagne part—that still exists. It’s not about storming the gates of that and tearing it apart. It’s about building around that party, so that more and more voices can be heard. And so while that can exist over here, I’m going to be playing frisbee over there, maybe some people are playing beer pong over, there’s some fried chicken in the back, there’s a fish fry going on over here, it’s all a giant mix. The more people that can be brought into the discussion of this, the better. There’s talk of, again, in the mid 2000s was that books were dying. Then there was indie bookstores were dying. Barnes & Noble is all the sudden something we need to care about. The fact of the matter is though now indie bookstores are on the rocks. E-­‐books were going to kill books. Well, actually e-­‐
books have plateaued off and book sales are actually doing well. That kind of shakeup has happened and there will be another shakeup that happens next. But books aren’t dying. Books criticism isn’t gonna die. Because that’s what we do, that’s what we love and I’m coming from a literary standpoint, but I think it could be said of all art, because if we’re in here it’s because we care about it, it’s because we love it. And so this party is open for everyone now. And if there are people in the audience here, if you’re students, all I can say is I have to encourage you to start something. It was mentioned earlier the Pitchfork of fine arts. Somebody wishes that that exists, so do it. Make something like that happen. The Rumpus was slowly, slowly built over four years, but to see the people that have come out of it and to see what’s happened with their careers has just been invigorating. So if you don’t see, if there’s part of the party that you don’t like or if there’s a part of the party that you wish was there, you yourself should reach out and should do it. Because that’s why we’re all here, right? Negative reviews, positive reviews, we’re all here because we care about it. We’re all here because either we grew up loving books or we grew up loving art or we grew up loving some different aspect of it. Whether we love recommendation lists, or whether we really live for criticism as stand-­‐alone art, we’re all here because we really, really believe in it, and we want to keep talking about it, and I think the fact that this conference even exists is a sign that everything is actually going really, really well. Because people still really, really care. So thank you so much. PANEL DISCUSSION:
Credibility, Criticism, Collusion
Orit Gat: So I’m going to go ahead and start. I’m going to start with the first thing that I deleted from my essay, which was I thought that I would come here and like everyone will talk about the death of criticism, and I was like I’m going to start by saying that criticism is alive, and then I figured, maybe all of this conversation about the death of criticism is also related to online publishing somehow and to the proliferation of new voices online. And I wanted to see what you guys think about that and what the connection between that conversation and the rise of online publishing is. Christopher Knight: True. I mean you know, several years ago when there was this whole brouhaha about, you know, is criticism in crisis and all of that. I thought it was really beside the point. Criticism was never in crisis. Publishing was in crisis and they’re not the same thing. And because the platforms were changing and fluid and unknown, and all of that, things I think sort of got misplaced, and one of the primary differences between—for me at any rate, between digital and print is that in digital, there’s much more opportunity for the kind of chitchat off the top of the head—as someone said, I think it was Isaac, but you know, it’s like being at a garden party. Where people are talking, and usually you only hear that face to face, or if you’re eavesdropping at the people in the next group, but now it’s online, now it’s in print, now billions of people can see it. So the whole—that whole layer of conversation has gone public. It used to be private. Now it’s gone public. For good and for ill, I think it’s created a lot of confusion about criticism. Isaac Fitzgerald: Yeah. I would agree. One of the things that I’m most excited about, one of the positives that I think is coming out of it, that I meant to get to, but I didn’t, but is the rise of diverse voices, and I think that that’s so important, not just that we have art being made by diverse artists, which I think of course is incredibly important, but I think we’re starting to almost—it’s almost trickling up. Like I think we’re seeing more and more artists of color creating work, and then talking about that work, but we’re now also getting to see criticism coming from all these different avenues where there didn’t exist a place for that and I think online has been really, really great for this kind of rise in not just the diversity of the art or the diversity of the artists, but the diversity of the people that get to have the conversations around the art that we talk about, which I think is just so incredibly important, to all these conversations, like anything, anything gets improved through diversity, through having more and more voices and I just think that that—that’s one of the things that makes me so excited to be part of this time, I guess, is the ability to have these diverse conversation. It’s one of the things I’m really proud of BuzzFeed actually, they really do reach out and try to work with so many different types of people from so many different types of backgrounds to make sure there’s this inclusive group. Because look at this panel right here, diversity is something that always needs, there needs to be more, like we’ve got one woman, and I don’t want to assume people’s backgrounds, but I’m a white boy from Boston. And so I just—I feel like to have the more diversity, the better, and I think that’s something that we’ve seen grow both with this online publishing art that’s being made and also the online conversation around art. Ryan Schreiber: Yeah, when Pitchfork started there were not a lot of other music publications out there and as we’ve grown, all of a sudden there are now all these music publication, music blogs, so many different opinions coming out about all these different records. I mean there are—there’s just a tremendous number of voices and Pitchfork staff has grown, as well, so we have now like you know, somewhere in the range of 120 contributors or freelancers, so it’s really interesting to see how people engage with things differently and how people’s backgrounds play into it Gat: I’m going to move from the death of criticism to the death of the critic, the appendix in the art world. Knight: Don’t look at me. Gat: This is—I like all of you so much—this is my first point of contention. I think criticism is still really important. I never shy away from telling artists, like I have dinner there’s a bunch of artists at the table, they ask me what I do, I respond I’m an art critic. I think it’s really important. I find myself as a completely equal within the arts scene to them basically I think my role is to have the exact same conversation at the exact same level of rigor as them, and I don’t think they give that up, maybe some of them would, well, especially some that I’ve written about, but I don’t think they want to give that up. I think that’s a really important thing to discuss, especially with, as you say, more and more criticism happening online, it seems crazy to think that that’s not just as important as the rest of cultural production. Knight: An artist once said to me, you know, without me, you wouldn’t have a job, you wouldn’t have anything to write about, and I said that is not true, if there were no artists, I could write endlessly about why not. Fitzgerald: Also, I just feel like also without you, you know, there are—how does their art get discovered? And I felt like your talk was just absolutely incredible and the honesty of it and what it means to work for a publication and to try and attract people to your readership and basically someone that’s been in the game for as long as you have, and had such an established career, but you have your own fan base and we were talking about this a little bit earlier but this dependability, people know that they can turn to you and that you’re going to have an opinion about it, and I feel like what the critic does, and even if it is scathing, it still is drawing attention to the artist and the artist’s work, so without them you would definitely have something to talk about, but without you, they maybe wouldn’t have people talking about their stuff. Knight: Yes and no. I mean, I think—how can I put this? I think artists, as I said in my talk, artists are going to do what they’re going to do, and if I’m not around to you know, direct attention towards them, they’re going to find ways to make whatever they need to happen, happen. They’re really good at that and, you know, it’s much more, it’s much more of back and forth, I think, as Orit was saying, than me directing people to them. I mean they’re directing me to them, the artists are. At any rate. And working for a newspaper, I also feel a certain obligation to principally write about art that a readership can see, so I’m not in the business of discovering people who haven’t had, you know, an exhibition or in an exhibition somewhere so it’s a little more of a balanced situation, I think. And also art is going to be more and more a discursive thing. So many artists right now they’re expected to be able to talk about their work, that even puts them on a more equal level. Do you feel the same way about music? I don’t see as many musicians talking about their work analytically. Schreiber: No, I think that’s true. I think music, it’s almost automatic. Like I make music for myself. I sit down and play and I think that release, it’s not, you it’s not—you know, it’s more physical in a lot of ways and you know, I think obviously it depends on the artist. There are some obviously brilliant artists who do think extremely intellectually about it, but I think one of the rules to critics is kind of, you know, distinguishing where within the canon or where within an artist’s discography certain releases fall and telling the story overall and how that’s shaped. So I think that’s an interesting thing. Gat: OK, now I’m going to warn you in advance I’m going to move to the positive and negative thing. Why don’t we start with the Bambi rule and what did you actually think about that. Knight: What were you thinking about in the bathtub? Fitzgerald: You should write your speeches beforehand. I did not expect for that to spill out of my mouth. I feel like I made eye contact with one person in here, and you looked really empathetic, and I was like, all right, man, I’m going to tell a bunch of strangers about the half a day I spent in the bathtub in the dark. This is a story I—and again, like I said, I kind of just walked away from it and tried to disengage so I’m talking about it kind of for the first time. But it was an interview that I gave at 6 a.m. If you read the whole entire thing, like you were talking about having a little segment taken out and then blown up, it was kind of a very offhand comment. Just trying to answer somebody’s question. It was born in The Rumpus, I won’t lie about that. The Rumpus, we had a very hard and strict rule, do not review your friends’ books, I think we’re talking credibility here, right? Like you definitely should not do that. That’s very basic. But the other thing we wanted to do was, there are so many other places that are there and stand ready to protect the readership. If somebody who has a giant name and they’re coming out with a book, and that book is bad, that is somebody’s job to point that out to say, you know what, this is maybe that person’s not their best work. But at The Rumpus, we decided we’re going to stay out of that not because we don’t think it’s important, but because there are so many places that already do it, and I kind of carried that into it. And literally it came to me growing up like Bambi was the first movie I’d ever seen, and it has a place in my heart, and I have these McDonalds figurines that I got with my mom, and it’s all very precious. It’s not actually Bambi. It’s Thumper. Knight: Thumper. It’s the Thumper Rule. Gat: Should we have this panel about Disney, actually? Fitzgerald: But if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. What I meant is that’s how I’m going to run my little area. Gat: Isn’t that throwing responsibility away? Other people will do that, I’m not going to do that, but it is remunerating to do that because negative reviews travel really well but it also means that you’re escaping something that’s going to be hard to do. Something that means that you’re going to run into the street and someone is going to say, you published that thing about me. Fitzgerald: I don’t go a lot. So I wouldn’t have that—no, it’s a responsibility that I personally don’t feel like I’ve ever picked up that banner, so I don’t actually feel like I’m letting go. That’s what I’m trying to to, I’m trying to be very straightforward. Like I didn’t want to hide it. I wanted to be very straightforward about that’s my approach to it but again that’s my approach. I’m not trying to be the best critic. I’m again, Boston, I hope America’s best critic, I hope America’s best critic doesn’t come from—That’s not what I’m setting out to do. And that’s kind of why I feel OK with it. The guy that you mentioned, the New York Times writer who wrote that incredible — Gat: Pete Wells. Fitzgerald: He just had another one. Which was fabulous. If you think I didn’t read that and think mmmm this is delicious. Like of course, absolutely, I loved it but just like I wouldn’t start reviewing food. What I know is my love of books. I promised I would never leave San Francisco and I left San Francisco. So what I really what I took away from it was never make hard, fast statements. But I’m open to discussing it here if you guys want to talk about it. Knight: I have as a general rule of thumb in terms of negativity: only punch up, never punch down. If an artist is, you know, having their first show in a gallery and I hate it, I don’t review it. It doesn’t matter. If it’s a major artist having yet another show that I dislike, I’m more than happy to write about it. Schreiber: Yeah, I think it’s actually really essential, because in a lot of cases artists can happen overnight. They can come out of nowhere and be suddenly relevant to the conversation and I think even with an established artist it’s worth pointing out. You know, these artists can become more relevant, they can start evolving. There’s a lot of amazing artists whose initial records are not their best work and maybe are their worst work, and within the greater conversation, for us, we want to have a complete catalog of that artist’s work. So if they start off on something and then they kind of evolve and become more relevant, become more significant, their art becomes better, it becomes brighter, I think having that initial review is really essential to, you know, parsing their work as a whole. Gat: Yeah, and I’m going to bring money back into it, because apparently that’s my role here. We all work in industries that make a lot of money, it seems really important do you have to keep the market in check. I have written about artists who were younger than me who had their first solo show ever and wrote really negative reviews about them because they sell. And this is selling because it’s pretty and it looks digital, but it is not good work, point blank. I know that’s a matter of taste and opinion and etc. and etc., and taste is something you should get over, but it seems like a really crucial word. But I also in my research about this positive and negative thing, which all sparked by Isaac actually. I found this amazing quite from Susan Sontag that says, “I don’t ultimately care for handing out grades for a work of art, which is why I avoided the opportunity of writing about things I didn’t admire.” I’m also interested in the grading thing. Schreiber: Yeah, I think ratings are, well, when I was—before I started doing Pitchfork, I read a ton of music criticism and I read a lot of books you know, guide books essentially, you know, and I think that—I think just having an ‘at a glance’ kind of a—it sets the tone sort of for what the review is about to say and I think it’s also good, like I’m sort of a populist type of person, and I also really like the ability to kind of—like it kind of opens it up to a little bit of a broader audience, like there’s a lot of people who just aren’t that interested in criticism, as well, so having something there and having something that kind of grabs their attention like OK, I kind of know what you’re saying, I’ll read a bit of it but I also—I think that the ratings are really, again, for setting framework of the artist’s discography. They’re actually really tricky because Pitchfork‘s scale seems to be so scientific like 7.9, these really granular kind of ratings, and that’s sort of somewhat of a gut– there’s not really a lot of science to it, it’s just this is where we kind of feel, and I think that our readers kind of know the difference what the difference is between an 8.1 and an 8.8, that there is actually a vast difference. When you’re reviewing five records a day and you have a catalog of thousands upon thousands of reviews, these distinctions, you know, make a little—make sense. But I do think that, yeah, that ratings are—they’re a form of populism, but also I think, you know, just placing things in context. Gat: So do you think ratings has to do with online attention? Do people expect that more online? Schreiber: I think so, yeah. I think everything is really, pretty quickly on the Internet. It’s easy to be distracted, and I think having that there, I think it’s a nice balance because our reviews are often quite long, and I think that’s unusual. It allows the writer to go very in depth and gives the reader a lot to chew on and really back up their argument. And so, yeah, I think that—but attention is—it is—I think the rating does play into that a lot. Fitzgerald: I mean I just want to think like as a fan, it works, yeah. Like you were talking about remembering, looking at Pitchfork for the first time, we were talking about this a little built before, but I was raised on two tapes like Les Miserables and Billy Joel and that was my musical education. And I remember discovering Pitchfork. As somebody who didn’t know music background, didn’t know theory, didn’t really know a lot, it became such an easy place to discover things for me anded that rating system, because that’s exactly who I was, I wasn’t going to read a bunch of different reviews, is oh, here’s this band, they obviously think very highly of this or like oh, it’s really rough but that’s what brought me in, it’s what engaged me, because like you said it’s this framework that I knew. I know what a grading system is. Gat: Would you introduce grading system in BuzzFeed? Fitzgerald: No. Gat: Why not? Fitzgerald: I did that thing, you made me say something hard and fast. Again, because I would do with Pitchfork does. The way I view my role is I’d like to think of myself as like your friend who’s just like, this is the book you’ve got to check out. I’m not—there’s not going to be like a rating of how much I think this like thing is. These, the books that I tend to talk about, the authors I tend to talk about, are people that I really think other people should be discovering. So a rating system in the context in how I talk about books really wouldn’t make sense, but I really appreciate that Pitchfork does it. Gat: Would a rating system make sense in arts? Knight: Every now and then there’s been discussions at the paper—should we go to a multi-­‐star review, five star, four star, and we’ve always resisted it, I think for a good reason. Whereas you’re suggesting that it can help bring people to it, I think it pushes people away. Oh, it’s only got three stars, I’m not going to read that, and if the writer can’t—if the writer can’t bring the reader through the piece, then get a new writer. My primary goal in writing a review is that once a reader reads the first paragraph, I consider it a success if they get all the way to the end, and if they don’t get all the way to the end, then the review is a flop. Whether they go see the show or something, you know, I’m really happy if it inspires people to go see a show or something like that, but mostly I just want them to read the whole thing, and you know, putting stars at the top would affect that, I think, in a negative way. Schreiber: See, I would think that—I think maybe from kind of an intuitive place, that that seems like it makes sense, but in our case really we find a lot, we find that people, at least from the metrics, will spend an average of 3 to 4 minutes on our review pages. Which is a lot. Some people are spending 7 or 8 minutes on the review pages. So I think that’s something that like early on, pitch people would say about Pitchfork and oh, I’m going to look at the ratings or whatever, and that says something about you. That the ratings are a hook. It’s interesting knowing going into something, you know, how good or how bad do you think this is, and that to me is always sort of an engaging starting point. It just gives you like a little reference and from there you may be interested in reading something that you didn’t know you were interested in reading. You know, if I—without any kind of rating system or without a best new music or whatever, I think that Pitchfork would not be what it is, I think that these types of things kind of allow, are a way of kind of just hooking somebody and getting them a little bit more interested. There are five reviews a day, so if I’m supposed to sit and read five 2,000-­‐word reviews, you know, in a day, that’s a lot of expectation to place on readers, because we want to be comprehensive. We really want to be thorough, and I think that just giving people a place to start, it’s like, oh, wow, this Mumford and Sons record is a 2 or is a 1.9, what does that mean? You know, I think getting into that is—like, I think that’s a fun place to start, you know. Oh, I really have to read what they said about this. Gat: I wonder, too, because having a rating system means that you have this recognizable structure that I know from food criticism, which I clearly read all the time, does that help people assert their authority? That seems important online. You work with young critics, you work with young critics, how do people assert authority online over Yelp if Yelp is considered something that is not as valuable? Schreiber: I think through, how do they assert authority? I think really just through like through the strength of their opinions, you know, it’s like any other critic, in a lot of ways. I think that people who are experienced critics or experienced Yelp reviewers, in some case you can kind of tell. But yeah, they’re writing the review, just the practice of reviewing is asserting authority. Gat: Could you assert authority if you’re only writing positive reviews? How do you develop a long-­‐
lasting voice if you’re only positive. Schreiber: I think that would be really, really difficult. I think asserting authority, really at that point it just comes down to the taste of coverage, right? Like is somebody writing about, and what is kind of new and what’s coming to the surface, and I’m listening for myself, and do I like it? It’s a very different kind of practice, so I find that to be—it’s one way of doing it, but I think that asserting authority, I think the negative really, negativity lends weight to the positivity, you know, without one, there’s just, there’s not this balance, there’s varying degrees or varying shades of positive. And yeah, I think that you need to—that the negative really—I think that when—like, for example, Pitchfork is very—we kind of have a reputation as being tough critics or difficult to please, and I think because of that, it does lend more weight to when we think something is really exceptional, I think it creates a little bit more interest. Fitzgerald: And not to keep hitting a dead horse, I will say that that works perfectly for him. To answer your question, though, for me it’s dependability. It’s do the recommendations that I make please my readership? So our newsletter that we have, it goes out twice a week and once a week we have a small review, just a paragraph long, it’s just art, it’s the new book to recommend that we recommend that people read that week. And obviously not everyone reads each book each week, it all depends on how much time you have, etc., etc., but that newsletter has over 150,000 subscribers, that means that those people find our recommendations, that they like them enough to keep getting, I mean email is time, and so for me it’s about being a dependable person. I’m not walking around giving gold stars to everything. I really take a lot of time, and I read a lot of books, and I get pitched a lot of essays that I do not publish that I tend not to talk about, so for me it’s about dependability and really having the strength of having good taste. And again, Chris, this is something I feel like you have, in spades in both, the negative and the positive. People, you have a fan base that depends on you, and really enjoys, and sometimes probably disagree with you, but definitely enjoys hearing your thoughts. Knight: Yeah, I was thinking what’s the opposite of a fan base? A loathing base or something? Because I have one of those, too. In terms of credibility, I think, you know, maybe just because I work for legacy media, there is a kind of built-­‐in institutional weight that comes along with that. For good and for ill. I mean when I started writing in the 1980s, probably journalistically speaking, the most powerful journalistic art critic in America was Hilton Kramer at the New York Times, and since I didn’t know anything about journalism, I read him religiously, even though I find him to be a loathsome, reprehensible, hideous human being. He’s dead now, so — But I also at the same time regard him as absolutely brilliant as a journalist. He knew how to push those buttons that a newspaper has in a way that very few other journalistic critics knew how to do. He was really, really good at it which is part of the reason that he developed, you know, whatever clout he had. So I would—I would read him for that purpose, to learn how to—to learn how to use journalism in certain ways, and he often had all of the right reasons for coming to the wrong conclusion. So I’d take the reasons and rewrite them. So the credibility thing can, speaking of negativity, can be useful in that way, too. Fitzgerald: I want to say one thing, just to jump back a little bit. You also said that a lot of this conversation sparked from those comments that I made. And I just want to make sure that folks see things in like a broader sense. The—this is not—it’s not a new conversation, like I want to make that very clear. Like that blew up around that time about a year and a half ago, but before that, when believer magazine came out, it blew up. This positive-­‐negative thing is a conversation that’s always been a part of criticism and talking about people of loving or clothing and fights between critics, the Renata Adler, and who did she go after? The name is slipping from me, say it louder. Pauline Kael. There it is, like again it is fascinating and it gives people things to talk about but these are all kinds of the conversations we’ve had about criticism for decades, if not longer. Gat: I’m going to take that back and say that my research has come out of the links, it has been going on forever. I have been interested in it forever. Now to a really great came that came from the audience, I feel like I’m a radio show host or something. This is from Luke Finsaas who’s asking if critics have a role of guiding artists or the scene or the industry somehow? And that seems really important in this context, I know that you think you have a role, I can see that in your eyes. Schreiber: Yeah, I think we do have a role. I think that it is—I think we have a role really for our readers, all different critics have different perspectives, different vantage points, different tastes and I think they resonate with their audiences in different ways and a lot of different publications, even covering the same type of art or same medium, you know, have different kind of a different perspective that they’ve built a trust with their readership that they turn to. So I mean it’s not really in shaping like the industry, it’s really in shaping our own kind of perspective on music. Gat: Do you ever get feedback from musicians one-­‐on-­‐one? Schreiber: Yeah, well, I mean I do to an extent. When prompted, I would say. You know, I don’t usually just go up and say, you know what, that show was really good, but have you considered like an in-­‐ear monitor or something in it’s not I don’t usually do that kind of thing. Like for the most part, I don’t know, I generally am more interested in artists’ kind of perspective. I’ll usually ask them questions about their art and how they make it, I’m really interested in gear, for example, and I’m always interested in the actual process of that, so I’ll ask them a lot of those types of questions, but you know, when I’m asked about it, you know, I’ll be—I’ll be pretty candid, but you know, it’s a little bit of a different discussion when it’s one-­‐on-­‐one. You know, I’m not trying to be cruel, you know. So—yeah, it varies a little bit. Gat: What about your role? Do you — Fitzgerald: Um, yeah, I mean I think it’s—things affect other things. I think it’s like physics or something some scientist would understand. But everything you do kind of affects, and so for me, it’s really about like what we share, which again gets into the philosophy. I’m just talking about BuzzFeed Books here, but BuzzFeed kind of as a whole, like what is something that is so good that you want to share it, this kind of gets into the idea of like click bait, right? There was a time in the mid 2000s, that I worked another website like how to get a click. If you get a click and the person doesn’t like what they see, they’re not going to take the next step to share, so for me what we all share, what we all talk about, of course it’s going to influence what art gets created and what people are interested in things, because none of us live in a bubble. And that’s—and I think that’s a very good thing. So art, much like music to be honest, is something that I really enjoy now, but I’m not very well versed in it so I just went to the Brooklyn art museum recently, and I had a very big fear moment which ties into music as well. I didn’t want to be the person at the show that holds up the camera and periscopes the whole, like, those people are really annoying, somebody’s got a selfie stick up for two hours and that’s really annoying. When I wanted to take pictures at Brooklyn art, they said no, we really encourage that, because it allowed maybe that somebody doesn’t get to go to the Brooklyn art museum to take a time with that and enjoy that and I do think that movement it’s a type of fandom, to be honest, but there’s no way that doesn’t influence it. It’s all part of the conversation. Gat: There’s also a feedback loop that’s built into being an author, you have a relationship with your editor which you discussed. Artists don’t get that after art school. Do you do studio visits, for example, do you consider that as part of your role as a critic? Knight: I don’t often do studio visits anymore, but it’s mostly just a practical consideration, like who has time? I love being in artists’ studios, you find out all kinds of things, but I typically, I will typically do that at my request, not there is, because I don’t know how to prioritize things. And in a—I don’t mean to completely change the topic and maybe I’m not, but I was thinking about in terms of criticism, negativity and so on, what one of the virtues that I think of newspapers is my column is not supported by advertising. There is some, you know, art-­‐related advertising in a newspaper, but it’s like the only—the only newspaper where it’s significant is the New York Times. So I find it a huge amount of freedom in that fact. And I get a lot of editorial support because I don’t think it—I mean they recognize it doesn’t impact that way and it’s the reason that I stopped writing for trade magazines in 1996. The Museum of Modern Art was doing a Jasper Johns retrospective and at that time Artforum when they commissioned a cover story, they would commission two so there would be two different voices because, god forbid, Artforum should have a point of view because it had advertisers to serve. So they asked Rosalind Krauss and me to write pieces about Johns, and as I was really excited to do it, because his work had been extremely important to me, just in the way I think about art, and I developed thinking about art, but his work from the early 90s and late 80, I didn’t like at all and I never had a chance to think through why, and I can quote the opening line of the review which is “I don’t like not liking Jasper John’s recent work.” Because what I wanted to do in the piece was parse out why. And they went ballistic at Artforum, you can’t say that about Jasper John, and what? And we had a real knock-­‐down, drag-­‐out and they basically sent a rewritten review which started out elsewhere in the review and I sent it back and no, no, no, and by that point I had been used to newspaper writing where I could basically take a position which I think is an important thing to do. And we eventually came to terms and were I think both satisfied with the piece that ran. But I decided at that point I’m not going to do that anymore. Fitzgerald: You got to keep that line? You got to keep that open line? Gat: I have never had that problem with trade publication, I that seems like a really important thing to discuss, actually and the ethics of it, too, what does that mean to write, but I also wonder about whether or not multiplicity of voices cancels that out so you say Artforum god forbid would have a statement or anything. Would covering everything releases you from that? You talk a lot about the comprehensiveness. I talk a lot about selectiveness, because as far as I’m concerned what I’m covering, the fact that I covered it that it appears in the pages of whatever magazine, already means more than anything I wrote and I see that, too. This week a museum shared a really negative review that I wrote all over Facebook and Twitter. Orit Gat has some really interesting ideas about the show and my interesting ideas about the show is terrible. They don’t care. Schreiber: Yeah, I think actually what you were talking about, I think I’ve seen that happen, I know writers talk about it, and have talked about it happening to them at other publications. In fact, we had a handful of writers come to work for us, because at a former publication they found they were being stifled by the publisher saying we need to be a little more positive or diplomatic because we have advertising and I’m sure the conversation wasn’t that direct, I’m sure it was a little bit more couched. But the fact of the matter is a number of publications do have dollars that actually have an impact on what is and can be said. For us, the editors, the Editor in Chief are not privy at all to what ads are going to run on the site, so they can’t know. It’s something we want them to be to be oblivious of. And it’s also you know something that is—that really you just can’t have these two opposing forces, you know, you know, we’ve had many instances where a negative review ran on the site, and it was plastered around the adds for the album was plastered around this review. It’s such a strange, you know, feeling or a strange look, but it’s really necessary, and I always kind of revel in that and kind of take pride in it, because it shows. It’s right out there in front of everybody. Look, you can see for yourself, these things do not coincide. And I think that’s really crucial and also interesting that I kind of increasingly Pitchfork some of the ads are less supported by labels and things like that now, as well. But that’s not necessarily as by design, but it is—but it is sort of the reality of things. Gat: I actually really believe in advertising that doesn’t come from your own industry. If all art magazines were supported by fashion labels for example it would release you so much, you could write anything you want. When I was an editor, I was told don’t cover certain things, that’s an advertiser, that’s the biggest gallery in the city. Schreiber: No, you have to be willing to risk those relationships, because also people change at these companies all the time, an old person will leave, a new person will come in and these relationships they can be repaired. What’s really important is that, you know, we stand for our opinion, and that our opinion is not affected by that. I think it’s just like 101 journalism. And like you said, it’s something that you hear all the time, people are—publishers always want, you know, that they are planning playing a very difficult game of balancing both sides of this thing, trying to make everybody happy but you just can’t. Fitzgerald: And it gets to the credibility. The fact that journalism, criticism, whatever, right, what are we all grasping at right? Life in general is grasping at truth. And if you start ignoring that. Gat: So many questions from the audience. I want to like stay on the money thing, obviously. And talk about payments for writers, too, because that seems like a part of the an ethics of a website. You’re going to be writers for a long time. Fitzgerald: At The Rumpus, let us be clear. Gat: Sorry, sorry, I don’t believe in writing for exposure. I think it’s really important as a woman to say that, because people will assume that I’ll be supported somehow in some mystery way. Fitzgerald: So to be honest, I agree wholeheartedly. It is actually part of the reason why I felt that I wanted to move on past The Rumpus. I was really proud of my time there. I was really proud of the work that was done there, and I still actually do believe that it’s help a lot of people’s careers and a lot of time I have to have faith in the writer that they are adult enough to make that call, if they want to work for free, that really is on them. Working for The Rumpus, it came out of my first year I can say this, I made $12,000 in San Francisco. Gat: I hear that goes a long way in San Francisco. Fitzgerald: Yeah. It does not. So I was working for nothing because I really believed in it so I don’t want to say that those publications like if you’re trying to make something happen, whether it’s build a community or cover a certain thing that you think there needs to be coverage out there and there’s just no money and it’s a labor of love, I think that’s important and that that place exists and that’s wonderful. I will say that one of my favorite things about being at BuzzFeed books is that I get to pay my writers, because I also do think, especially in this day and age, it becomes more and more important. In the mid-­‐2000s, there was the shakeup, what are we gonna do? Build the airplane, figure it out when we’re in the sky. Great, what have we done? Beautiful editorial, anybody know anything about business? Shit! And that’s really a problem. But what we have now, you see it more and more whether it’s been around for 20 years or new websites, I think a lot of more attention to how, no pun intended but how you pay your writers, and not only how you keep the company afloat, but also that you’re treating your writers, your critics, whoever is creating the content for you as human beings and I think especially if there’s any way to make it work and in this day and age there’s so many tools to make it work. If you work on a wonderful website and you have no money, start a Kickstarter. If you have built up the fan base there’s different ways to monetize so that you can even just a little bit pay the folks and then it’s their call whether they want to write for x amount of money but I think it’s a very important part. Gat: I also wonder about that connection between a salary and the kind of writing you get to do. I’m blanking on his name right now, the other art critic for the LA Times. Knight: Current? Recent? Gat: Current. He was amazing at a panel. Someone asked him what the value of criticism was and his response was a dollar a word. Knight: It was David Pagel. Gat: Yeah. But having a position, being paid allows you to write very particular things. What do you think is going to happen now that clearly I’m not going to get your job one day, never gonna happen. There aren’t any art critics anymore. Knight: Well that’s good, because I’ve got a mortgage. Well, one of the other good things about legacy media is that they will—they will support me to do things like this. They will underwrite my being at something like this. I’m doing this for free. I’m not being paid to be here by the Walker because it’s not a good idea for the chief art critic at the Los Angeles Times to be cashing a check issued by a major art museum that is, you know, potentially part of coverage. So the newspaper allows me to be able to do something like that. In terms of monetizing criticism, that’s beyond my pay grade. That’s the business side and I don’t know anything about how that works. I don’t know how they do it. It’s a mystery to me. Gat: I’m going to stick with that, there’s also a really good question from the audience about ethics. This from Anna Searle Jones who’s asking what about the boundaries between the critic, the journalist, and the publicist. I also think it’s really interesting that Superscript is about art journalism and criticism, whereas I differentiate myself from journalism because that is what happens online in the art world. It’s just journalism. What are these boundaries? How important are they? Knight: Boundaries between? Gat: Between journalism, criticism, and publicist. Knight: I consider myself a critic. There are places where they converge and there are places where it’s clearly separate. My byline says critic so the reader is included in that what you’re about to read is opinion. And if that’s not on the by line what you’re about to read is theoretically fact. May or may not be depending on situation. But there is generally a separation between the two that is clearly clear in the way newspapers are laid out. Gat: I think this is muddled a little bit online. Though, that separation that I consider really important. I think people look at an art website and say this is criticism, this is critical analysis and I think it’s reporting. Knight: Do you consider yourself journalists, as well as critics? Schreiber: No. Fitzgerald: I don’t have the memory, I don’t have the facts. And that’s what I respect about journalism. That’s what makes it—that’s what makes it what it is, and like I feel like the boundaries are actually just in the definitions of the words, you know, and then as far as to bring publicity into it, like that’s totally different. That is, somebody gets paid to promote something. That’s what publicity is, and from the place that either published it or the art institute that is throwing the show. Knight: You know, at the risk of getting too philosophical here, the First Amendment to the constitution has our understanding of what the press is has really been negatively impacted in the last 50 or 60 years when we generally seem to think that freedom of the press means that the press will not be constrained by government. That that’s what the constitution—that’s what the First Amendment is for. And it’s true. But it’s also only half the equation. The reason that the free press is in the First Amendment is an assertion that citizens have a right to information in order to make the democracy work. And that’s the half of the equation that has disappeared in the last 50 years. The idea that citizenry has a right to information is gone. Nobody thinks about that at all. So the whole idea of monetizing journalism becomes a bigger issue than it really ought to be. Initially when, you know, after the constitution was written and the country was being founded, the government subsidized journalism. Because it was important. You paid less to send newspapers through the mail, than you know, business contracts, things like that, because it was important to do. And whether or not there is a way in which to make that half of the equation more prominent at a time when we’re all drowning in seas of billionaires’ money I think it’s arguable that that’s not going to happen too soon which is too bad. Gat: Should we take questions from the audience? Why don’t we start with you and then we’ll go to you, OK? Audience Member: Hi, I’m Patricia Maloney from Art Practical and Daily Serving, and I need to go back Isaac to the end of your presentation and just sort of call you to task on imploring people to start their own initiatives, because I think this is a room full of people who have either started their own initiatives or are like deeply invested in contributing to independent publications, so I just wanted to put that out there for this group. And then as someone who is really invested in an independent publication that is also invested in locality, I wanted to go back to that idea of the positive and negative, I think is much more nuanced when you think about the ways in which so much of what we do is trying to represent the values of our cultural communities. Gat: I think that’s a self-­‐canceling thing immediately. It means that because you’re committed to a scene you’re only going to write about it positively. Audience Member: No. No. No, I think I mean I think it’s just like bringing into the conversation that, you know, like what you are calling to task, or like holding up as representative of the community, has to be invested in like what that—an acknowledgement of what that community values and like that positive and negativity has to include like presenting what that community revolves around and what and what it values. And I think, you know, that happens much more at an independent level than you know, perhaps you know at a—major media outlets. Fitzgerald: So I’m confused, though, because you started by saying you wanted to call me to task? Audience Member: Oh, just about that last. Fitzgerald: But I feel like what I was doing was trying to encourage people to start. Audience Member: But I think you’re speaking to, you know, the converted here, you know, like how many people in this room, like have started their own initiatives? Fitzgerald: Yeah, no, no, so, yeah, I mean I just—it’s something that I believe strongly with. I guess I don’t get the task I’m being called to. Not that we should get into this quagmire, but to speak to this other point that yes, of course it is something that you have done and you have built and it’s independent and it’s location-­‐based which I love this. I’m in Brooklyn there’s like numerous local blogs that I love to read, some independently owned, I think most independently owned probably and of course it reflects the community and I think that’s a wonderful thing. That’s something that’s very much come from the Internet. Instead of having this massive coverage of trying to speak to as many people as possible because you’re trying to get your circulation up, you can actually have a place like you’re talking about exclusivity that’s very, very small that’s power is drawn from the fact that it talks about the area, like either whether it’s a small online culture or an actual physical area. I think that that’s something that should definitely be applied. Gat: I think that the Internet would have been a great place. I didn’t use the word exclusive, did I? Small scale operation. Selectivity. But it actually isn’t. That’s one of the biggest problems with the Internet is that it creates this platform, these possibilities, and then the ten most visited websites, the only one that is in control of a fortune 500 company is Wikipedia. Just saying. Fitzgerald: So that’s the top 10. I mean the top 10 TV companies, I mean yes, you go to the top 10 it’s going to be conglomerate, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean that we should be disheartened by the fact that there are all these other ways to go to. Gat: We need to find new ways to do so, though, because the economy of scale is really depressing. Should we move to you? Audience Member: Yes, getting maybe more to the nuance of the relationship with the critic to the community, I just—I had left graduate school, a degree with painting and was given a grant in the late 1970s from the center for arts criticism which is based here in St. Paul to write art criticism, and I was cool, you know, I was living in a loft and everybody I knew was artists and everybody I knew loved me and I loved them and then all of a sudden I got a grant to be an art critic and everybody hated me. And I would go to the bar and people would say who do you think you are Clement Greenberg or Barnett Newman? And then suddenly it became antagonistic, and I felt like Sam Kinison. I’m just a kid. Leave me alone. I didn’t have the power to do anything with that, I’d just write. But I think historically there’s a sort of antagonism between the critic and the community sometimes and the artists and I see this in institutions, locally, where people, you know, who put on plays or whatever they don’t want to, you know, talk to the critic or the critic is antagonistic or they want to like correct them or whatever. And I just wonder if you feel there is historical antipathy, and if that has a function in terms of collusion, credibility, all that sort of stuff that the antipathy, you’re not just building people up, I mean you’re writing—I like the definition, you’re just writing your own thoughts and you’re using writing to discover that. Gat: And if that antipathy is historical how does the Internet change that in the comments section in the way you can see with your audience? Schreiber: I think, yeah, I think there is oftentimes a sense that journalists are writing negative reviews out of a place of insecurity or just a vindictiveness or various other reasons and artists make this claim, sometimes fans who hold music really closely as part of their identity when something that they love gets you know, kind of torn down or just not fully supported in the way that they think it should be. You know, they always make these types of claims. And I think that really you know, you write negative reviews, really because you care. You care about your subject. I mean we care about music really a lot, and it’s really, really deep for all of us but I think that it’s just an absolutely necessary thing and I think in a lot of cases you’re speaking what’s on a lot of people’s minds. In some cases you’re just making the claim or you have a completely independent point of view. You’re willing to put yourself out there on the line and risk that kind of backlash, but yeah, I think that kind of—it’s always interesting, I think that it’s just the kind of go-­‐to response for people who, you know, who disagree with criticism and I think there was that great piece on Gawker almost a year ago on smarm, right, and that piece talked about the differences between snark and smarm and that kind of oh, you’re just insecure, you’re vindictive, you’re nasty, criticism comes from a nasty place in people and it’s this defensiveness, is that then what is categorized as smarm? I think that, you know, people don’t really have a real reason for it. It’s like, wow, you know, it’s really mysterious why you would have to put this out there, but it’s really a central part of the conversation. Knight: If you’re in criticism to make friends, you’re in the wrong business. The fundamental thing that a writer has to do in addressing a work of art is take it seriously. You know, there’s got to be a level of respect involved, and short-­‐term, people might be upset, long-­‐term, I think people understand that. Gat: What about the comments section? That is something that I consider really important and am always really disappointed by. Knight: My solution for that is I don’t read them. Fitzgerald: I want to jump in here because that actually, that one used to be my—I think I thought getting it tattooed on my chest. Never read the comments, and for a long time that was a driving philosophy for me, but I think this ties into a couple of things to your question that I kind of want to talk about. One, I agree, I was going to say the same thing, not here to make friends I think is very important and I think again my view of this is that it’s all of larger conversation. I think trying to break it down, is negative or positive right or wrong? Like of course it’s both right. I can’t believe that that’s a question. Like it is all important and it is all part of the conversation. I want to talk about I love that this comes up around the Internet is that the inter net was a very negative place, like super negative and I think it still is. You only have to take a look, if you’re a guy, get a friend who’s opinionated and she talks on Twitter and look at her mentions just to realize that the Internet is can be a very harsh and terrible place. So that there is a lot of negativity. Negativity is not going extinct. Like negativity is fine because it’s important for some of it and some of it is people fucking harassing your friends, which is a horrifying talk. That said I’m glad I didn’t get never read the comments tattooed on my chest because I’ve actually switched roles and I really like defending the comments now. I mean don’t get me wrong, if somebody comes into a comment section and just like spews racist shit, then yes of course, delete it: fuck them! But sometimes the comments is where these things that we’re all talking about actually bump into each other. People have super smart and on the other side of the fence feelings about something, and in the comments section is where some of that it come out. But that’s where I’d like to say that the comment section is very much about the Internet as a role. Whether negative or whether positive. You can find them and they’re gold and yes, sometimes they’re surrounded by garbage. Sometimes they’re surrounded by even lovelier conversations or more negative conversations but they’re still important. But that’s what it is. It’s humans bumping into each other all given a voice, all given a space. So actually I am here for—don’t get me wrong, not unregulated, I’m not—although maybe there’s a space for that, as well, but. Gat: I think that’s one of the roles of the editor is to lead those. My editor at Rhizome responds to every comment on the site, which is kind of easy, because you don’t get every comment but there’s also a really smart thing there that that you’re keeping your readers talking. You’re keeping your readers discussing what you’re writing on the site, not on Facebook. It mean Mark Zuckerberg is not making money on your intellectual property. Which also leads me to another question from the Internet. This one is from Katie [unintelligible] who’s asking if what we share affects what gets made, and that seems like maybe the two of you will have a lot of opinions about that. Fitzgerald: I’m going to jump in and just say to an extent of course. But I also believe what Christopher says, just about writing in general, whether it be criticism or whether it be art creation, right? People are going to make art. People are going to tell stories, from the literary world, this is like one of the things that the human race has not dropped the ball on basically since the beginning. So like it’s always going to happen. Now, what will what gets talked about force things, like the memoir blew up and had this other resurgence again in the late 90s and you saw a lot of memoirs, but I also think that art is a little self-­‐correcting, and I believe people are going to express themselves how they want to express themselves. I feel if somebody feels very passionate about something they’re going to make it in spite of — Gat: Regardless of you. Fitzgerald: Regardless of any of us. Schreiber: Yeah, I think that’s true and I guess I feel like it, I don’t know, that it doesn’t—it’s not necessarily, well, isn’t it kind of better to kind of take a back seat to that role? It says here you are paying attention and seeing what gets made and how people make it, I guess I feel like it’s not necessarily there. Criticism is not necessarily there to affect or influence. It’s not really its role, it’s not really our job, you know, if it happens, it’s kind of a byproduct. Ideally in negative reviews, as long as it’s not, you know, if it’s something that’s not completely harsh, completely totally negative, ideally, there is a form of constructive criticism there that an artist can kind of take to heart. But, yeah, I think it’s not—it’s really not our place. It’s something that I think can affect it and ideally it can affect it positively because we have different opinions about it, but at the same time it kind of lets nature take its course. Gat: Let’s take one more. Audience Member: I’m Skye Goodden. I founded a site promoting art criticism last October. I’m paying my writers, and I’m paying myself a decent wage, as well. I had a question from an advertiser of mine this morning, wanting to jump in, and saying, though, that he was worried, online advertising was a bit moot because of ad blocks that a lot of us employ on our computers, so my question was to Orit. You mentioned in your short lecture there that you thought we should return to pay walls or a similar structure. I thought that didn’t work out. I’m pretty sure it didn’t work out, so I just wondered if you could speak to that at a bit more lengths and talk about why you think it still has a possibility as a model for us. Gat: That’s a really good question. I think it will work out, because I think that presumption that everything online will always be free makes no sense whatsoever. Advertising has never supported any industry that much. Journalism that happened there, and we all knew that that was not a great idea, actually, I mean the idea of like newspapers with like champagne in the rooms and that happened. That wasn’t the like high time of journalism. I think that people really believe in what they read. They’re interested in that. They will pay for that. It’s a really, really difficult move to do. I’m not jealous of the first ones to do that. A lot of art magazines have introduced pay walls on their site. A lot of people are doing it really smartly like frieze that closes the entire issue and then their entire archive is open. But yeah, your readers should support what you do, point blank, they should also prefer that, they should prefer to pay whatever they pay so as to not get advertising that takes advantage of them. Knight: I think it also helps clarify—I mean one of the things that I run into a lot is the assumption that social media is public space. And it’s not. It’s private space. You know, it’s corporately owned private space, in which labor is given for free. I mean basically. And doing some version of a pay wall thing helps to clarify the situation in which you’re engaged. Gat: Another question from the audience? Where is the microphone? I guess right there. Yeah, OK, go for it. Audience Member: Hi. A lot of the criticism has been discussed is in terms of someone sort of on high discussing individual projects by a maker of some sort. Whether it’s art or a book or whatever. What do you think the value is of a critic in the sense of speaking to analyzing what cultural institutions for presenters are doing? Do you think the value of negative criticism changes within that context? And I don’t know, I’m just interested in hearing you speak to that a little bit more in terms of the broad scope of criticism and who it can be directed towards. Gat: Anyone want to take that first or should I? I’m really into it. Fitzgerald: Go for it. Gat: I actually think it’s easier to criticize institutions than individuals. That said it’s terrifying because institutions are usually more powerful than the freelance critic. I have long dreamed of a blog or something that criticizes art magazines. I would never make a living if I did that. Every magazine would hate me, so I did that publicly with other people and it’s the most engaging conversation I’ve ever had, and I think museums should do that, too. I think we should have critical groups coming into to discuss what they do as an institution, because otherwise, all they get is basically pat themselves on the back, we’re so great, we do research and R&D. Oh, my gosh, I shouldn’t say this at a museum. Fitzgerald: Keep going. You got it. It’s already out! You’ve gotta be brave about it now. We’ve got your back. Gat: So I saw a curator at a major museum speak at a panel, she was amazing, she was great, but she also talked about the museum as an R&D lab and no one asked any questions about that, any questions about how you translate financial models from Silicon Valley to cultural production. Nobody really talked about that as something that needs to be critically discussed, and this was on stage at another museum, and I think those discussions should be easier and I think there’s a lot of room for them. Fitzgerald: I think it’s important, because that’s how change happens, right? Calling out institutions, if we wanted things to stay the same, I think that’s incredibly important, you know, that’s how you fight if you’ve got a local museum or a publishing house that you love, if there’s somebody and you want to see change in those directions of course you’re going to have to stand up and have those conversations and like it’s just important, right? Like I feel like that is like—I feel like that’s being a good citizen, like that’s not just being a critic. That’s being like I think all of us as Americans or as human beings, that’s what we should be doing all the time, because that’s usually the things that we care about, and that’s what you want to see reflected in the institutions around you. Sometimes—a lot of good can come from getting punched on the nose. I would not be here if I didn’t get punched in the nose. But I think. Not to get too philosophical, we’re getting to a much broader conversation. But we’re seeing that from our actual government right now, right? And I think that’s important as citizens to do that. Gat: First Amendment in everything. As Americans. Knight: Especially at art institutions. I mean, socially and politically the whole big trend since the 1980s has been to privatize, privatize public space, everything public has been privatized and privatized and privatized. Well, an institution, whether it’s the Walker or the Metropolitan or whatever public institution, I subsidize them with my taxes, as does everybody else, and the degree to which they’re handed over to money can become a real problem. The commercialization of American museums that’s going on now is really disturbing to me. This is on the top of my mind because I’m in the midst of writing a sort of long piece about this. It’s getting to a point where it’s so pervasive, the commercialization of museums is so pervasive that people don’t pay attention to it anymore. It’s becoming the new norm. It’s like: of course, it’s that way. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way and I need to use my institutional clout, as I said in my talk, I need to use my power against their power and let them do with it what they want, you know. That’s not up to me. It’s just up to me to, as a journalist, to say this is what I see going on, and this is why I think it’s screwy. That’s all. Gat: I think, well, that’s—OK. I any last words? Fitzgerald: I feel like this is why it’s screwy is a perfect way to end. PANEL PRESENTATIONS:
Sustainability, Growth, & Ethics Veken Gueyikian, Hyperallergic Thank you so much for inviting me to speak today about Hyperallergic. I’m typically behind the scenes doing day to day work of building the business, but I’m glad to be out here telling you a little bit about how we started and what we are working to build. So I wanted to begin by providing a little bit of background on how and why we started. In 2009, when we were first making plans to start Hyperallergic, newspaper revenues were in free fall and it seemed like new independent blogs were being started daily while the number of major newspapers in the US was decreasing rapidly into the single digits and there was an absolute panic in the media world that professional journalism may not survive. And around the same time, it seemed like the established art media wasn’t interested in digital publishing at all. The art magazines were funded primarily by gallery ads that didn’t translate well onto the web and most were still only interested in reaching an older, wealthier collector audience who were still not really online. And most of them had websites that just repurposed print articles and displayed small logos in their side bars. And on the web the new digital media model promised exposure to their audience but without any payment for their work. There’s still a lot of discussion about how much critics and journalists should be paid or even if they should expect to get paid at all. So back in 2009, my husband, Hrag, had been experimenting with a personal blog that I had set up for him. And almost as soon as he started publishing online he fell in love with the idea of online writing. Blogging offered him a new way of writing, of organizing thoughts, communicating ideas and making connections. When he had previously written articles for print, there was never any response, no feed back or dialogue, and very little ongoing conversation. So it was the middle of the recession, and both of us were frustrated by our current jobs. I was working at a corporate ad agency and itching to start something on my own and Hrag was ready to move on from his communications job and was frustrated by all the non-­‐paying writing opportunities that were around and not really interested in writing a traditional 800-­‐word review for market focused art magazines, and so we just decided to build a new site that we could use as a laboratory to explore our ideas. Him with new forms of writing online and me to build a business to support art writing. So like the tech and business blogs had done in the previous decade, we out our idea of what an arts publication could be. And with a few thousand dollars with a WordPress designer we built the first version of the site with the name Hyperallergic and the tag line “sensitive to art and its discontents.” We described it as a forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking about art in the world today. We shied away from the predominant academic tone of art writing and expressed strong, clear opinions to create something that we would want to read ourselves. And it was important for us to be independent and challenge existing ideas, experiment with new forms of writing and ways to activate communities and for me in particular, new ways to create a sustainable business model for art writing. This is what the site looks like today. We strive to champion the voices of the powerless and push for social and economic justice with a multicultural world view. We champion visual storytelling. And we integrate social media and understand that it is an important place to share, communicate and offer insights into ideas. We publish breaking news and always integrating an arts perspective. Which is many times then picked up by other media outlets. We publish reviews both experimental and traditional reviews that go in depth. And influential opinions that lead art world discussions on current topics. When we started to build our audience, we organized events where we could meet our readers and where they could meet each other in real life. In the beginning when they were smaller, we had them in our office in Brooklyn, as you can see here, and as they grew bigger, we moved to other spaces like this one from last year that drew 800 people to a factory in Queens. And we also partnered with museums and other arts organizations to co-­‐host events in their spaces. So how did we make all this happen? We started Hyperallergic with the goal of trying to build a sustainable platform that could support high quality writing about art and culture and push the boundaries of what that could be. So having the flexibility, independence and control over every aspect of the project were really important to everything that we did. We wanted the autonomy to challenge the status quo and to resist the influence of power and money in the art world and to create a publication that was committed to paying writers for their work, that valued writing as creative act as much as the other forms of art that we were writing about, and we knew that all these things would require revenue. And while many people in the art world have been saying for years that there’s no money in online publishing, I was married to a writer so I had a lot of motivation to figure it out. So what does it mean to be sustainable? During the first year of the company, we looked at all sorts of revenue streams and were excited to experiment with all of them. We knew advertising would be a part of the mix, but we were also interested in exploring subscriptions, events, books, apps and many other ideas that we were throwing around at the time. One thing, though, we were never really interested in was trying to make money directly by selling artwork, or by taking an investment that would inevitably steer us towards the market where most of the money in the art world is made and we chose a for-­‐profit model because we felt it aligned best with our goals of being an independent sustainable company that could earn revenue directly from our audience instead of what we did or did not publish. And to be sustainable, we knew we needed to continue growing by earning the loyalty and satisfaction of our readers, our sponsors and all of our partners. So we started with advertising and which seems like the easiest to experiment with. And soon we added other types of revenue as we went along. When we started we really thought a lot about what it meant to be an ad-­‐supported publication, specifically in visual art. Could we make online advertising more transparent and work for both readers and art organizations? How could we insulate our editorial from sponsor influence? Could we use advertising to create positive change in the art community or support organizations we believed in? And could we work with sponsors that shared or mission to grow the audience for art? At the same time, we also knew that expecting charity from sponsors who would buy ads merely to support writing was never going to be sustainable, nor would it be scalable. And this approach to advertising was very difficult at first. Most of the arts organizations that we were working with at the time in 2010 had never advertised online before. I had to spend a lot of time educating and talking through them about the process, teaching them about impressions and CPMs and click-­‐through rates. And how to create campaign packages with fixed budgets that ran on a monthly schedule so it would match up with their print magazine, both the concept of what an ad is an their budgets. But it seemed to work and more and more sponsors began to move their advertising online. Online advertising can often be ugly, annoying, and sometimes even offensive. It’s often considered an interruption. So we thought we could do better and we thought we would need to do better if we were going to avoid the race to the bottom that plagued online advertising at the time. So we try our best to serve as a space that is relevant, respectful and beautiful. We want advertisers to find their ads. We avoid ads that target only the wealthiest part of the art world and we work with art sponsors to run campaigns that address their marketing goals. We really try and understand what they need and how we can help by reaching out and interacting and engaging with our audience. We work with museums and nonprofits to increase awareness and engagement of an exhibition, a performance, an event, or a conference. We rally support for nonprofits that are looking to raise their profile. We inform artists, writers, or creators about opportunities like residencies, exhibitions, contests, or grants, and motivate them to improve their skills or expand their horizons through education. And also help professional services build their audiences and reach potential clients. And even work with major brands looking specifically to reach our audience and raise awareness of an art focused project. At the same time when we were building a community with sponsors, we really felt it was important to build a community, a broader community of—sorry, in addition to building a community of readers and sponsors, we wanted to extend our reach by supporting a broader community of independent voices in the arts and so about a year after we started Hyperallergic, we joined forces with like-­‐minded sites like Rhizome and art F city. We provide sales support to smaller publishers who typically couldn’t afford to do it on their own and we help contribute to their funding of other operations. So this is what we did. So we work with building four different communities and how it works is we knew we had to provide value to each individual community individually, and together. For the system to work. We started with one writer and a small audience and sold our first ads for $300 a week. We reinvested that money into more writers, continued to grow our audience which in turn created more demand from sponsors who wanted to reach audience and more funding for writers. And we’ve been working through this cycle for the last five years, slowly but surely constantly growing. And it’s working. This year we have 9 full-­‐time employees of Hyperallergic, 6 of them are writers and editors and we are, working with 11 art publishers who reach over 4 million people per month and many more on social media. We have published over 500 writers on Hyperallergic since we started and continue to increase our freelance rates every year. We’ve built a community of over 500 sponsors that readers welcome and love to hear from but that has no influence over our editorial. And as one of the most important ways that we measure our success, in the last year we’ve paid out to almost $300,000 to Nectar Ads, affiliated publications, and $75,000 to freelance writers and hope to support them even more as we continue to grow. As you can see here, it’s been a long, steady climb over the first five years, but we are confident and excited that this trend will continue and will keep working every day to build a stronger and stronger company that can be a home to readers, writers, publishers and sponsors. Thank you. Eugenia Bell, Design Observer Hi. A lot of you may not know Design Observer or read it religiously, so I’m going to give a little bit of history about how we came about and who we are and what we do before I kind of get into the meat of the conversation. In 2003, Michael Bierut, Bill Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, and Rick Poyner launched a blog at designobserver.com. They were interested in creating a space for independent, provocative, and serious conversation about design and the larger world and to bring that conversation to an audience that reached beyond the design community. By conversation, led by four prominent graphic designers was open to everybody. Experienced professionals, curious students, sophisticated readers everywhere. We had a rich comment section that no doubt was visited by the worst tendency of the commenting world, but was also a legitimate and rich conversation in itself. Design Observer quickly earned and has sustained a reputation as the leading online magazine covering design. Its writers include Jessica and Michael, the prolific Steven Heller, Adrian Shaughnessy, Eric Spiekermann, Rob Walker (who many of you probably know for his work from Slate or Medium) writes for us from Savannah. Paola Antonelli, the poet Megan O’Rourke, the sound architect Nick Sowers, and the filmmakers Errol Morris have all written for Design Observer. Despite, or as a direct result of the success of this inclusionary approach over the course of the decade Design Observer expanded to broader topics. Ranging from citizen journalism to global healthcare, which was of special interest to our late founder, Bill Drenttel. A grant in 2009 from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed us to spend two years covering social impact and design industry. More recently, very recently, I’ve only been with Design Observer for about nine months, we enter add two-­‐year publishing initiative with the online platform Blurb, which some of you may know about and may even use. We’ve launched a publishing in print called Observer Additions, which will collect essays from the website and also generate new content. We have established an online platform for international BFA and MFA, called the Thesis Book Project, and we hosted our inaugural conference last February on design and sound, this is an endeavor we hope will become an annual event. To a certain extent Design Observer‘s original mission has been completely fulfilled and to go by social media numbers if people care that audience has been widely reached. We have 800,000 Twitter followers, over 500,000 Facebook followers and a million subscribers to our podcast on Soundcloud. We’ve been nominated numerous times for Webby Awards and with a core staff of five people, only 4 of us are part-­‐time. Only one full-­‐time person, I think it’s fair to say we’ve accomplished a great deal and continue to do so. Yet, unlike the cultural climate that characterized Design Observer in the early years, design coverage is now everywhere. Conversation about design has emerged from its insular bubble to become a central concern and how we talk about culture, education, technology, business, let alone the lifestyle, shelter, and food coverage that has always lived at the margins of increasingly 24-­‐hour design news cycle can be full of highly visual pieces that are free of commentary and ideas. In this new environment of abundance, 12 years after its initial launch, Design Observer is still dedicated to its original initiatives of inclusion, while amplifying designs, critical signals in a noisy world. We are elevating the conversation about design on and off the Internet now. From traditional publishing ventures like the books I just mentioned and also a magazine that we will be launching this summer, to alternative projects like our podcast that we already do, and videos. And some face to face encounters like seminars, our conference and salons like the ones that we’ll be doing at AIGA national conference this fall. We are not afraid to ask tough questions. Why do you only “like” an announcement of a friend or family member on Facebook? Nor do we shy away from typical topics, like is Lululemon inherently antifeminist and why do cities reject the homeless? We’re eager to debate and disagree and we think there’s a role for humor, inquiry, scrutiny, for art, commerce, politics, and film. As design becomes not only a common cultural currency, but a truly international language, we’re committed to extending our reach even more broadly than we already have. While sticking to our core competencies as educators, and practitioners and editors, and most importantly as global ambassadors for design, Design Observer is positioned at the nexus of the cultural and the critical, the social and the commercial, like many of the publications and websites present here today probably. So this might be a natural lead-­‐in into talking a little bit about financial stuff. I’ll keep it brief because I think we’ve agreed that a lot of the meat of this discussion is really going to happen in our panel discussion and from questions from you guys. But I will tell you what I can here. It’s probably a bit of a stretch to suggest that Design Observer operates on a really sophisticated financial or business model because we don’t and we never have. We are kind of in this foggy middle ground where we’re not a for-­‐profit, we wish we were, but we’re not a 501(c)(3), either, though we have a component of the Design Observer group which is a foundation that has a writing award. For some time early on, the site relied on really goodwill, and the urgent desire of contributors and our founding editors to expose and expand the dialogue around design and that often meant not paying people, including me in the early days. In the first few years Design Observer has this modest stipend from the school of visual arts from New York and it helped cover some operating costs and computers, and programming, and a little bit of contributor’s fees. That wasn’t contingent on much, but we’d already had an established relationship with the school of visual arts because a lot of our contributors taught there or lectured there and it made is sense to work with SVA as like educational partners and the educational component was a big part of our mission. The programs were broad around progressive and Sympatico with Design Observer’s mission and you know, mere inches of subtle ad space from a school didn’t and still doesn’t feel like a principle-­‐breaking act, so we happily partnered with them. But since those early years we’ve attempted other things. We have an active job board, it generates about $15,000 a year for us. That doesn’t sound like a lot of money, it isn’t. But it goes a long way in helping pay contributors and our occasional interns. Occasional grants of short-­‐up special projects and topical coverage like the Rockefeller Grant from a few years ago and more recently we’ve been taking sponsorships from companies like MailChimp who underwrote our—one of our blogs, the observatory that Michael and Jessica do. The printing company Moo and blurb as mentioned earlier who will be printing our magazine this summer. You know, it’s kind of a more commercial take on the public radio model, I guess, you know, in having these sponsors for discrete areas of the site. Podcasts in particular, because we have to hire producers and you know, people to really help on those, and it makes a lot of sense for us. Especially after our redesign last July, going after this kind of medium-­‐sized funding support for the special projects and podcasts, to help build support, and staff that those initiatives require. It also means I’m happy to say that I get to pay every single one of my writers. And the occasional intern. By web standards we pay pretty generously, though, unlike Veken, we only publish two or three times a day so it’s a slightly simpler model, but you know, I come from print, Design Observer is the first website I’ve ever worked at. By print standards, web pay is horrific. So when I first joined observer and I was sort of given our rates for writers, I was totally scandalized and there were people that I thought I couldn’t approach because I thought those rates were so low, and then three months into my tenure at Design Observer, I was talking to somebody who had worked at the newyorker.com who told me what their rate was and it matched ours and all of a sudden I felt completely legitimized and I could go to people and say we pay what the New Yorker pays and it felt incredibly edifying. So we’re currently testing the waters about new funding possibilities. The most important thing for us is to find ways of combining our principled approach which models that complement our mission. Or its earlier paid subscription, you know, really resonates with me, because it’s something that’s come up a lot at Design Observer and we want to believe in it, but you know, Design Observer is 12 years old and walking back something that’s been free for 12 years and that has an incredibly deep archive that people use, you know, we get emails from instructors and professors who are making course packets out of our archives which is fantastic and that’s probably something we should be helping them do and you know, charging for, but you know, it’s—you know, like Orit, I’m not envious of the first person who’s going to do that, because it’s going to be complicated. Some conversations that we have internally involve not just embracing new topics and the revenue generating possibilities that those things might imply. But methods of distribution, as well, you know, is the web, one question we always have, is the web, for a site like ours, which you know, that publishes original writing and excerpts from new books, is the web a place of origin still or is it just a place of dissemination? So these distribution models also come into our mind and you know, especially what it means to be publishing serious design observations on the web anymore. We don’t have the answer and I don’t think we’re going to answer it this weekend, but I’m really grateful to Susannah [Schouweiler] and Paul [Schmelzer] for organizing this, and giving us the opportunity to talk a little bit more about it. I’m also grateful to Andrew [Blauvelt] for inviting Design Observer to the conference and me back to the Walker. Thanks, and I hope we have an active conversation about this in the panel. And the question and answers. Thank you. Carolina Miranda, Los Angeles Times I know we are here to talk about models of art writing. I feel a little bit like a fraud in this area because I have not come up with any models I’m simply a writer. I don’t run a publication, I haven’t launched a platform and I work at a newspaper, which is, you know, definitely a legacy media throwback. I do have a unique position at the Los Angeles Times in that I have a new type of role which is considered digital first, so I can do bloggy items, I do full feature stories, I do Q&As, I do photo essays, and then whatever the paper is interested in, they pick it up from my blog, so it’s more about sort of being online and being a digital journalist and then sort of, by osmosis, I end up in the paper. So the way I work is a little bit different than the way Christopher works, but I’m still a throwback to legacy media but I’m really here to talk about sort of my time as a freelancer. I just did this story where I illustrated the entire Marina Abramovic/Jay-­‐Z fight using media from the Getty and I’m really into it, I think we should illustrate all stories with artwork from museum collections and I think this is more interesting than any photos of my website which you can go and see at any time. That’s St. Matthew, by the way. So before I joined the Times I was a freelancer for almost 8 years, I wrote for Art News, Time magazine, Architect a lot of work for public radio. And I managed to make a career out of writing about art and culture, which is why I’m here, but before I get into the mechanics of that, I just wanted to give you a little bit of background on my professional trajectory. People—that’s St. Lazarus, by the way, from the 16th century. People come to art writing in so many ways. There are curators who create records of their shows, academics who publish their research, there are essayists who want to add to the body of knowledge and the economic models are all different it’s not a one size fits all profession, so I really think it’s important to acknowledge where we all come from in this and I come to it through journalism. I am not an art historian, I didn’t major in art. I didn’t take a single course in art history class in college so I’m a complete and total fraud. I don’t teach and I don’t do curatorial work. I really approach this as a journalist. And actually as a storyteller so sort of the art and architecture and culture are where I happen to tell my stories and it was really—I got into it in my 30s when I was a reporter at Time magazine, I was a general assignment reporter where one week you might be writing about Al Qaeda and the next week about FEMA and the next week it’s Scarlett Johansson so it’s kind of all over the place. And my first art architecture assignment—all this kind of happened by accident, I’d been very happy at a general assignment reporter. I thought it was very interesting to be able to write about all these different and weird things. I’d always been an aficionado of culture, a big reader, a big museum goer, I always loved going to galleries, I read books about artists but it wasn’t something I had considered writing about professionally a lot and then one day at Time magazine I’m walking down the hallway going to get a Coke and I happened to walk in front of an editor’s office right as he debating who to assign this architecture story to and so I happened to step in front of his office and he saw me and he gave me the assignment. It was kind of that sophisticated was the assignment process at Time magazine sometimes. But it was a story, it was a story about architecture and skyscrapers and how architecture pedagogy is changing because of skyscrapers and architecture itself. That really got me into the idea of writing about these topics for a mass audience. I was really interested in this idea that it could go beyond the sinecure of the art world. So it was really Time that fed this bug. The idea of Time magazine was that grandma in Peoria has to be able to read it and I really loved the idea of doing that for culture stories. So when I left Time, I really got seriously into culture writing. At the time there wasn’t always a lot of opportunity to do it. And that’s when I started freelancing about art and architecture, but also other topics that I had been familiar with, travel, food, the occasional opinion piece, and bizarrely, neurological development stories, because that was something I had covered at Time magazine. So during this time that I’m just starting out as a freelancer, I also started a blog called C-­‐Monster. There we go. I don’t know if they’re sea monsters, but they kind of look like it. These are from the 15th century. I did this blog for almost seven years, it was not designed as a platform, it did not generate a lick of revenue, I didn’t make a dime from it. It really was a place for me as a writer to go and be able to play. And not have to have an institutional voice, not be writing for an editor, not be writing for a giant publication, not have multiple layers of editing, so it was where I could really sort of work out my own voice as a writer and in the process, it ended up being this great sort of piece of visibility for me. I didn’t make any money off of it, but I think a lot of—I know many of you, through that site, but because I didn’t make a dime from it, it means that it’s always been really important to me to make a living as a journalist and which means that any writing that was not on c monster, it was really, really important for me to make money on it. Now, I come from a relatively privileged position in all of this, in that when I started working as a freelancer, I was already an experienced journalist, I could already sort of command a certain level of payment. It wasn’t payment that I was getting rich from but it allowed me to survive as an arts writer, and because I was a general assignment reporter, it also allowed me to occasionally write stories about things outside art. So if things in art were a little slow, I could do a travel story, I could do a neurological story and I think that’s generally good for writers, have other things that you can write about, too, because this is a shaky business. So I’ve had the good fortune of finding a steady stream of paid work both inside and outside the world of culture that allowed me to work as a freelance writer for almost 8 years, but in my time as a writer in those 8 years, I’ve seen the landscape change. You know, I’ve seen pay rates decline, I’ve seen magazines close, I’ve been asked to write for free more times than I can count, you know, and I’ve been offered fees that once I sort of factor in the amount of time that goes to producing the work, they probably violate all kinds of minimum wage laws, and so that’s something that I wanted to address here today, because I think questions of payment and more specifically nonpayment, and how to get by in this economy, are really important. You know, so often I feel like the writer’s contribution it’s treated as so expendable. So I think my main advice for folks who are trying to get paid to write is to not give it away. Now, by not giving it away, I don’t necessarily mean immediately reject all unpaid work, tell that editor to stick it where the sun don’t shine, that’s not what I mean, I mean in an ideal world we’d all get paid for everything we write and that minimum rate would be a dollar a word, because that is a liveable wage for a writer as we talk about liveable minimum wage, a dollar a word is a liveable wage for a writer. But we all face situations in which we choose to work for free or for little pay and I want to highlight the word choose here because I really think it should be choice. When I get these offers part of the exercise that I go through in order to determine whether this is something I really want to or need to be doing is I ask myself three questions: And so the first question I ask myself is, somebody’s offered—you know, asked me to do something for free, the first question is how can I improve the terms of this? So you know, if the pay is zero, can they give me 50 bucks? If the pay is 50 bucks, can they give me 100. If there’s no money for a writer’s fee, can they purchase a couple of books for me to do my research that I can then retain in my library? Does the sponsoring organization have access to databases that maybe me as an independent journalist does not have? Can they give me access to those databases? I feel like so often this is approached as a one-­‐way relationship as you know, an organization coming to you the writer and asking you to write for free, but it’s a negotiation, it’s a collaboration and we are allowed to ask for things back and we might not get money but we might get other things and I think it’s important to ask for them so that this becomes more of a relationship of barter than one of unpaid labor. So question No. 2. That I ask myself is, what does the publication and its staff look like? So is this a commercial site that makes a profit? Does the publisher get paid? Does the editor get paid? Do the marketing people get paid? Does everyone except the writer get paid? Or are they paid 25 bucks for a thoughtful, well reported thousand-­‐word blog post? You know, if that’s the case, then the writer is subsidizing that enterprise, and it’s unsustainable and usually in those cases the answer to myself is no, that that’s not a piece I want to do. However, if the publication is a nonprofit with tiny budgets or a project supported by a passionate group of people who are volunteering their time, if it’s a forward I’ve been asked to do by an artist for their book and I’m really passionate about their work but I know that the budget to produce the book is microscopic, I’ll set aside the concerns about money because there are stories I want to tell. So in those kinds of questions I ask myself, am I the collaborator? Is this part of a creative endeavor or again, am I simply functioning as unpaid labor? I think if I’m going to be doing something for free, I want to feel that I’m a collaborator. The third question I ask myself is how much of a burning desire do I have to write about this topic? There are times I have written for free or for low pay because I felt a sense of urgency about the subject, because I was really moved by an artist’s show and I just wanted desperately to get the word out about it or there was an idea that I really wanted to express and that particular platform, even though it might not have been ideal in other ways in terms of pay or structure it was the most appropriate place to tell that story so in that case I’m willing to do it because I’m not just a paid writer, I feel like I’m also somebody who traffics in ideas and sometimes you know, ideas just aren’t about money. So I think that’s such an important question of if you’re going to write something for free and you’re not going to be 100% enamored by it, it might not be worth doing it. Now, for writers who are new to the field, who are trying to make a go as a freelancer, free or low-­‐
paid work is probably going to be part of the deal initially. That’s a little different than how I started out. But I think again, think critically about what you’re going to be getting out of it. Does this job give you a portfolio of worthwhile clips? Is it improving your reporting skills are you getting good editing so that you’re improving your writing? Are you getting something that you wouldn’t get just by writing your own blog? So I think those are important questions to ask if you’re starting out. But I think at the same time it’s important to set limits on sort of how much and for how long you’re willing to do that, because by having everybody write for free, it devalues what we all do to some degree, but I also recognize that writing is an art and it’s not any one thing and so people are going to do it for different reasons. Now, to finish out, I wanted to bring up a question of sustainability that has nothing to do with money, but more about the way we communicate. We live in a society where art seems to hold little cultural capital. According to the national center for education statistics, only half of American high schools require any kind of arts coursework for graduation, we are not a culture that calls on artists or architects or philosophers or playwrights to understand the world around us. When I watch TV on Latin America I’m always kind of wowed, there will be like a policy maker and a poet describing like the week’s news, because in Latin America what a poet has to say about something is important and I agree. Here in the US when art does make it into mass media it so often has to do with auctions or scandals or you know, the San Diego professor whoever wants his class to get naked so it turns into that, which is a little bit about I want to talk about asking ourselves who we write for and why. So do we write for the caravan of people who jet from a fair to fair, biennial to biennial? Is it for the people who buy the 150 million-­‐dollar paintings? Is it the fellow egg-­‐heads who like to use words like recontextualizing and hybridity? Every choice, every choice we make as a writer of the subjects we choose to cover and the language we use to cover it and the publication we choose to disseminate it can narrow or expand our audience. And I think the art world can—it can be such an echo chamber and sometimes a very small one at that and so I think it’s important given the state of art in this country for every writer to find ways to get outside of that world, at least some of the time. To cover stories that aren’t aren’t fairs and biennials to do essays that aren’t all jargon. To explore topics that take us into the myriad areas of daily life. In whatever we write, I think it’s important to keep ideas concise and language simple, to invite people in rather than keep them out, to continuously make the case to the broadest possible audience that art is a rich part of life and not just something for the rich. It’s a really big world out there, so let’s write for all of it. Thank you. James McAnally, Temporary Art Review I appreciate this panel in general. I think the conversation after will be really good because we’re all coming from very different places. So on my end, I thought it would be important first to define terms. We’re not interested in growing an industry, we’re interested in growing a field. An art world obsessed with money, we want to understand how to surpass it. If we can’t imagine new models as critics or publishers, we’re perpetually subservient to models we claim to oppose. Temporary Art Review is an anti-­‐profit publication, founded in St. Louis in 2011 by Sarrita Hunn and I, in order to connect disparate communities particularly those outside of traditional art centers to document, assess and advocate for artist run and alternative practices throughout the United States and increasingly abroad. We have many starts and resets and restarts. We talk a lot about models, I think it’s because we’ve always been an experiment in how an alternative publication today may operate as much as how it has existed as a publication itself. Its form as always applied back to its language. Our decision, finances, and design moving towards a collapsing center. To talk about alternative spaces we needed to enact or embody an alternative form. To forefront questions of the artist run, we needed to be artist-­‐run ourselves and to discuss inequities in the art world, or problematic platforms, we needed to create a sustainable equitable financial model, a platform we can live with and grow through. It’s simple: We needed to connect the discourse with the work we were doing, the artist, activist, organizer considered inseparable from the critic, editor, publisher. We carry our conscience and out political consciousness forward through our forum, ethics, growth and sustainability are considered inseparable. That which we cover typically hovers in this border as well. Non-­‐nonprofits, unprofitable for-­‐profits, conflicted curators, conflicted critics, artist-­‐run, artist centric, alternative experimental, ephemeral, and ekphrastic. The models we seek haven’t yet been found or they’re found in the passage between forms and it’s our role to consider their emergence when they appear. We were interested in creating a publication that is an example of the form we celebrate. It advances the forms we see succeeding and that creates meaning that circumscribes ignores or pushes past the art world as we now know it. To me, the most interesting models come out of extreme dissatisfaction, displacement. Temporary initially reacted to the failure of art criticism and its extremities. In the smaller off-­‐center cities and smaller artist centric spaces. Founding the site in St. Louis in 2011 and in most cities throughout the country the limitations of dominant model was clear from the out set. We knew we could not sustain ourselves on ads or grants, subsisting on existing models, we weren’t going to found a new legacy platform. We had to start from that place, post recession, uncertain support structures, collapsing industry, we emerged alongside what we felt was the defining element of our time. The return of alternative space. In the wake of economic shifts, the protest of shutters in place of context, the conditions of scarcity itself catalyzing new models. Entering this landscape as a national site with an emphasis on communities without an active critical dialogue only punctuated this. The models weren’t working, so the work wasn’t happening. So much of our work went undocumented, undiscussed. Putting in a broader context of art criticism publishing, a point that persists not only are critical institutions and traditional media outlets faltering, but there continues to be a startling lack of meaningful expansions of models. Not just bloggers, part-­‐timers and casual critics that fill in the gaps our media outlets have always missed but emerging models of publishing more broadly. We can agree that criticism is in continual crisis. The crisis in audience and readership, The crisis in advertising and gazes time and attention, the crisis of platform and pay. Round tables, presentations and panels like this one often hang there, circling around a point without ever transcending it. The possibilities of emerging platforms should lead to an expansion of agency. New critical voices should be emerging as we understand there no gatekeepers and no gates to keep. New models should be taking root, yet this persistent should continues to haunt the field. Our industry is not going to return in the same form. It’s our obligation to make sure our field is documented, discussed, distributed, contended with publicly. I think this echoes a lot of what Carolina was saying, as well. Can we not advance alternate means of address, of criticality, of sustainability. In times of crisis, sometimes it’s sufficient to state the issue then experiment with whatever is in your control. Perhaps in this experimentation, we’ll stumble on the new forms of publishing, perhaps the form becomes a model. Because repairing crumbling models isn’t sufficient to address the contours of the contemporary and this moment of experimentation is an opportunity to reshape our work into something that addresses the breadth of art as it is. Decentered, multiple, malleable. There have to be more models than grants ads, sponsored content, pay wall, our models to consider what he we can build outside of these patterns. What a community can create for itself. We founded the site for $1.99. Operated with essentially no budget until recently, publishing over 400 articles from a scattered community of 150 artists, artist writers, curator critics from around the world. Through this act, we became increasingly interested in the possibility of creating radical sustainable and alternate forms of organizing, of publishing, of being. An emergence of a radical conscience not limited to locality. In many ways this is what we were doing all along but it was inarticulate until we relaunched the site last year as an anti-­‐profit publication with the formulation our vision was to make it public or at least attempt to. This making of a public, connecting together as a community was itself a goal. We didn’t feel like there was a place for ideas to gather that was open, equitable, accessible, diverse, intelligent. A place to prepare that was neither for nor nonprofit but was other. Opposed, experimental, and not just in language but in form. Not just by content, but by finances. There was a form itself that acted out our oppositional radical stance as being alternate to, yet intersecting with the art world we engage. We decided to distribute what we had this public embarking on ad shares, mutual support, cooperative models and attempt to build out a structure we could live with and in. It is still very much an open ended experiment, one that works at certain moments and of course feels restrictive at times, but nonetheless keeps the space of the site open and undetermined. Temporary exists in a complex position which I feel is essential to make transparent, we are an anti-­‐
profit experiment in mutualism and connectivity. Primarily managed by two people and published in proximity to The Luminary, a nonprofit which I also helped found. It doesn’t exist entirely outside of these systems we critique, but at angles with it. We do sell a small number of ads, mostly from friends and partners, we receive some grant money through the Warhol Foundation, through The Luminary, in order to have create a fund for writers and guest editors, something like 95% of what we publish had been bartered, donated, given to the public as a way to advance this discourse. It’s a collectively developed platform for a quickly growing number of contributors and readers. Anti-­‐profit for us is a transparent reflection of our finances. More properly, that we operate without finances at the center of our enterprise. We may make money, but when we do, it’s equally shared as one form of payment among others. So we don’t exist due to a financial model. Nor are we dependent on one. We found both for ourselves and for many of our contributors that finances aren’t the primary concerned when you’re openly aligned along a similar vision. The removing money from the center of the conversation doesn’t collapse, but actually expands it. As a case study just to get practical, Cassie Thornton, an artist in the Bay Area, wrote a piece for Temporary called Save the System in which she advocated for death strikes in the context of increasing costs for MFA programs. In exchange she was given an ad space to do with whatever she wished, she could sell it, barter it further, advertise a project, whatever. She ended up putting up a gold and black ad saying “Bad Credit does not Equal Bad Person,” which led to a site in which she would offer alternative credit scores through her feminist economics department. This microcosm of the site connects as an idea outward. Merging an alternative proposition in one field, puts the structure of a publication in another. Positing a valid alternative economics in a succinct act. For us an emerging community is the concern. In a broader sense of a radical alternative that does not just critique, but builds. It’s important that Temporary is just one model among many advancing these ideas, a publication echoing the ways that artists are working. The metaphor we’ve productively applied to our work, but also the larger landscape of that of the artist-­‐run ethos, is that of wild building it’s a practice in which families and small communities create a settlement on border territory that drains off resources from the grid in order to sustain it. What’s interesting about these structures, they’re built along a particular logic, the family builds the first floor out fully, finishing it as a living space and moving in. However, the second and third floors and so on are framed and left unfinished waiting for future generations to inhabit and expand it. It’s a radical form, open ended and anticipatory, the act of foretelling, waiting, preparation, paired for us with documenting, describing, assessing, anticipates the sustainable structure in a migratory border. An un-­‐termed territory. We’re interested in building towards this future space, creating a ground floor that is inhabitable, living here and inching upward floor by floor, we wish to make a public, or at least to attempt to. Thank you. PANEL DISCUSSION:
Sustainability, Growth, & Ethics
Susannah Schouweiler: I was thinking about this, and as I followed all of our panelists really closely, and as I think about sort of the economies of this work, of writing and responding to culture as a professional, whatever professional means, or as an artist engaging that conversation, it strikes me that cash might not be the central question, but compensation might be and that could be professional compensation, that could be intellectual compensation, a sense of collaboration that Carolina was talking about, but I think even with that, I think we have to start with the question of pay. Pay for writers, before we get into publishing models. And I really can’t think of a better way to start than Yasmin Nair’s essay Scabs, Academics, and Others Who Write for Free. This little nugget is really striking. The system of free writing has created a caste system, she says, with those who can afford to work for free doing so, while those who can’t struggle to pay the bills and often give up. As with unpaid interns, those who can’t afford to write nothing, inevitably make it into networks of influence, which allow them to continue on to actual paying gigs. She goes on, if you write for free, you are making it possible for publishers to refuse to pay professional writers what they’re worth. You’re contributing to what she calls the “adjunctification of writing.” Her solutions are really blunt. If you’re any kind of writer, demand pay and good pay, even and especially because you don’t need it to survive. If you’re a would be publisher who wants to provide a space for radical feminists, whatever but don’t know how to do it with your pay rate starting in the hundreds and not the measly tens, don’t publish. It’s as simple that. Do you think people who can’t pay should just north publish? Carolina Miranda: Well, I have some problems with that essay, I don’t like to write for free and I think writers should get paid for their work, but it completely—there’s no nuance in who or what a writer is. People write for lot of reasons. People write as part of another process. If they’re an investigator research the written result is sort of an ancillary part of their research work or for an academic to publish findings and so there’s a lot of reasons that people write and I think to put this blanket statement that if you’re writing for free, you’re a scab. There’s something really ooga booga about it. I also feel like writing is a form of communication. After talking it’s one of the oldest forms of communication and no, people haven’t always gotten paid to do it because sometimes what you’re expressing, you know, is not necessarily for a paying audience or things like that. Veken Gueyikian: I have a problem with it, too, when we started, we started paying very little. I mean what we could afford. Both me and Hrag had full-­‐time jobs but we knew that we had to start somewhere so that we could start paying writers and increasing over time and really grow. Because growing from is probably impossible but growing from $20 to 50 to 75 to 100 seems like something that we could all build together as a community. So our writers, as a community, our sponsors and our publishers and us building it together to get to this point so I disagree that we shouldn’t start, because we need to start something. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Eugenia Bell: I have feelings about it, as well, I think the human in me wants to agree with the idea that, you know, we should as writers should be demanding pay for our work, and that writers and the work that we do absolutely be valued the same way that the work that doctors do or anybody else is valued and certainly monetized. On the other hand, as the editor of a website and as a book editor in the past, you know, and somebody who is lucky enough to be able to pay their writers, I—you know, I like—I really liked your point about the different, you know, and it’s not something I think about very often, but the different models that paying your writers can take, and this idea of barter is a very good one. I know we spoke a little bit at dinner last night about sort of back and forth that a writer can have with a really good and involved editor and the work that an editor puts into improving a writer’s writing and thinking process. You know, hugely valuable, and that’s something I’ve had with my own editors at Frieze and Artforum and on books, so I recognize that that is one characteristic of payment or at least compensation. You know, on the other hand, we—many art writers live in cities like London and San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, and cash pay is utterly important. It’s vital. Literally. So, yeah, I mean, you know, the idealist in me wants to side with her but the realist in me understands that demanding some kind of compensation, whether that is intellectual or cash, is utterly important, necessary, and I just, you know, and I am really glad you made that point. It wasn’t something that I really thought about though we had touched upon it and you made it very strong, convincing. James McAnally: I think one thing, that quote it sort of assumes a top-­‐down industry. It assumes that existing infrastructure that is able to pay and I think it’s something we have talked a lot about in this. There are a lot of predatory publications out there I think that they kind of subsist in their infrastructure and they pay some people and not others, which came up in several different panels and I think the think that what we were reacting to is if you set out that model, then a lot of things are not talked about. So if you do separate this conversation from industry to field, what are you doing? What is the work? You know, something that we considered starting in a place like St. Louis, but also in a lot of cities is it just wouldn’t happen. If you set out these kind of ways of formalized structure and what we’re going to see is the art critic from the newspaper gets fired and then you go five years and there’s nothing, you know, and that’s kind of not good for anyone. It’s not good for artists, it’s not good for writers in those areas, so you really have to consider what can you make happen otherwise. Sometimes, you know, that can exist in a paid writing position, sometimes it can be a nonprofit publication, whatever, but I think that there are always other approaches, I think, to make sure that it’s happening. Schouweiler: James, when you guys founded Temporary, who were you serving? Who were you writing for? Who were you accountable to? McAnally: I mean I think we were accountable to ourselves. We go back to the beginning, it was really an artist-­‐run space. I mean we think about that in terms of spaces or galleries, but not really about publications but it’s increasingly common. That it was sort of artists and I mean I also run a space that has exhibitions that would just not get covered and so there was kind of an accountability to ourselves that we sort of looked around St. Louis, but also we started out immediately kind of a national conversation, and the idea was that we wanted to talk about artist-­‐run spaces, alternative spaces, projects that were ephemeral and were likely not going to be covered and so there was no archive around it. So we felt accountable to a way of working I think and actually documenting it, taking it seriously being critical about it, as well, so not just kind of boostering, that way of working, but actually what is criticism that is more directed and intentional, you know, the underlying value was, we felt like that was a really important moment in time, we started in 2011 but really form 2009 on you see this resurgence of the artist-­‐run space and we felt that that conversation wasn’t happening and that we weren’t really willing to wait for it to happen, either that at a certain point you have to take responsibility for it yourself. Schouweiler: I’m thinking about conflict of interest because I know Veken spoke really well I think from the idea that from the very beginning, if you’re approaching especially arts writing as journalism, you’re thinking about who you’re accountable to and how you can keep the editorial, you know, church and state how you keep them separate so that the source of your funding doesn’t unduly affect the kinds of stories you feel free to tell and I’m wondering Carolina and Eugenia, you’ve worked as freelancers, and you know, with this creative entrepreneur model, this go it alone freelancer who’s kind of a hired gun for a lot of publications, are you finding yourself when you’re in that role, you have to create your own kind of ethical super structure for determining your own sort of comfort level with conflicts of interest or is that still dictated by the publisher that you’re writing for? Because to me those lines feel a lot more fluid with these sort of artist-­‐driven and freelance-­‐
driven enterprises. Miranda: I mean it depends on who you work for. I did a lot of public radio work, and public radio has, and especially NPR in Washington, not necessarily local affiliates, has very strong conflict of interest rules and when you sign on to be a freelancer, even though you’re not staff, you’re still governed by conflict of interest rules. So I couldn’t make any money from any person I might be in the position of covering in the future, so it meant I couldn’t really do catalog essays for galleries, I couldn’t do projects for museums, I couldn’t do any of those things and that sort of governed the ethics I obviously applied to all of my work and it governs what certainly what I do at the LA Times right now, we have very strict, you know, like Christopher I can’t be paid to be here. Very strict rules. Bell: I mostly freelance edit books for publishers and museums and galleries, and that’s—you know, the primary source of my freelance work, so you know, I think there are self-­‐imposed, you know, an ethos that you are driven by, and that’s kind of how I operate. There aren’t really conflict of issues except in the case of when I was working at Frieze, if I was working on—I wouldn’t be, working on the book of someone I was writing about in the magazine or someone I’d commissioned someone you know, to write an article about an artist or a designer or a musician or something. I wouldn’t be working for that person in another capacity. But I mean that doesn’t feel very fluid to me– that feels quite obvious frankly, but you know, as far as book editing goes, I think you know you don’t have quite the same commercial or advertising interests you know, that would bring those questions up, so in my case I feel a little bit free from that thankfully. Schouweiler: Are there self-­‐determined lines that you’re drawing or is that expressed? Is that made explicit? Bell: Oh, no, definitely self-­‐imposed. You know, there are kinds of books I won’t do, or you know, certain, you know, topics that I won’t edit on because it’s not an area of expertise, you know, I’m not going to edit a book on neuroscience, you know, like they’re self-­‐imposed, they’re common sense quite frankly. Schouweiler: What about you James? If part of this is filling a gap, a sort of a documentation gap and we’re going to do this for ourselves to provide a critical discourse that’s missing outside in these in-­‐
between cultural zones that don’t have the kind of publishing they used to, how do you avoid people playing fast and loose with the barter system? McAnally: I think that’s something we have to be aware of as editors of people sort of wanting,—you know, if you want to cover what you’re doing, then maybe this is an opportunity that you’d see. I mean I think we’ve experimented with different ways. One thing that we’ve been doing more recently is kind of throwing that question out the window, conflict of interest. We started doing for kind of longer duration I guess publishing, we have been doing things we call social responses. It actually starts with the the curator stating what they intended to see happen so it goes from there and bringing it into the body of review and making it explicit. So I think that’s one way is making it really clear who the person is that’s writing, who the critic is, what their connections to all these things are, but I mean it’s something that isn’t really—for us—I mean conflict of interest isn’t really a financial question. I think that’s come up in a lot of conversations of you know, are you beholden to your advertisers and that is a who whole other conversation that’s really problematic and I think for us, our duty is to make sure that something is documented and talked about and that we self-­‐select, we don’t write about art fairs, we don’t write about commercial galleries for the most part. Even museums, so there’s kind of a self-­‐selecting thing. People have to enter that conversation and be willing to risk relationship. I think that’s the think that we find is everyone in these fields are very tied together and you just have to kind of embody that and you know, I think people have a hard time doing that, but it’s kind of coaxes it out and the editorial process helps with it, as well. Schouweiler: That’s certainly something I run into, we have a lot of artists in our stable of contributors and I think it’s been trickier than even they would have anticipated much less than what we would have anticipated where they have to switch gears and wear a critic’s hat what does it mean to give critical feedback to your peers and does that criticism look like you know, criticism that’s published by a newspaper or by a magazine or by Hyperallergic, it seems like maybe they need different terms because they’re kind of not functioning in the same way. Bell: Are they? Do you set them out? Schouweiler: I don’t set them out but I find that they’re writing more strict reviews. Because I’m really interested foregrounding the artists who work within a particular practice, I found almost by happenstance really that some of the most interesting critical analysis, if you get away from the consumer guide model of reviews, right, the most interesting analysis is coming from people who really understand and have a deep investment in the practice, so I wouldn’t want to discount that, but I think there is then this push-­‐pull, because it’s a different kind of critique and it kind of functions differently. It’s really deeply interpersonal. And it has come up for people who are writing about folks that they know well and it’s troublesome, I think. Veken, you’ve spoken well to the idea that you specifically don’t sell advertisers on the idea that they’re supporting the writing. Gueyikian: Right. Schouweiler: How are you making that case? Are you selling them on the reader? Gueyikian: Yes, so we approach them and try to sell the access to the audience, so we engage our audience, we can educate or inform our audience about something that needs to be addressed so we address their marketing goals and not their PR goals, so we don’t think about how this campaign will influence the writing. It’s completely separate, and I think that we’ve been able to grow the audience big enough and through the network have reached into the many different audiences together that we can really provide value there for advertisers when they keep coming back and coming back and buying bigger and bigger campaigns to reach our audience and it has nothing to do with the editorial and we have 500 sponsors versus 10 big sponsors so if we lose one it’s not a big deal, we can keep going and we work with a lot of nonprofits and art institutions and art schools that we don’t necessarily write about anyway. Their mission or their goal is aligned with ours of reaching and growing the audience for art and so they’re not looking to influence editorial. The ones that are usually call me, ask for a review, I say I can’t help them, and then I hang up. Or if they buy an ad hoping for some kind of editorial, don’t get it, they don’t come back. Schouweiler: You guys are doing really well now, Jillian just got an award, you’ve got a lot of traffic, you have 500 sponsors, what did you do years 1, 2, and 3 when you didn’t have that kind of clout and you couldn’t make the case? Were you just doing the hustle? Gueyikian: Yeah, and we you know, we over-­‐delivered and under-­‐promised on everything. So if we took a campaign, we charged less than what it was worth and delivered twice as much value and then that built a reputation over time, word spread, people kept coming back for more and we just kept building from there. So I think it was daily execution, you know, very hard work, it took years to build, very slow going, but it just built brick by brick and by the third year of Hyperallergic and Nectar Ads we were able to quit our jobs and start really building it and then word started to spread and campaigns started coming in and it was really exciting and just kept running and kept building it. But the first two years as very slow going, kind of just patience and lots of hard work, but always providing value, like really we had to think about, the ads are not just tacked on with no thought. I had to really think about the ads and what that experience was for the readers as well as the sponsors. Schouweiler: How did you articulate that to the people who were providing you with the ads? Like, how did you lean on them to get beautiful, worthwhile. Gueyikian: I had to do a lot of extra work with them. Schouweiler: Did you make it for them? Gueyikian: Sometimes. We did a lot of free consulting so I did a lot of teaching, I had to teach them about the world of online advertising, how they should approach campaigns, you know, it wasn’t just picking up the phone and selling inventory for this price or that price, so I had to really bring them on board and I think that made the difference. So it if someone called me and said I’ve heard about blogs I want to advertise, I don’t know what to do. I’d spend an hour with them talking to them about what are their opportunities, what do they want to do and how they can best accomplish their goals and I think that’s really how we started. Schouweiler: Just sort of educating your advertisers and bringing them into the — Gueyikian: Well in 2009, there was no real art ad marketplace where people were buying online ads. It was really a new thing. Schouweiler: When did you reach the threshold? Like, how did you determine internally that you’d reached a threshold when it was time to bump pay for writers did you have an internal formula. Gueyikian: No, just as soon as we could afford it. This is the first year we might make a profit but every time we made more revenue, we would just increase our writers, because we know we’re not paying enough, we know we’re not where we need to be, so we wanted to start and not start from zero, so we started but we keep bumping it up over time as we can afford it and we’re committed to keep that going. Schouweiler: Thinking of value and the declaration in that check when you’ve written something for publication, that says this means something to me, this is valuable, this is work that we’re going to treat right, given the interpersonal intangible qualities of that transaction, do you find that as writer, Carolina, when you have written, you know, under a number of different sort of contractual terms, sometimes collaborative, sometimes free, sometimes paid really well, do you find that your investment in the editorial process for any given piece, like, how is that connected to the way you feel valued. Miranda: To the way I feel valued. Do I feel more valued if I’m getting paid more? Is that the question. Schouweiler: OK, so in digital media if you think about sort of the way publishing works, I hit publish but that’s not the end, that’s a the beginning of a reader response and sort of ongoing conversation and long-­‐tail click-­‐through and ideally as an editor I would really love for my contributors to be thinking about that article as a living thing, especially if there’s reader conversation happening around it. But it feels like a hell of a lot to ask a contributor that’s getting 150 bucks for a thousand words to moderate the conversation around it and so I’m wondering what do you think is reasonable to expect on the part of editors and publishers to expect that sense of stake in the ownership? Where does that sense of shared ownership come from? Miranda: That’s a tricky one because I think it is something, especially when you are really busy doing a lot of stories, the onus of sort of maintaining a sort of a social media presence after a story is done, there is an expectation that you’re going to do that as a writer these days. I tend to have the point of view of like, I treat my stories equally regardless of where they are published. I feel like a story no matter what story I do, it has my name on it and that hopefully that name means something so just because a site paid me $100 to write the piece instead of 1,000 doesn’t mean that I’m then going to be like oh, see you later, guy, I’m too busy to tweet it or engage in a discussion about it or whatever. I mean I see all the work I do as just being part of this larger ecosystem of things that I’m interested in. And so yeah, whether it’s a well paid magazine or a tiny blog, I as a writer am going to treat it the same. Schouweiler: Eugenia did you notice that the investment from your contributors changed as you were able to go from free to paid? Bell: That’s not what changed, actually, no. I mean this is a slightly different conversation to have, but really the investment that you know, our writers, our regular writers and even those who are once a month or once every couple of months, all of our writers work really hard. And I think that that, you know, that makes those pieces more valuable and potentially gives them a longer life span out in the world. There was a time at Design Observer until about four years ago where the comments section was incredibly lively and was as much a part of the post as the post itself. I mean, you know, 60 comment-­‐
long threads that were full conversations. We had a number of regular readers who kind of commented on everything and those were—I mean those were like great days. Schouweiler: Does anybody have good comment sections anymore? Has it all moved to Twitter and Facebook? Bell: Well, that’s what happened with us unfortunately and you know, as soon as you know, the on switch on Twitter went on, that entire thing moved over there, and the—you know, if there’s a tragedy when it comes to commons, you know, the tragedy is that it’s no longer a discussion. You know, it’s moved to Twitter and it’s now just, you know, that’s great or retweet are there’s no—no one is saying anything of substance on Twitter about anything. Miranda: That is getting retweeted so hard right now. Bell: But you know, for Design Observer it’s been, you know, it has actually been a big blow, we really—we valued that, and in fact, you know, we’re doing these books now and the first two are coming out this summer and they are essay collections from the site, that span quite a long period of time on the site and they—there are posts that we’re reprinting that we’re reediting and reprinting that had, you know, really rich discussions in the comments section and we’ve decided to reprint those as they appeared on the site, because as I said, you know, they were as much a part of the discussion as the original posts were, and you know, if there’s one way we can resurrect that or you know, try to stoke that a little bit more, that you know, that’s one way. Another way is that we have encouraged our contributing editors and our contributing writers, you know, we don’t ask much of them, usually but we do hope they’re reading the site every day and we want them to at least comment. We don’t need they will to go into some big philosophical discussion. I think a lot of our readers would love to see Michael and Rick and Jessica back in the comment section and our other contributors, but it’s a momentum issue and we should try to start that up again, because you know, the Facebook and Twitter just aren’t really compensating for the loss of that. Schouweiler: Has the making a public objective worked for Temporary? I mean, you get some pretty good comments. McAnally: I think it spans both audience and contributors that there’s a sense of there’s a stake in the conversation and think it’s not a site that is aiming for this kind of mass circulation, so I think that if you’re there, then you want to have a conversation, which I think does drive, you know, more interesting comments, like I appreciate when people kind of take the time to do it there where it’s searchable and but attached to the original source. We were running a book club for a while that was built around comments, the entire discussion was in the comment section, ours included, so there was just sort of a general introduction and then it was really intentional, like can you do that? Can we return? I think there are only a few sites doing it well. I think it’s actually rebuilding a culture around that kind of thing, which I think e-­‐flux conversations is trying to do, as well, and the think about Facebook and Twitter and the thing is it’s not really archived. It’s there, it exists but it’s not searchable, it’s not returning the value back to the original conversation and so ultimately like a really intense thing can happen and then it doesn’t return back to a community, actually that it benefits, however you define that community unless it’s just your friends circle because that’s false-­‐reaching. Because I think we intentionally do invest in that, have a sense that our stake is the same as our audience as the same as contributors, and I think in that way it’s succeeding. Schouweiler: Your editorial staff is volunteer, as well. McAnally: It is, I am unfortunately the full time as the executive director of a nonprofit, but Temporary exists outside of those hours, it’s kind of extra to that. So I mean we have started—I mean again so we just started paying writers if they choose recently. Started paying our other editor is kind of like doing copy and managing the site and she gets paid a little bit for that, but it’s kind of comparable to the scale of the writers. So there’s no sort of extra infrastructure layer of like where does the money go in administration and all of these things, it’s really transparent and in that way works as a cooperative. Schouweiler: How do you handle the decision making? I mean my experience with publishing started with print and that’s got such a top-­‐down dictatorial power structure, like you know, my editors would decide how much we could afford to pay, a publisher would decide and the editors would decide who to assign and that shifting online to the good, I think, but those—the power dynamic of both money and editorial control, moderating conversations in the comments, like who pulls the plug in an overtly sort of collective environment? What if you brought in a writer who didn’t necessarily immediately fit into that public and was kind of an interloping voice? Can you envision a situation where there would be such discomfort where you would think we are going to pull the plug on that person or that’s not our kind of piece. As a collective entity, how do you make those decisions? McAnally: I mean it’s not decentered in that sense—it is edited by two people and we make the decisions about those kinds of questions, including moderating comments and things like that, but also choosing what we publish and what we won’t. It’s not kind of a free for all and the decision in that sense are not—intentionally we don’t talk about ourself as a collective. Like it’s not collectively owned and anything like that, it’s really about transparently sharing what we do have. And I think that—but that doesn’t give up editorial control at the same time. I mean I think that’s the thing that’s been kind of the question of, you know, a lot of it for a few years, it was kind of what people would send or we would seek out and specifically ask for certain pieces from people that we knew and it was kind of a broad thing. As it’s become more and more popular, those things are, you know, people just send us stuff, we have to be a lot more careful, I think, with our editorial process. Schouweiler: A brass tacks question here from Katie Hill. She wants everyone to talk actual numbers. Is it always a dollar a word? Does anybody make a dollar a word anymore or real writing about the arts? I haven’t for years. Miranda: Well, I’m staff now, so I have this magical thing that happens where every two weeks this money materializes—I can go to a doctor, too, without having to go to Mexico. As a freelancer, the pay rate was all over the place, depending on the outlet I was working for. I did have dollar a word assignments, and dollar a 50 word assignments, occasionally I could even get 2. Which was magical. Oftentimes it might be a flat rate, so many of the art magazines would be like, OK, an 1800 to 2500 word feature, but we’re paying, you know, $1700 and that’s, you know, but I always tried to negotiate something that was in the range. Like I needed to be a dollar a word does not assure a comfortable living. It assures a living. It’s like I’m not talking about, you know, vacations in Cancun, I’m talking about I can pay my rent, I can pay my bills and maybe I’ve got some money left over for a happy hour PBR. Schouweiler: I don’t know anybody who starts at a dollar a word. I don’t think you spring fully formed out of Zeus’ thigh. Miranda: And I’ve done work for free and I’ve done work for 50 bucks and a hundred bucks, because sometimes you negotiate it was sort of putting that checklist through my head of you know, is this worth it for me, am I really passionate about the topic, am I subsidizing someplace that doesn’t really need subsidizing. Like if the questions stacked well for me, I really feel this is a personal decision, so it’s not necessarily a template. You know, yeah, I’d do a 500 word piece for 50 bucks, like I wasn’t—
but I needed the dollar pieces to survive. I was also an on-­‐air critic and so that was a steady stream of revenue that I had as a writer. Schouweiler: For freelance work I sure don’t know of anything like an industry standard. It’s all over. Miranda: The web writing, yeah, it used to be a dollar to two dollars a word but web writing turned it into here’s 25 bucks and like a small scrappy outlet doing something interesting who’s like OK but you know when the Daily Beast is approaching you and says we want a 2,000 word reported feature in two days I’m like tell Tina Brown to take a cut on her lunch expenses and pay me a living wage, like no. Schouweiler: No thank you, Huffington Post. Miranda: Yeah, thank you. Bye. Bell: Well, Carolina as a freelance editor, I’ve kind of had these thresholds—you know, when I was working for, if I was doing a book or you know, exhibition copy or something for a nonprofit artist space I’d have one rate that was way below, you know, the rate I would charge if I were, you know, copy editing a 500 page catalog for The Met or something else of that size if I was working for a commercial publisher, there was another rate. Though working for a commercial publisher is usually just a big flat lump sum, you know, like Isaac’s, like his tattoo of you know, don’t read the comments, mine would be never amortize, like you could never, you know, never think about that, you know, because those jobs, and those editing jobs that some editor or publisher promises are going to be three month gigs and they become seven because the main essay doesn’t come in for months, you know, there’s that part of your life that you’ll never get back. Speaking as the editor of Design Observer, we have a two-­‐tiered rate system for what we consider short pieces and then long pieces, and — Schouweiler: What’s a short piece? Bell: A short piece is anything up to about 400 words. Schouweiler: What’s the rate. We got a specific question. Bell: I’m happy to say. Schouweiler: It says, OK, what’s the rate? Bell: Our rate for a 400 word piece or up to 400 word piece is about $125 and anything in the 500 to 800 word range or longer for that matter, you know depends on how much longer pieces become, sometimes we serialize pieces, is $250. Miranda: I mean I honestly used to negotiate a rate sometimes like oh, our website pays 40, I’m like, great, pay me 50 because it’s like you’re going to get clean copy from me, it’s going to be well reported, like there’s also certain things when you’ve been doing it long I feel like there’s a certain something you can bring to the table and be like great, you’re just going to pay me a little bit more than you pay everyone else. Like, just a little. Schouweiler: Carolina is going to take that bar and lift it with this shoulder. Bell: Similar to this, you know, it took me a really, really long time to start saying no to jobs that didn’t pay enough and I think as a freelancers you are just so, you know,—you’re terrified, you know, you think you say no, you know, to some gallery, and you know, the no in your brain your neurotic brain, my neurotic brain is that oh, they’re never going to call me back, which is completely asinine, that’s not true. If they value your work, I was talking to somebody about this, who said, you know, who was trying to point out how ridiculous my thinking was, she said but you as an editor tore who commissions writer and they said you know what, I’m writing an essay for a book, I don’t have time to do that right now, she said would you never go back to that person because they don’t have time this week and of course the answer is no, so — Schouweiler: It got you for a while to be able to have that kind of freedom. Bell: Perhaps, I don’t know but the same woman I was talking to was also a book editor, said to me, you know, I’ve been editing books for many years, and you know, she told me, she told me point blank, she said act your age, like you’re at a point now where you don’t have to take, you know, like, you know, the $300 gig to edit a gallery guide, but you have a Rolodex full of good young editors and writers who would be great at that and would you know, kill for that opportunity to work for a big commercial gallery and on something and she was absolutely right and it seems to me it finally dawned on me, it was like right, this is the point in my career as an editor and as a freelance editor where I should be kind of beginning to nurture people. Next generation of editors, whether they’re freelance or otherwise. That I should be helping out, giving that work to. So that’s one way. Schouweiler: So you barter. McAnally: Yeah mostly we allocate ad space, artists guest writers choose, then our rate it generally 50 to 150. Gueyikian: Yeah we have different tiers depending on the type of writing it is so something like an investigative piece that take a little bit longer might get 100 or 150. Something that’s a blog post, 500 words, we usually start at 50, and we hope to raise that in the fall to 75. Since we’re not paying a dollar a word, we’re generally working with young writers who need the opportunity. We publish about 12 posts a day, so we have a lot of opportunities to publish new voices. And our editors work really hard with them, so we’re nurturing kind of a new generation of writers. I think that’s part of the value we can provide now. Schouweiler: Along those lines of value, who values this work is what James Bridle asks, which is a great question, and who should be paid like doctors and who pays doctors and do you want to be paid by a system like that? But I would add an addendum—whose work gets valued like that, and that’s seems to be a really critical question about access and actually diversity in arts writing and who can afford to go through these really low levels of unpaid work to reach the point where you can command a seat at a negotiating table where you can say I’d like – you know, how can we as editors and publishers, how can we open the door a bit wider, like what are the economies of that for a young writer? Miranda: I think magazine writing has always been problematic for that reason. When you’re starting out you’re not going to be making very much money. I mean, when I started out, I started as an intern at The Nation, which was a full-­‐time job, Monday through Friday, 10-­‐6, then I got paid $75 a week living in New York City, which meant I did moonlighting at a bakery, I stuffed cannoli like nobody’s business. So I mean I didn’t come from a family that could support me. Like I was not the cast of Girls. I had to make a living, so I worked at night. You know, slinging coffee, and cannolis, and yeah, and it gets really frustrating and exhausting and you’re sleep deprived, and you know, you don’t have the advantages that another more affluent person might have. It’s not like I came from a family, I ran into a lot of people in New York it’s like their uncle was so-­‐and-­‐so at time Time magazine. I didn’t have that. My parents are immigrants from South America. I grew up Southern California this was not their world or mine. What I do think the Internet was done in terms of diversity is that it has, you know it’s allowed voices like mine, you know, would I have been hired by a major daily under the old system? You know, to do what I do now? Probably not. I don’t have a degree in art history. I don’t have some of the paperwork it takes to get some of those jobs but I think through doing work online and through my blog I was able to prove that you don’t necessarily need that. You can be a good writer and a good reporter and do the homework without the piece of paper, so I think the web there has provided an outlet for different voices and also allowed voices like myself to build an audience, because you know in a print publication they’ll be like oh, Latin America stories, nobody cares about those and it’s like no, I know people who care and on the web you can publish them and kind of show that there is an audience for it. Schouweiler: And I think building that audience, means writing the stories as an article of faith that the audience will come if it’s a good story. Do you find that with the more global arts coverage that you’ve been doing? I mean you’re unusual among the Brooklyn based outlets for being really intentional about having national and international. Gueyikian: Yeah, we really want to highlight diverse art scenes in different parts of the world and I think people now come to us to learn about that, and to read about different things going on, and I think we’ve developed that audience. Schouweiler: David Truman and then you in the back I see. Could you hold on? Think, as Orit would say, think of the Internet. Let’s be mindful of people listening remotely. Audience Member: I think my question is, are pay rates the same for writers here as—say for example in Europe? Are European writers paid more for doing arts writing? Do you know? Bell: In Europe or if we commission European writers. Audience Member: No, I’m talking about in Europe. Bell: I have no idea. Audience Member: Here’s the basis for my question. Are writers outside the US paid differently because the public has a—maybe a better educated, more interest in the arts? Bell: Not for the with web, I don’t think so. I mean my little experience with that and other editors I know doing this kind of work abroad, no, I think the pay is paltry as it is here. Miranda: I think in most parts of the world being an arts journalist avowed poverty. If there was a country where I could get rich doing this, we’d all be there right now. Audience Member: Hi, thanks, this is a great conversation I’m so glad for the transparency of it. The publication I founded titled Momus, I forgot to mention that at the earlier session. Schouweiler: I love Momus. Audience Member: I’m paying 200 per piece right now, that’s where I started and I’m about to bump up to 300. I’m sort of disappointed to hear the rates that I’m hearing. I’d like to think that my rates are sustainable. We’ll see. I guess my question is this: With, say, Hyperallergic, why not publish less and pay more? Is the only way that you can maintain the relationships that you’ve built and the traffic that you’ve built at the pace that you’re publishing? Gueyikian: I mean that’s kind of our thinking, that we really wanted to grow the audience and we really wanted to capitalize on the momentum to create a sustainable foundation and then build from there. We felt like if we just published once a day or twice a day that we wouldn’t get the critical mass and momentum behind us and it would peter out and die after a couple of years and I think that’s how we approached it and our goal is to raise those rates and our goal is to build something long-­‐
term and we always had a ten-­‐year plan. So the first five years was about building this momentum and then going forward we’re going to be building the business around it and building up all of the infrastructure that supports it. Audience Member: So I work for an LGBT, pretty much alt-­‐weekly in my region. While I’m a young reporter interested in going national, a number of my colleagues aren’t. They really do want to have the opportunity to tell these stories in our community. But we all have clearly had different, more specific forms of ad revenue than y’all clearly do. Do y’all have any experience and I guess maybe Carolina may the most, but with like—how will we survive? How can we tell these rich stories, too? I mean granted I work for an LGBT weekly and we just write about how people want to beat us up every week but you know, it comes with the territory. I’m not guilting you all, calm down. But where does the role of community journalism in all of this? Not citizen journalism. But places like ours? Miranda: I’m a little confused about what the question is. Is it how do you make a community journalism story a national story? Audience Member: Well, we will localize a lot of local stories. I’m seeing this as a lot of national conversation but what is a way that could be relevant to bring this to bring this discussion to alt weeklies, regional magazines, yeah. Miranda: It’s really interesting that you ask that question because now that I’ve been at the LA Times for a year I’m in this interesting position where I do think about national, but I have to think about local. I can’t justing writing stories about the New York art world. Or what’s going on Basel. I really think if there is a place that is vibrant in journalism it is in community journalism, because you are there, because you can do the face to face reporting, you can go out, not just be behind your desk talking about some expert on the phone, like you can be out on the scene in ways that some national reporter doing it as a phoner just isn’t going to be. And I always think of it as every story I do, as it having the potential to be both local and national, that when you’re doing a profile of an artist, that when you’re telling their story, you’re telling a story, and if you tell a good story it’s going to attract readers regardless-­‐of-­‐where they are. I mean how many times have you clicked on some viral story in Facebook about some guy in Alabama saving his cat or some guy in you know New York doing whatever, like there’s a real power in storytelling and I think sort of untold power of community journalism is being able to be there. And so it’s getting out, not just being behind the desk it’s not just doing the phoners, it’s meeting people and making sure that your stories reflect your profound knowledge of having been in the place. Schouweiler: There’s a local outlet. Is Alan Berks here? He and his wife, Leah Cooper, another playwright, founded Minnesota Playlist, and they do the most innovative interesting critically sort of meaty theater and performance criticism you’ll find, and it’s for profit and they’re making a go of it because they’ve enlisted the community of actors and performers who have a stake in something coverage like that, much like Veken, they’re not drawing them in specifically on the back of that content, they’re offering them a service, they’re offering them a place to put their head shots and audition announcements and advantage of having this high-­‐level critical conversation, but to me like the huge success that they’ve had and other platforms like them is actually enlisting their community members as stakeholders, whether that’s regional or a community of interest, because I think Hyperallergic has been great about galvanizing a community of interest. Gueyikian: Right and I think we’ve figured out how to create a model that works for individual artists specifically in New York and LA and I’m going to spend the next few years in how to revert that and make a model that might work for local community journalism or community publications where sponsors are interesting in reaching those communities right now. Those communities are interested in reaching what’s happening in New York and LA and sponsors are interested in reaching those people but I want to figure out how to flip it and to see if sponsors want to reach audience around the world and around the nation. McAnally: That kind of gets to the heart of our model and why ads don’t really work and why we never started there because it was in some ways starting at that opposite place of starting in small communities, so in a sense like our entire model was we would be working in a community that we would ask what’s important to your community and that’s what we would cover and they would kind of—there would be a back and forth and exchange there. But I think that we actually underplay the value of small communities, like advertisers are looking for a mass market, but a lot of the most meaningful work, there might be five people in the room, and I’m not interested in an art world that is kind of catering to this mass audience that kind of an advertiser is going to look for, you know, and I think that there’s kind of at the heart of that a really problematic model of, you know, it’s why museums commercialize, it’s why galleries are looking for this populist theme and it all gets to this question of what can we value and can we value a small one and can our model accommodate that and I think that that’s really important. It’s why certain things move to be monolithic in that process. Audience Member: Thank you. I’m going to stand up so you can see me because I realize it’s hard to deal with disembodied voices. My question goes to that word community that you were just talking about. My name is Bean I am an art critic. I’m also the Editor in Chief with Daily Serving. Wearing both of those hats I totally agree that paying writers is really important. But I’m also an artist so if you want to talk about getting paid. Buy me a drink. Let’s go. So my question is as people who are communicators and people who have outlets for our voices what do you think is our responsibility, perhaps an ethical, even a moral responsibility, to talk about the fact that artists are not getting paid because we have parallel tracks, we’re talking about writers not getting paid and artists are talking on their own track about artists not being paid and I wonder if you think that overlaps and whether we have a sense of community and solidarity. McAnally: I have to say initially yes, that’s one of the main kind of tracks I’ve been thinking about is we sometimes think of publishing and arts publishing as a separate sphere and I really do think that it works together, you know, it is about the work that artists are making and the galleries taking risks on them and then us as writers and publishers working with that and responding to it, but taking it all seriously and I think there is a sense of solidarity. I think that—I think that it’s building structures that work, because obviously they aren’t there. You know, if we keep talking about this, there’s more money in the art world than ever and it’s not going to artists and it’s not going to art writers, well, then there’s something wrong with that picture, I think. And our approach has always been to sort of look around, who is there, who’s with us, who’s complaining about that fact, and then start there, because, you know, working inside the system to date has not gotten us very far, I think. Bell: And a think a lot of the reason, you know, a lot of writers will agree to write for low rate or for free is because they view their writing in the same way you visualize your visual arts. It’s what you do, and you can’t not do it and you’re willing to do it at your level. Or whatever the stake is. So I think there’s definitely solidarity there. I don’t think we really answered James’ question about the value of writers, but the same way that writers, great novelists down to art criticism, you know, is a contribution to culture and society, you know, artists are, you know, equally so, and yes, there is, you know, a necessary value that is not recognized by the status quo, and we just, you know, have to find that—I mean we’re not really answering questions here, we’re just sort of talking about it, but — Miranda: I guess coming from a news background it’s like sort of looking at the angle of how—I have been following the debate about, for example a living artist getting paid to help out produce like a survey or retrospective for a museum, because you hear the story about like the artist and the museum installing his big show and he’s the only one not getting paid. Curator is getting paid, the museum marketing director is getting paid. Everyone is getting paid except for the artist under the idea of well, like, this show will give them exposure, but you know, is that artist’s time there valuable? So that is a story I’ve been kind of following it like in terms of covering it, I also work for a general audience that’s not necessarily an art audience, so it’s like I always need, for stories like that I need a little bit of a news hook to write about them. I’m interested in writing about them, but for example there’s been this whole case going through the courts in California there’s resale law that when a work of art gets resold in California, like an artist gets a cut of that resale. That law is now up for question. I forget where it is but it might be shot down. As a result a lot of people sell their art in other states so that they can cut the artist out of it and there’s been this whole question about should artists benefit. It’s always like I always need that little, given the platform I write for, I need kind of something—I need news essentially. That it’s a harder, it’s harder for me in the position I currently have to just write the big picture questions like should artists get paid? It’s a great question, but my platform doesn’t necessarily lend itself to it. But I do follow it and I especially think of it in the museum setting where artists will devote weeks of their time to installing a show and if they’re not a commercial artist they’re not going to reap any benefit from it whatsoever and in the mean time they’re sacrificing pay. Schouweiler: At Mn Artists, we see a lot of solicitations for donations in the pipeline. People having a silent auction and what not. Audience Member: Back to the pay issue, I’m wondering if getting paid by the word is an outmoded way of looking at things. Because Christopher Knight said one of the things that the Internet does is open up space. You don’t have to worry about column width. And yet isn’t interesting that art writing online is short. I’m a big fan of Hyperallergic and your columns are short and tight and to the point. So how can a writer make any money if what we’re asked to do online is you know, condense down? Gueyikian: We actually—I think you could do talk to Hrag about this, but our editorial team prefers shorter pieces that are more accessible and I think sometimes it’s harder and takes longer to write than longer pieces and so we actually prefer that writers work on shorter pieces and I think we work with them to really hone them and focus them a little more. Audience Member: And I appreciate that so that’s why by the word doesn’t really apply. Miranda: I mean there’s one. Like there has been the flat rate method, that can sometimes work. That can sometimes work pretty well, especially if somebody wants a short piece, but that for example requires an intensive amount of reporting, so they want the 600-­‐word piece, but boy, I’m going to have to work the phones for it then a flat rate makes more sense. So yeah, it’s not a perfect. I don’t think we have figured out a perfect system for how to bill and I’ve done for example like photo essay driven things where I’ll choose a bunch of artists we have them photographed and then what I’m writing are essentially very large captions so in that those cases I’ll negotiate a flat rate ahead of time, because obviously the amount of work that I put into it is not reflected in the word count. Audience Member: Thank you. I just wanted to bring it up. Schouweiler: I could put on my editor’s hat for a second and the whole by-­‐the-­‐word or even flat fee: if I’m being really candid with are you, it’s more nuanced than that. Because not every word is worth the same to me. Because there are a lot of factors that go into that. It’s not that it’s not valuable but if I have to spend a tremendous amount of time cleaning up copy that isn’t ready to go or close to ready to go, that costs me something. That word is worth a bit less to me than somebody who’s super dependable, turns in really well work—if I’m going to have to fact check everything because there are sloppy details, that costs me something as an editor, and so I guess if I had a tip to give, it would be sort of to echo what Carolina said, write about a number of things. Cultivate a sort of diverse number of subjects, some of which may pay better than others that you’re comfortable writing about, and even if you can’t always get paid what you’d like to get paid to write about the thing that you love, like cultivate your expertise in that, and make your copy really clean, check your facts, link your text, make it easy for your editors, have nice pictures, you know, think about the medium for which you’re writing, and I’m going to be way more inclined to bump your pay by 10 or 20 bucks if I know like you’re going to give me a really well developed piece that’s ready to go that I know is going to be engaging and get me traffic so it kind of cuts both ways. It’s still like the bar is too low, I think, but, yeah. Miranda: Yeah, I mean I’ve worked as an editor, that’s why I felt comfortable. It’s like turning stuff in on time, let’s start there, you know, just turn it in on time. What is it that we don’t understand here. Like. So I felt like oh, I always turn in my stuff on time and it’s generally relatively clean. I kind of felt like after working as an editor for a summer, like oh, I can ask for a little more money that’s OK. Schouweiler: I think we have one more time. One more question. Audience Member: Yeah, it’s a question specifically for James. I love your anti-­‐profit model and that you’re trying to do something else. You’re trying to do something different, and I suppose it’s a romantic notion in a way, but how do you look forward to—I mean you’re bringing in people that you know, people you want to share that information with but long term what’s your sustainable model I feel like if you didn’t want to do anymore you and your partner, it would just dissolve. And I would feel betrayed if I was working for that. So it’s great on the one hand, how do you look forward with that? McAnally: I think that’s an interesting question because it is completely kind of in the editor’s hands of that sustainability question. I think that ultimately we are attempting to build an alternative, you know, and talk about sort of alternative spaces and they do ebb and flow but some lasts. We’ve set it up to be profit agnostic is a way to think about it. We do bring in money at this point, we do start to sell ads, we do get some grants, things like that that can bring in I guess a question of sustainability within finance. I think the important thing for us is that as we return to it, that money will never dictate the model and I think that that’s the difference, and I think that in living in a community around working with an art world that is so saturated with profitability and kind of money changing the terms, essentially, of what is possible, that I think that—I think that there’s always a community that’s willing to keep that going, and I think that if it succeeds, something that I always go back to, it’s about the broader field and a broader way of working succeeding. I think that that’s how I talk about it in terms of Temporary is if we last, then that’s one example, but if a kind of way of working takes hold, then that’s an entire different conversation and that’s something that I would be proud of and I think that sort of extends much beyond the kind of site itself is I think—I mean we’ve already seen a lot of sites start in response to what we’re doing, not exactly the same model but I think that we are we work with a lot of smaller publishers, there’s a recent partnership we had, we had like 30 Twitter followers or something but what they were doing was amazing and I think it made an audience but the fact is that it works both ways that we’re not the model, the example and if people contribute to our model that means they’re invested in the idea of it and the site itself is just an example of that, I think. Schouweiler: Do you think sustainability is really always necessarily like—is that really—should that be the top objective in our minds? Is it enough to survive or should we embrace the idea that some publishing projects will have a natural life span and they’ll rise and maybe they’ll involve pay maybe they won’t. I think we get stuck in the idea of it’s got to live. We’ve got to make it survive. McAnally: I think that’s why everybody becomes a nonprofit. If you start to bring in that term, you just think that you necessarily have to go down a certain path that it is sustainable, that it is a broader community is responsible for it. Schouweiler: The Internet in particular seems antithetical sometimes to the idea of indefinite project. It really seems to have projects that have a life span and can rise and go away. Do you guys have questions for each other? Is there anything we didn’t cover? A lot. Optimism. I don’t think anybody up here is saying the sky is falling. Miranda: I wouldn’t do anything else. I wouldn’t do anything else. KEYNOTE:
Ben Davis on Post-Descriptive Criticism
Paul Schmelzer: I’m honored to introduce today’s keynote. When we invited Ben Davis to speak at Superscript we were drawn both to his political sensibility and his engaging and accessible criticism for publications including Art Papers, Frieze, the Village Voice, Slate and Artnet News where he serves as national art critic. We also love the ideas in his 2013 book—seen here—9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket Press), which was hailed by the way by New York Times critic Holland Cotter for its “smart, ardent, illusion-­‐puncturing observation and analysis on the intersection of art, commerce and—the elephant in the art fair VIP lounge—class.” But little did we know there are other reasons to invite him: He’s one of us. Ben did his undergraduate degree at Macalester College in nearby St. Paul, Minnesota, and during that time I learned that he was a docent right here at the Walker Art Center, so welcome back to your adopted hometown, Ben. I’m particularly excited about his keynote today, as he’s using his time on the Superscript stage not just to trot out some prefab conference talk that he does all across the country at colleges and universities. He’s using his time here to plant a flag, of sorts. He’ll be using his times on stage to name, define and dig into what he calls “post-­‐descriptive criticism.” And of course you have plenty of time to explain what that means. We hope it’s the beginning of his further investigations online, and maybe in another book long after Superscript. We hope you all come back to see the seminal video that was launched right here at Superscript 2015. So please help me welcome Ben Davis. Ben Davis: Can people hear me? Yes? How’s everybody feeling? Good. You’re ready? Well, fasten your seat belts. It’s an epic talk. So there I am. This makes it look very official that I have something to say, so I’m going to try and deliver. That was a very generous and kind introduction, and I do have to say that it is a real rush for me to be back here. People always ask you wherever you go, you know, how you became an art critic and there is no really good answer for that. There are so many starting points but one possible starting point I can think of is right here at the Walker where I was not just a tour guide, I didn’t just go through the docent training but I was a tour guide for kids which is a particular kind of challenge and so you come out of college and you’re full of all these heady ideas of what art is. This is a Robert Rauschenberg from the Walker’s collection. And you know probably that how to talk about this is neo-­‐dada art, or proto-­‐pop art, it’s about appropriations, it’s about a collage. But what the kids see is a big exciting mess and that’s why they like it and that’s a totally different way of looking at it and I think everyone should have that experience of trying to explain art on that level in a way that has informed the way I approach and write about art. And informs some of the ideas in this talk today about the relationship of image to text. So there it is. A text slide for a talk about images. And I should say, I’m a visual art critic, and I spent many years giving talks without images until I actually had an intellectual epiphany that was that was a bit of a paradox or a contradiction that what we do is very visual. The concept I want to present is post-­‐description. I have to say at the outset that I am almost a little embarrassed by the subject—by that subject. I have very specific reasons that I chose it for this talk and for you, but it’s a kind of a—I think it’s almost like a—it’s a technical concept that I think that to some of you is going to be head scratchingly cringingly obvious and to some of you it’s going to be a little bit repugnant and almost like everything you stand against. And the idea is very simple, essentially and as I say, technical, that most of the way that we think about writing about art has been formed in times of relative image scarcity, that is, in print culture and since this is a conversation about digital culture and its effect on art writing, the digital world, particularly now, is one of relative image plenty and that may change and I think is changing the way we think about what an art critic can or should do. And before I go on I want to say two particular things about this argument and the first is I’m making an aesthetic argument and a non-­‐epistomological argument that is I’m not interested in here totally in having an argument about whether or not images totally capture the reality of an artwork or can or should or if words do. Or you know, what I’m interested in, this is sort of more pragmatic, I think it’s true that images are more engages, they’re more am engaging way to describe an object and this chain of thought began, as I told Paul when he asked me what I was doing here, of working in digital media for ten years as a writer, critic and editor and there is a pragmatic reality that art criticism which is in some ways the crown jewel of art writing doesn’t do that well. The monographic art review measured by traffic, it can’t justify itself against news or opinion. I mean it really is—it really is the kind of laggard, so I kind of started thinking about what is it, are there habits that we need to break and things we need to do, and maybe visual art criticism needs to be a lot more visual than it is. Maybe we’re inheriting patterns of writing and thinking that we need to rethink. And the second thing I wanted to say about the talk that I think is important is that it’s descriptive, not prescriptive. That is, I’m not saying that we should do this, I’m saying people are already writing in a new way and thinking about images and text in a new way. People in this room are. And what I am saying is I don’t think that’s totally theorized or thought out yet. I think that it bears more thought and deliberation than we’ve given that problem so far or that I’ve given it so far and this is my attempt to think it through for myself in a certain sense. So why is it a big deal if ideas of description change? Well, first of all, because description is it the cornerstone, if you take a class on art, it is—it is and such things exist, it is the cornerstone of what you will be taught is that good art criticism is good description. My first editor said to me is clear description is the most important thing, and this is a very recent guide to writing about art. Very first thing she says you need to do is clear description. And that’s—the meaning of that—we’re moving into a world where that—those terms are—even as I was planning this presentation, I saw a friend of mine who writes for New York Times posted on Facebook, this is Michael Kimmelman’s review a new Whitney and she already described this as a post-­‐descriptive review. I think it’s important to look at this and so it’s important enough that I am actually going to click out of my own the prison of PowerPoint to show you what it looks like. So here you have a big—I think you guys may be taking up the bandwidth, but you have a big enormous image. There are glitches in this new world and then you have a big pieces of large text and you have these like animated graphics. Giving you a sense of the geography, zooming you around here, flying over the city, you arrive at the new museum, and more text. Then you have this amazing graphic where you fly into the new Whitney through this 2 dimensional woman, look out through the window, transforms magically into real New York, and you get a sense of the view, and then there’s—
and then it goes on like this. Here is this sort of strange serial-­‐killer-­‐like tracking shot taking you through the new installation. And on and on and on. Now, as interesting as that is, I would say that I think it’s still relatively primitive. As absorbing as those graphics are, I think if you read what’s going on there, it still essentially reads like a text that was written separately from the images, that there was a text written about this Kimmelman’s text and then they layered a bunch of very elaborate graphics into it so there are really two ways of thinking about what the critic is doing there in one place. And I think that there are these times—here we are. It’s a little bit—yeah, there we go, there are these times in art history where you do see there are two systems of thought that collide with each other, so in the early Renaissance for a long period, for instance, people were learning to use perspective, but they’re still painting halos on figures in these 2 dimensional flat forms so that the halos blocked the view of the people behind them. So you can see two systems of thought. In the early days of photography photography was being thought of as art they thought they had to make paintings. You had to treat the surface in a very painterly way and these forms have charms of their own, but you can definitely see two different forms of thinking wrestling with each other. And my argument is that that’s the kind of world, we’ve been writing in on the Internet about art. Not until now, because I think it’s an evolving form, but I definitely think there are new forms of thinking that are occurring. It would be after all very strange if we had thought through all the implications of writing on the Internet after all the Internet is not that old. This is the New York Times admitting the word to film into the vocabulary a quarter century after the invention of film and they essentially say well, people are using it we’ve got to use it but we think this film thing is probably a fad. They say the vogue of the moving pictures is surely at its height and will last until the great actors return to the stage. So just some history. Now I want to do a little history on the history of this problem. So the rhetorical name for—there’s a Greek word ekphrasis for what we do, where the idea of art criticism as describing works of art comes from. The literary description of a visual work of art, the attempt to evoke its properties, is called ekphrasis, and that’s a Greek word but the thing of course is the Greeks didn’t have have exact images of the world. Pliny the Elder in this passage when it came to botanical art they couldn’t get it good enough to be scientifically accurate so they fell back into descriptions of the world. That didn’t prove to be exact enough, either, and it really hampered their knowledge of medicine. But we live in a different world. I like to point out that art criticism was we know it as we trace to probably really picks up steam there in the 19th Century, I like to point out the figures, the big figures of art criticism is Charles Baudelaire in France or John Ruskin in England, both it would have been, they both would have been in the same high school class with Marx and Engels, like they were born at the same time, so the art criticism was born of a fast-­‐changing capitalist world where standards of taste were happening and you needed someone to step in just as the criticism of modern art was born of the same system of capitalism and all of the industrial things that come out of capitalism and photography being one of them form new ways of thinking most notably art history is the product of the invention of the illuminated slide lantern. You can’t have a real art historical thinking, an art historical pedagogy without the ability to photos that compare things. Nevertheless, images until the last quarter of the 19th Century, were relatively rare. And criticism was steeped in ekphrasis and here is a classic example from John Ruskin which I’ll read to you in its entirety. This is about a Turner painting, The Slave Ship: It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-­‐clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-­‐drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-­‐like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight,—and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. They do not write criticism like that anymore, it’s beautiful, it’s evocative, it attempts through the force of rhetoric to evoke the intensity of the experience of this painting. It is clearly—it is dense and difficult and complex, involved passages clearly the product of a culture where people would spend, oh, I don’t know, 3 to 5 hours listening to a political speech, that was a normal thing and where Shakespeare was popular entertainment and not boutique entertainment, so but nevertheless, it is beautiful, it is amazing, it is a work of art in itself, and I doubt any of you unless you know this painting actually have an image of it in your head and this does that job far better and there’s a detail and there’s another detail, and there’s another detail. So there’s a lot to say about what happened with pictures, with photos, with art writing in the last half of the 19th Century, the early part of the 20th century but I’m actually interested with the purposes of this talk with how recent really the dramatic changes in how we think about how art writing relationship to images is so I went to the New York public library and I found the oldest issues I could find that seemed to be within—seemed to me to be legible as an art magazine so this is the Art News annual from 1956. And on the inside, inside flap, the colored plates every colored plate is like they’re advertising that it’s a really special thing that there are color plates in this thing. The editor emphasizes that they have exciting color plates and how that makes this particularly luxury product, a really exciting product you have in your hand and here’s what it looks like inside, still a lot of black and white illustrations but then these glossy inset photos. Now, 1962 is an important year, magazine history in the United States, National Geographic in February 1962 becomes the first all-­‐color magazine published in the United States. Same year, 1962, June, 1962, Artforum publishes its first issue in San Francisco, later moved to Los Angeles and New York and this is that first issue. Here’s what it looked like on the inside, ads in black and white, there’s table of contents. Here’s the opening critical salvo critics pondering then as we do now, why are we doing this? And here’s a passage you can see here he lays out the tasks of art criticism and there’s our old friend description, the very first thing that he mentioned there is the descriptive task that of telling what the work looks like, a most difficult exercise in objectivity. As it absolutely would be given as this is what the layout of the reviews looks like. So you have these on the left-­‐hand always separate, on the left-­‐hand you have these fairly inscrutable low-­‐quality black and white reproductions of the art being talked about and then on the right side is dense blocks of text and then more of that with the same images on the facing page and then a lot of stuff that’s like this. So as you can imagine, description not just of absolute necessity there, if you have—if you want to like evoke what an art, the visual experience of a work of art. Now, leaping ahead ten years, 1972, is the year of John Berger’s classic seminal Ways of Seeing documentaries on the BBC. This is an important reference to me. I’m curious how many people in this audience have seen or read ways of seeing. Almost everybody. That’s great. You’re a great crowd. So it says right there on the cover, seeing comes before words. It’s the very, very first words of the book version of Ways of Seeing. Famous first words of Ways of Seeing. And yet the interesting thing about the book is that the images in it are quite bad. It’s all about looking and the excitement of the image, and actually for that matter, he talks a lot about the ideological impact of the introduction of color photography and yet the book itself is quite poorly illustrated actually and there’s a reason for that, a good reason actually is that Berger was committed to making it cheap and accessible to the widest number of people and in this period there’s still a pretty hard opposition between detailed color images and which would make it much more accessible and these kind of reproductions. Jumping ahead another ten years back with our old friend Artforum. I don’t mean to pick on Artforum it’s just a convenient object of study that represents a specific way of thinking about art but here it is, here’s what it looks like on the inside. The ad is now in color, here’s the reviews, the review is still in black and white, and the images have moved off of the facing page and is now on the same page with the text. But they’re still siloed up there. They’re in their own space that floats above the text throughout the back of the book and the reviews and this is what that looks and then there’s plenty of pages, still, 1982, that look like this. Cut forward again another decade or so and this is actually—what most blew me away this is after I graduated from college, after I worked at the Walker, this is what Artforum I guess looked like when I started professionally writing about art and you have much more colorful illustrations, this is the front of the reviews, you have a clear hierarchy where the important reviews by the important writers are colorfully illustrated and then shortly thereafter there’s the ditch where they put the less important reviews with the less vibrant illustrations, much less vibrant illustrations and you can see that the text is encroaching a little bit more on the image, as well, but it’s still basically the same thing. It’s sometime in the middle as far as I can tell. I haven’t actually looked at exactly the moment but it’s in the middle of the 2000s when Artforum goes all color. This is a Paul Chan on the cover. And this is what it looks like you have these inset tiled images that are now, they’re in color throughout and they’re actually much more integrated into the text, but still relatively discreet, right, and modest. Now, and so and that really is it the trajectory, right? You go from low quality to high quality, essentially, in some sort of way and you go from images thought of as completely separate, image being more and more embedded in the text. Now, at the same time all this happened, of course this other little thing is happening, the Internet, and is becoming a thing. This is the magazine I worked for for many years, Art Net magazine which is depending on how you count it the first or one of the first online art magazines. Talk about different systems colliding. Here’s what it looked like in 1997 when it was launched, this is a review of the Whitney Biennial, you have this great typewriter font clearly designed to make the web look like a typewritten thing and for that matter it’s presented as a magazine. It’s not, you know, this is well before the term blog even existed. Ten years later, this is what it looks like. This is me reviewing the 2006 Whitney Biennial complaining about the use of text, that labels were out of control, there was too much text mediating your experience of the art and this is me two years later, reviewing the Whitney Biennial in 2008. Now, when I look back at this now, and keep in mind, this is not that long ago, this is what, 7 years ago? When I look back at that it’s almost like looking at another world it’s hard for me to even imagine putting together an article like this. For one thing, the title is crazy. Rave on? What does that mean? I look at my own archive now and I remember vividly being at Art Net magazine and having consultants who would come in an see, you know, it would really help you if you put like the word Picasso in the title. It would be really helpful for an article about Picasso and we’re like we’re not going to name the article there’s a new Picasso show at MOMA, that doesn’t make any sense and that’s exactly what you have to do and now everyone has sentence style, declarative news headlines because that’s very important with Internet search, and then the other thing, and this Art Net magazine was already a technical dinosaur at this point. This is akin, I think some of you who have grown up with sophisticated blogging platforms that say that we cranked this out with a chisel on stone is that we didn’t have any sort of back-­‐end CMS (content management system) to do this, we wrote this stuff to Microsoft Word and hand it had to a designer and who put it online for us so you get these two columns. But we had no control over design and those things thought about totally separately and that’s where things stood in 2008. We’ll get to examples of what’s going on now later but I want to emphasize how recently it was that people, me included, still were thinking about the web in a relatively print-­‐based way. You know, as if we’re just taking what we do on the—on in a print magazine and putting it online and that’s the key access of what we do. So part two. So the interesting thing—an interesting thing for me about this topic is that this is not a political topic, like as in my introduction I said you know my book is about class and political art, so this is not a political topic, not really. It has political dimensions, but on the other hand, I think there would probably be less argument about it about I were doing, there would be more consensus about it and I think that talking about, you know, whether or not we need to describe works of art, we should just use pictures actually touches some key nerves for people, the very core about what people think about this is my former boss, Walter Robinson, Superscript tweeted the topic the subject of my talk out and I see him responding, sorry buddy writing about art is thinking about art and begins with looking and he certainly is somewhat right about that now I want to touch through a couple of theoretical touch stones, think a little bit about why, why this is such a—what are the kind of resonances that makes it such a touchy, touchy issue at this particular moment, as I think it is? I wrote, last year probably one of the most read things that I have ever done is an article I wrote last year about Instagram where I took—because people care an awful lot more about Instagram as a means of expression than art, but I took John Berger’s theories about how classical art and images work in different ways and applied that to the way the images function on Instagram and it became a very big hit for me, got picked up all kinds of places, including the Entourage actor, Adrian Grenier, reposted this visual comparison I did between Kim Kardashian and a Spanish nude and posted it on his Instagram railing against inequality and this became a celebrity news story. Some colleagues and I got called into the Instagram offices where they wanted to pick our brains about ideas for stories. So here I wrote a Marxist critique of Instagram, invited me in to talk about it. And one of the things that staggered me, that was flabbergasting, that they said to me is very casually, they said, well, one thing that we want you to know is that you don’t need staff photographers anymore. There’s no reason to hire a photographer anymore. All you have to do is make a hashtag if you do an event, and then it’s all free on there, as long as you know where to find it you just like harvest the bounty of Instagram for your uses. So there’s a lot of angst about being a writer at this conference about writing, but you know, spare a thought for the photographers, because as a profession it’s disappearing pretty fast. This is the two years ago, Libération, the French paper published an issue completely without images in solidarity with photo journalists, saying the profession is going away, precisely being crowdsourced turned into an amateur thing, writers are being given iPhones and so on this is what their culture section looked like without images and actually I found about this on this very good podcast called “This Week in Photo” that I listen to that has a very good discussion of the implications of this maybe better than anything I’ve heard from the point of view of writing. This guy Alex Lindsay says that the interesting thing is that most of you who are bloggers, we naturally write, take photos, think about those articles figure out what we’re going to do, we are moving from one type of media journalist to another type, a media journalist is going to be able to take those photos, they’re going to get really good at photography but they are also going to understand how to do creative writing and narrative writing and news journalism and there will be one person who understands that, and then Frederick Van Johnson who’s the host of this show coins this term the multi-­‐mediographer, which expresses something very accurate. It becomes so ubiquitous and cheap, becomes so pulped that you actually, we live now, things are becoming just one expressive medium that you kind of—you pick different things just to express one continuous thing. You’re just like collaging together different types of expression and it’s all one form of writing or expression. That’s the way I interpret this concept of the multi-­‐mediographer. Now, there is a reason, I think one of the reasons why is there’s a long history of art criticism being about the design of the—celebrating the image as a absorbing, celebrating the absorptive property of the image but there’s also an important critical tradition, theoretical tradition of thinking about how to dispell the absorption of the image. I think this is one reason why people they feel this is an invasion. In 1957 Roland Barthes writes Mythologies where he talks about there’s a political analysis of the way images work in society he talks about how the language of power is what he calls mythology to take one thing out of context and fill it up with another meaning and make it become the natural as if it were naturally signified something else. And one of the examples he used precisely this magazine cover from 1957, of this young black soldier saluting, presumably the French flag and he points out well, there’s obviously one meaning of this, the clear meaning of this which is a real person, but on the other hand is he clearly being made to do service for another thing? The message of this is really clearly a whole other mythology about the French nation, how the French nation is a great empire but it’s a progressive empire, and all serve under it equally, and how it discriminates against nobody. And this comes from Paris Match, which is a fairly genteel text, but this is a very political point though that’s happening in 1957 when the French occupation of Algeria’s coming undone, it’s quite a bloody conflict, The Battle of Algiers, if you’ve seen it. So the point is that this is all about how through images power naturalizes itself and Roland Barthes sees the job of the mythologist. That’s what he calls the person who unpacks these and debunks these things. As using language to take you out of your natural enrapturement with these things. With all the ideologies that have been stuffed in them. Now, that was a pretty—I think that was a pretty—I don’t know if this—but the point is that in I think this is a—I think because images have become so present now, you know, this was the new thing. Color photography, color magazines was a relatively new thing in 1956, now we’re swarmed with images but people are very image savvy. This is actually a common form of writing where people sometimes take a little piece of pop culture out of context and captions it in such a way that it becomes allegories for things and this is a kind of like people’s mythology in action. The point is that if the project in Barthes’ day was a debunking, I think people now are naturally cynical about the image and recontextualizing things. I guess this is one of my favorite examples of modern mythology, this is the hipster cop, a police officer who had skinny ties and skinny jeans and was sort of a darling of the media and obviously this functions exactly as mythology in Barthes’ sense. He’s a real guy. He becomes a media sensation because he represents the funny side of power. This guy knows it, he’s interviewed in GQ and he talked about the semiology of his fashion and his clothing and of course people responded to this immediately with a variety memes. People are savvy enough to be natural mythologists in Barthes’ sense. You know, most of this stuff with the response is kind of an empty cynicism, but I think there are some, this is my big example that actually symbolize power in the police state and constitutes a form of image criticism. The point is that there are new forms of criticism with images that are already being born and already sort of vernacular. Vilém Flusser, a Prague-­‐born media theorist, writes in 1987 this book called Does Writing Have a Future? This is the opening page. I think it’s amusing that it begins with Superscript and the book is weird and problematic in many means in ways that I won’t go into, but it’s loaded with quotes about the relationship between text and image and the evolving nature of it. One of the things he says, one of the arguments he makes, first of all he makes what he calls electromagnetic culture or something, we’re moving towards something else, we’re moving towards essentially a post-­‐literate society but the bulk of the book is going back and looking at what alphabetic or articulated language has does. He says before books you had images, right, hieroglyphics or ideograms. And these are pictorial ways of looking about the world and alphabetic speech. This is the quote: “One writes alphabetically to maintain and extend a level of consciousness that is conceptual, superior to images, rather than continually falling back into pictorial thinking as we did before writing was invented.” And so there’s this idea that we have—that a form of thinking and expressing yourself that forces you to order thoughts, articulate them in an order, actually produces a space for critical thinking at a distance from an image and that is precisely that and formed the foundation for a lot of ways of anything not just about art and criticism, but a whole number of things and that, as he says, the rise of a more picture-­‐based universe of a post-­‐literate world “it leads us to a new mode of thought that can be anticipated but not yet perceived.” All in all he’s pretty ambiguous about it, so as I say this is a little bit of a problematic text for all kinds of reasons (that I won’t go into here that we can talk about in the Q&A), but I think it does articulate a certain anxiety about what’s going on with the rise of an extremely image-­‐dominated culture. An anxiety that was articulated to me very well is this article from the New Yorker a few months back. This guy, Emerson Spartz, who runs sort of a BuzzFeed clone, they do like funny listicles and stuff called Dose, I believe. He says very clearly in his article that he’s not interested in politics. He doesn’t find “the news” interesting because he thinks the presentation is boring but I asked him if he had any advice. He says, “If I were running a more hard news-­‐oriented media company and I wanted to inform people about Uganda, first I would look it up and find out exactly what’s going on there on there.” Good advice to start off. “Then I would find a few really poignant images or story lines ones that create a lot of resonant emotion, and I would make these into a short video, under three minutes, with clear, simple words and statistics. Short, declarative sentences. And at the end I’d give people something they can do, something they can feel hopeful about.” So some good ideas about audience engagement there but also clearly lowering the bar for what it means to think politically. And I think part of that sensibility is in the air and that makes people really anxious about this. Here’s BuzzFeed, their article. Making mythology of the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin turning him into an inspiration pinup great quotes. Not including interestingly my favorite quote: Mankind’s self-­‐
alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” But you can’t be perfect. So there is a way, I think you could say that the looping animated cat GIF, this is a cat on a book, by the way in some way can stand as an allegory for the return to a kind of looping mythical thinking primal thinking that’s you know, that’s outside of—that’s beyond—that’s almost precritical in a way. It’s viscerally you’re kind of frozen in this kind of limbo of pleasure and I’m not going to take that too far because as I say I think that we’re learning new ways to think about these things. I just wanted to show you this GIF. Now, I want to talk about forms of contemporary writing that forms, contemporary forms of talking about art, where I think we’re going, essentially. So I first began to have a lot of these thoughts not thinking about my own practice but thinking about how contemporary artists were engaging with images on the Internet so I was teaching my students, this is Artie Vierkant which is what you would maybe call a post Internet artist—this is one of his image object images that blur the line between installation shot and some sort of abstraction so you can’t really tell whether it’s a real object or not. And he wrote—he wrote this, you know, it’s become a touchstone, this manifesto called The Image Object Post-­‐Internet that I read and he says: “The architecture of the Internet—an arrangement of language, sound, and images in which imagery is the most dominant, immediate factor—helps facilitate an environment where artists are able to rely more and more on purely visual representations to convey their ideas and support an explanation of their art independent of language. This is a crucial point of departure from recent art history, as arguably it marks an abandonment of language and semiotics as base metaphors for articulating works of art and our relationship to objects and culture.” So that’s a horrifying statement to me as a writer that was my first thought when I read that is this is like basically images explaining other images and it’s cutting out me out, cutting out the critical middleman. I also think it’s—well, I also think it’s a little confused he doesn’t seem to know what semiology means. But my second thought was well, maybe I can work with this. Maybe there are forms of criticism I can come up that actually are a critical intervention into languages that use images against each other in order to create a form of criticism, so you know, this was my little experiment. I called it my “Instagram art reviews” in that I would use the structure of Peircean semiology, which is a three-­‐part sign where the first thing, the object would be the work of art and then I would find a second thing that you know, an association maybe to represent it. You know, there’s an association that it produces in my head. You know, this looks like that. And then the third is the third aspect of the Peircean sign is the interpretant. There’s a signifier and a signified but then there’s also a relationship between the two, they mean something together and I thought with those three things, maybe you can take images and create a form of writing with images, and so I’ll show you my modest experiments. This is—this is a Richard Serra show at the top at the Gagosian Gallery and then there’s comparing it to the experience to Caspar David Friedrich. And here’s my third image of a stock photo as kind of signifying the industrial sublime or something like that, so you can see that here’s the comparison it makes me think of and here’s what I think about the comparison. Here’s a detailed a painting by Raqib Shaw, which is kind of like fantastic glittery paintings and then a Frank Frazetta painting, the Conan the Barbarian artist, so I’m comparing him to pulp art, and then third is a stock photo of chintzy cheap gems, it’s like the idea here is it looks like pulp art and therefore I think of it as cheap razzle-­‐dazzle. And here’s the one that started it all, The Girl with the Pearl Earring compared to this famous National Geographic cover and I guess what I think the visual comparison is clear but I guess what I was trying to get at in this loaded subject matter is I think the visual appeal of both is that they are made to seem a little bit otherworldly. Now, this was an interesting experiment for me. I learned a lot doing it. There are many others of varying degrees of success. I learned among other things that it’s very hard because as it turns out, coming up with meaningful comparisons of images, thinking of images writing with images is just as difficult or more so than writing with words and I would freely admit, however, that it is a bit of a wrack as an experiment, I mean I don’t think might as well just put an image there that indicates that well, making this comparison I’m a little bit confused about how to represent what I think about that comparison. Nevertheless, I think you’re going to see a lot more of this kind of thing. Not exactly this kind of thing, but forms of thinking with the image inside the image, critically about and within the image. Because as I say, images have become just another expressive material for people. And there are lots of examples. I think people in probably in this room doing interesting experiments with this that I don’t know about. Carolina [Miranda] was reminding me before about this, that you know, the Getty does Game of Thrones recaps. I just picked out one. The Pelican Bomb which is a New Orleans art website and publication does this series of visual essays. This is one that takes off the history of the reclining female nude. So it starts with Ingres, the Grande Odalisque. And then this is presented all in a stacked ribbon in the original piece, but they walk you through a sort of a history of this theme. Now I think it’s interesting, I would say it’s still very primitive, though. It’s essentially on the first two levels, you know, their relationship of comparison of difference and sameness, and but it doesn’t make a critical argument and the reason I picked it for you is because I think it brings me back to Ways of Seeing and people always remember because Berger’s arguments are so clear, they remember the written parts, the famous parts about the popularization of Walter Benjamin or his section on the male gaze, but there are vast sections of that book that are just images, that are simply visual essays, and I think, actually, more sophisticated than that. Here’s Chapter 2 which takes us back to—which leads in this famous chapter of the male gaze and you have this juxtaposition of images. Here’s a woman working in a bakery and behind her are celebrity shots and here’s a glamorous woman in a car with people looking at her. Here’s a whole set of complex situations between you have this at the top Picasso and Modigliani and this pinup and this kind of ecstasy and looking at histories of how sexuality is expressed. You have this voluptuous pin-­‐
up here and this emaciated Giacometti with this sort of violence of the gaze and you have these like hyper-­‐sexualized advertising images and over here a Dutch still life, so creating—talking about how the language of making objects desirable are being applied to literally treat women like objects of consumption. So that’s—that’s all, I mean that’s all image essay and I think it is not—it’s murky, you know, and I think he wants it to be. I think he wants there to be significant comparisons, but also room to breathe. That’s part of what the book is about. But I also think if you go through the book, in some ways I think that the most sophisticated form of navigating between images and text is maybe that I know, maybe this book, which was produced 40-­‐some years ago, if you look at the way—and he also takes off from Grande Odalisque and here’s him incorporate it into the text of the book. Here’s he uses details of paintings to show how images can be constructed out of them and he uses—he has a sophisticated way of looking at details of painting and how words, the relationship with their words and the descriptions, transform them. So here’s, this is a landscape with birds flying out of it. Look at it for a moment and then turn the page. When you turn the page, it says this is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself. “It is hard to define exactly how the words have changed the image but undoubtedly they have. The image now illustrates the sentence.” So this is a fairly sophisticated way of addressing the new problems for us that are emerging for us as we write online and part of that this is an analysis of how images function and he’s using image and text in an elaborate way, in an involved way. Come back to Turner. So this is not for me a question of escaping images. Or escaping textuality. My argument is as I said at the beginning, that we live in a sort of hybrid state, you know, there are different modes of thinking. And the function of description is of course always partly analysis, you know, you’re picking out the significant things you with the to describe. My argument is once we disarticulate those two things, we think about the problem, what it means to to describe around images and within images in a different and more productive way. Here’s another text about this same description of this same painting by Thackeray. He describes it very differently and he services what is only implicit in Ruskin’s description about the painting which is a painting about slavery. An abolitionist painting inspired by an incident where 133 slaves were thrown overboard because the slaver wanted to collect the insurance money, and, after all, Turner himself accompanied this painting with a poem that explains the meaning and ends with “hope, hope, fallacious hope, where is thy market now?” So Flusser ends his book, “Subscript,” in counterpart to “Superscript,” that we need to go back into kindergarten and we need to relearn how we think about basic things. And I began with a story of my time as a tour guide here at the Walker, and I’d forgotten ways of seeing has been a very important reference for me as a book and I’ve forgotten that the TV show is different than the book and actually the first episode ends with John Berger showing art to children and sitting with them as they describe a painting, and his conclusion is that they see it because they have—they’re free of some of our habits, they have a different way of seeing it. They and this is a very hopeful for me this is a very hopeful thing and I want to say that I picked this topic because I’ve been to enough art journalism conferences to know that gloom is in the air and there will be a lot of angst about money and so on and the state of the profession, but I think that you need to disarticulate the question of the economics of writing about art, and the secondary question, which is about whether we have ideas we believe in and whether you have ways of presenting art that excite us and feel real and lively and contemporary. They’re separate questions. They interconnect their separate questions. So this idea of thinking through the present and the potential of the present in a new way I think is a very optimistic conversation that this, complete with its typo, you know, complete with the typo where you really see text breaking down relation of images is a hopeful image for me, it’s about new it’s about new starting points of people to have the opportunity to do something new, I think that’s a very exciting conversation to be a part of. The question of a post-­‐descriptive criticism or post descriptive criticism, if such a thing exists, is not simply a that applies to art critics of course. Art criticism is about engaging the visual so it may be paradigmatic mode and that means that the kind of solutions to the question of how image relates to text that people come up with potentially at least have a wider relevance to culture and that’s not something you can say about everything that we talk about within art, which is sometimes very arcane. New ways of seeing, I think create new ways of writing and new ways of writing about seeing, and it’s on that note that beginning, I think is a good place for me to end this conversation, and turn the conversation over to you. Thank you very much. Audience Member: So a couple of presenters today have used emojis in their presentations, so it kind of begs a question like when we have a unicode standard of an agreed upon definition for an image how can we use that to modulate written information? Does that make sense? Davis: You’re asking me? I mean I think—I don’t know if I have an answer to that. I think that’s an aesthetic and intellectual problem. I think it’s a more—I think emojis are a more interesting thing than people give them credit for, you know. It’s people thinking with images finding essentially creating new signifiers for agreed upon you know, new languages, I think it’s a tremendously interesting topic, probably the subject of a lot of unreadable dissertations at this point, you’re behind the curve here. Audience Member: First of all, thank you for your talk and for being so well researched. I want to address something that is a potentially troubling take away from your talk and that’s that post descriptive means post verbal. I think as writers, you know, there’s definitely the understanding that we need to work with images, we need to incorporate images in our reviews in whatever we write, but replacing words entirely with images is a kind of different project altogether, so I guess I’m wondering, is that your assignation for the future of art criticism or would you want description to be replaced by a discussion of context, politics, ethics, social issues, the kinds of things that artists are concerned with in the studio? Is that you know, I guess in a way what I’m asking is what is the function ever an art critic or an a writer in you know, a broad way. Davis: What is the function of an art critic. Well, there are different questions here that are mashed together. Part of it as I said at the beginning is this is a practical talk. I mean I actually wanted to do a talk here that was practical, theoretical, you know, that the pass-­‐through theories of images and theories of language and I think this is like tremendous practical relevance and I don’t know about you, I mean there is—the problem with images is not the only problem with reviews, I don’t think, but I do find myself—this is a cliche about Internet writing, but you know, scanning reviews, I mean I write them, you know? This is a little bit like my students when, you know, when we do critics and I ask them to look for ten minutes at their peers’ art. And they can’t do it you know, and I say you spent months in your studio and you can’t even look for ten minutes looking at your peers’ art. I do the same thing with writing. I spend a lot of time trying to find the right words, and I find myself scanning through things, tell me what you think about this, why should I read this? You know. There’s some function of description that can be done better by image. Image I think that’s obvious, and that I think that there are intellectual hangups that people still have because we’re still inheriting models of how to write from the past and I think a new model that’s not post verbal but that treats images and text on a more—on more of a same plane, that will—I think that’s just happening. I don’t think that’s not like me saying that, I think the people are doing that. I think it raises a lot of questions about, you know,—that’s what I was trying to say about the political vectors of this. I think this raises a question where it was mentioned earlier in the earlier in the day, you know, lots of visual stories with no thought in them. That’s a thing. I mean that’s a thing that there is demand for, actually, is to just kind of give yourself up to the idiocy of the image. The argument I’m trying to make is we have to be, to use a really corny word is we have to be dialectical about this. Right now it seems to me that there are two kind of big positions playing out there are people that are running madly in the direction of the visual and another one people saying no, no, we’re holding out for the word and I think we need to think through critically the problem about relating the image to the word in the new—with the new reality. So I think that’s a critical problem, right? I think that enlivens the task of the critic is, because it’s not just describing something out there but thinking through the presentational problems of what writing is. Audience Member: Thank you so much for your talk so earlier we had the reference to the Flannery O’Connor quote about not knowing what you think until you find yourself reading it and you yourself have referenced this sort of pedagogical situation and I find with my own students they have no idea what they’re looking at until I force them to delineate exactly what it is they’re looking at so I guess I’d be curious to hear your comment on the kind of pedagogical value of ekphrasis even if it’s something that may not persist into the final form of professional criticism. Davis: Yeah, I mean I think, yeah, Walter is you know, in a certain extent, right, the tweet, the angry tweet from my former boss he’s saying, you know, thinking about art is writing at art, that begins looking at art and describing it or something like that. And that is to a certain extent correct pedagogically I think, and I think—the thing is that’s a different question than, you know, the question of how you—does, you know, do you need to—do you need to re-­‐describe things and there are some things, you know, to say, you know, it looks as if a bird clawed its way through white paint on the surfaces of this canvas is like a beautiful sentence that’s Frank O’Hara writing about a Cy Twombly but it doesn’t actually do the duty of telling you what it is. It’s a separate thing that you’ve produced and that separate thing has its own value and I’m not sure I total want to ditch it. I just think there’s a problem here that we should think about. Audience Member: Yes, thank you very much for your talk. When you talk about the separate thing that you can produce, I loved your Peircean little chart, and how it—it’s almost to me if I’d seen those things without your descriptions I’m sure I would have had different reactions to them. It’s almost as if you were creating—you’re creating something yourself. It’s like you are the artist yourself. It made me think of Warhol perhaps being that’s what he did. I mean he wasn’t creating art so much as he was—you could almost say creating a form of criticism but I’m curious what you learned from that practice. I mean obviously you thought a lot about it, what made the images when they weren’t successful and what didn’t. Davis: I’m glad you find them interesting I sort of gave up on that experiment and I was excited to be able to use it in some kind of way here. I—well, I mean the hard—first of all, yeah you’re inventing new forms of agreed upon structures signification, I just think it can be done. I think through images you actually can produce forms of thought. The things I learned from it were two: One is that, you know, the real problem thing, there is no problem in finding comparisons, you know? There is no problem, it’s the cheapest form of criticism, actually to say this looks like that. It’s absolutely there’s difficulty finding meaningful comparisons that’s where the third term comes in there, that’s why I think I like that little block because I think it does express something, so where the third term comes in that you produce a thought really, and what I found and I think you probably all accepted that when you look at those Instagram art reviews, that the third term is extremely vague, you know, because images—the trick there is finding images that are enough of stock images that they already function as words, or that they’ve already become processed into essentially a signifier and then those are, you know, it’s pretty simple to find, you know, frowny face if the point of the comparison is that you—you think it makes you sad or things like that, but to produce complex senses of them requires kind of a new image lexicon. The other thing that I learned about it, which this is screamingly obvious, but worth saying, is that it’s not impossible to produce thoughts about something using as Artie Vierkant says producing images for images. If you were going to review a show in this format, you could do it it would take like 100 of those things to produce a series of thoughts where you could compare, you know, different details within something to different objects and build that up into a significant thing, so as it turns out, actually just old fashioned writing is very efficient for some things, you know, that’s one thing that I guess it’s a good point to make is that part of the point is that there are some things for which images are more efficient, and more engaging and there are some things, actually, like writing is more efficient and I think we’re just in a moment where we need to clarify what those things are, because they’re putting pulped together pretty quick. Audience Member: Thank you. I wanted to thank you for bringing in John Berger’s way of thinking about Superscript. And when you brought up the Van Gogh, where Berger talks about the image being the illustration for the writing, I thought it was really to think about how much power the word has once and also looking back the at those Artforums where are those artworks becoming then the illustration for the writing? You know that, in some ways counter to what you’re saying, maybe words still have a lot of power over when you’re looking at something and you read about it, that it alters your way of looking which is also what he’s talking about in Ways of Seeing, but and then perhaps to think about is it also going towards more analysis or more the content of the writing going more towards media making or maybe looking in ways that aren’t in the description but engaging in the artwork differently. Davis: Well, either side the power of the word problem well I’m a writer so I’m just going to tell you that I believe in the power of the word. But as for the second piece of the question, what was the second question again? Audience Member: Well, I guess thinking about if descriptive writing is less pertinent. Davis: Right, I did have something to say about that, yes. Well, look so there is a pragmatic lesson that just you know my process as a writer and writing about things, when I first got my first job writing about art at artnet magazine magazine, I look back on it as kind of a golden age in a way because I had very little supervision in a way. I got to write about what I wanted and what I wanted to do was write reviews, and my boss gave me Walter gave me tremendous trust and so on. And what happened over the course of the years I worked there is you just start to realize that the reviews—
while they serve a great purpose—don’t get people nearly as interested as something a larger, argument, analysis, news, things like this, political commentary. There’s just—that is—and so then it does make me think that—I mean in some ways I’m trying to think, you know, how criticism can function in new kinds of ways, taking advantage of new capacities, but the other argument you can of course make is that the form of the review is just a historical product. There’s no reason we have to be writing this way. There are other forms of writing about art that we’ll discover and find and maybe it is you know, more emphasis. I do find myself just hungering for what’s the point. Tell me what you think about this. So maybe it is, maybe that’s that’s the solution. I don’t think there’s one solution. That’s the thing. I think that there are hundreds of solutions, exciting moment in a way. I have some excitement about what’s going on right now because it’s—there’s like clearly new stuff on the horizon, new ways of thinking about things, new ways of doing things. I’m not going to be able to do a lot of them. Everyone here is and so it’s just very a privilege and honor to be here in front of you and I hope we carry this conversation into the future. Thank you very much. Saturday, May 30, 2015 PANEL PRESENTATIONS:
Connectivity and Community
Claudia La Rocco, The Performance Club One: When the Walker asked me to talk about “connectivity and community,” I remember thinking I probably wasn’t the best gal for the job. I expressed my concerns that I hadn’t given much thought to the subject, that my response to the phrase “arts journalism and criticism in a digital age” is typically a scrunched-­‐up face. I write a column for artforum.com, I publish poetry chat books, it’s all part of the same mess, but of course I said yes, a freelancer’s gotta eat. Months later when I asked if there was a particular mandate I should keep in mind I was told, “we’re very much looking to avoid one-­‐size-­‐fits all canned TED Talks,” and later when I told a fellow writer I was having difficulty approaching this topic, she emailed back “Connectivity and community are the lies of our age, how would anyone actually feel connected via the Internet?” A week or so before today, I asked Twitter what it would do if it had to give a talk on community and connectivity. I received one response. From the writer Marit Case, whom I’ve never met. She wrote, “Handwriting is still important.” Two: One of my early articles for the New York Times was a 2005 profile of the choreographer Arthur Aviles who after an impressive international career as a dancer had been working to establish an inclusive performing arts center in Hunts Point, a South Bronx neighborhood that has not historically been all that interested in the arts or in embracing feminist or queer perspectives. Roughly ten years into his project the center was both humble and thriving. Decidedly site-­‐specific and grassroots, it wasn’t, in other words, anything the New York art world would pay attention to, unless it happened to fit a flavor-­‐of-­‐the-­‐month whimsy. “No one will ever say he’s made it in the Bronx and I’m fine with that,” Arthur told me. “I feel satisfied with the career I’ve had. This is the next step to come back home and develop a dance community.” Referring to the drive that many choreographers in the Bronx had to make it to Manhattan, he said, “They want something bigger, which I understand.” And then he added, “I want something small, something respectful.” Three: My first substantial journalism gig in New York was at the Associated Press. Back then the AP was still headquartered in Rockefeller center. Its venerable history announced by the ten ton Isamu Noguchi sculpture entitled News that adorned the front door. Entering the office it was hard not to feel, if only fleetingly, that one was doing something important and useful in society—unless, of course, your job was as an online editor. The multimedia desk where I worked wasn’t even housed in the same building as the rest of the organization. I’m not sure if I was paying enough attention to grasp the brilliance of the department charged with connecting AP to the worldwide web being marooned or perhaps quarantined is the better word in its own building. But I do remember one reporter saying to me, oh, yeah, you work at that desk whose purpose nobody else here knows. There’s nothing so symbolic as geography. AP Digital was like an island of misfit toys populated by rookies, jobbers, and a few actual multimedia specialists whose reactions to AP’s rather impressive ineptitude in the face of a technological sea change ran from disbelief to disdain. I worked part-­‐time on that desk for several years, years in which attitudes about the online operation from other AP folks didn’t so much shift as expand to include the irritated belief that digital initiatives were the only ones safe from chronic cutbacks. Meanwhile, I scanned the Internet on my numerous desktop monitors, tried not to make any intensely bad mistakes in the headlines I spent most of my shifts composing and wrote for the arts desk whenever I could. I realized I wasn’t a journalist. I began to think of criticism as a Trojan horse. Four: I started the Performance Club in 2008, while working as a cultural critic for WNYC public radio. WNYC had gotten a big chunk of foundation change with the mandate to promote online community. With the initiation languishing and the foundation demanding results, WNYC ordered its contributors to drum up proposals for its website. Mine was the Performance Club which I imagined as a book club for live art so people could take part in the discussions through monthly social gatherings around performances while also having conversations that would continue on my blog forming an archive of discussions and debates. My proposal was responding to two things that had been frustrating me for a while. One was that I would take friends to the live art I was then writing about and in spite of being smart and knowledgeable in other fields of contemporary culture, they would come out of these performances and say I don’t know how to talk about this stuff. The critical minds they would use to read any other sort of text were not being activated. At the same time, conversations with my colleagues, the actual critics, often tended toward the petty. Little clusters of us marooned in lobbies throughout New York. Spending intermissions making these hierarchical assessments. So-­‐and-­‐so was better than so-­‐and-­‐so. This work used to look better than it does now. I was interested in the possibility of creating a third space. If we brought together people who are already intensely knowledgeable about live art, and people who were curious, but felt they had no way to talk about it, I wondered if we could collectively create a more fruitful conversation. To put it another way, I like talking with smart people. It’s one of the only consistently good reasons I can think of for getting out of bed in the morning. Five: Trust your boredom. That’s one of my favorite one-­‐liners in Jonathan Burrow’s book of one-­‐
liners, A Choreographer’s Handbook. I appreciate its get out of jail free insistence and just now it seems important. I had assigned sections of the text to my students earlier this month and prepping for class, cramming on the train as usual, I was stopped by these three words. It’s not that I’m bored exactly by the idea of connectivity and community but it makes me restless, my answers to it feel small, preordained. As if we all assume we know what we’re talking about. As if alienation isn’t the right answer, as if technology actually lessens class divides. Six: The Performance Club I want to emphasize was something I proposed because I had to propose something. In an area I had never considered as an actual thing. Fostering online community. I couldn’t show up to this meeting empty handed and so I concocted several half-­‐baked ideas, thinking one of them might stick long enough to impress my producer. Such is the lot of the contemporary arts freelancer, busily racing along as one colleague’s husband put it, on the hamster wheel to nowhere. I wasn’t expecting the thing to actually stick. Had I expected it to stick I’d like to think I wouldn’t have saddled myself with the P club nickname, something that another colleague later said “sounds like a cabal of urination fetishists.” But I digress. Having almost never been in a club, I found myself running a rather successful one. People showed up to performances and stayed out for hours after to talk about them. Despite WNYC’s terrifically wonky web infrastructure, people also left smart comments on my attempting to be pithy blog posts. The club became known around New York and beyond, even spawning other like minded ventures. I liked this network aspect of it which didn’t yet seem oppressive. Also the improvisational nature of it, the thinking and writing out loud. It was a good moment. Seven: A journalist friend and I were wandering around the streets of San Francisco the other day in search of a good midday drinking bar. The subject of Twitter came up and we agreed that there is often a direct correlation between feeling terrible and being on it. Another day I was visiting an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle which is about a 50-­‐minute walk from what everybody calls the Twitter building. A guy got in the elevator with me as I was leaving the third floor and when I asked him which button he wanted me to push, 1 or 2, he said there is no more 2. Then he clarified it no longer belonged to the Chronicle. I asked him what was there. The usual he said a bunch of hunched over 20-­‐somethings plugged into their laptops, in other words the same old story. Eight: What’s the best web infrastructure for fostering responsive arts journalism that encourages valuable substantive conversations between writers and readers? That’s one of the questions we’re meant to answer. I’m not sure what the best infrastructure is. I do know I’ve never worked with it. Every system I’ve become part of has come with some or the of disclaimer that the technology is outmoded and/or in some way not up to the task of being truly interactive and the assumption is that interactive means lots of traffic, lots of linking, liking, reposting, etc. In this I see a strong parallel with the idea of the traditional audience member as passive, as if anything that happens below the surface cannot count as true engagement, writers business busying ourselves with numbers. We are wholly beholden to the quantifiable. There never appears to be an easy or good way to make these systems better. This seems like a very old human problem, the fashions change but not the body. The status quo lets us distract ourselves with the pretty idea that we have found alternatives and we comply, giving it all away. Two other questions posed for this panel: How does a platform create a sense of community around the ideas it presents? And how can the online intersect with the in-­‐person? The Performance Club was always conceived of so that anybody could be a member. It was free and open to the extent that those things actually exist. It was up to individuals to decide how they wanted to interact with the idea of the club. There were people who read everything that was online but never once came to an event and there were people who would come to the events religiously. They ranged from practitioners, artists, funders, writers, and people who worked in art spaces to WNYC listeners who have no particular connection to the arts. Most of these people were lovely. Some were much more at ease in person than online and vice versa, with myriad ways of performing and presenting themselves. A few made demands that only in retrospect presented themselves as inappropriate and creepy. I found the live gatherings both exciting and exhausting it. It became clear that in creating the P club I signed up to be a social sculptor, someone who had to shape and care for public space whether one person showed up or 35. This very particular sort of caring felt the same whether the space was physical or digital. Does a platform create a sense of community any differently than any other system? Is it ever the platform really that makes the difference outside of extreme examples, a technological ineptitude or dazzlement? Running an online anything seems to be a lot about being a good host. The onus is on you to make your guests feel comfortable, to try and head off trouble at the pass or to set up collision courses if that’s the sort of party you’re interested in. And for the guests, the question is do you want to be in a room with anonymous bodies, the pleasures and perils in in that or do you want to be at the dinner table, jockeying for the best seat? Nine: in one episode of Girls, Lena Dunham’s character meets with a publisher who’s interested in publishing her book which is in limbo after the death of her last publisher. The only catch this new publisher tells her is that “We don’t do e-­‐books, we’d want to put it out as an actual book, you know, that you can hold. I hope that’s OK with you.” The camera cuts to Hannah, there’s a pause and then she breaks out into high pealing laughter. “Are you kidding me? I mean, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. I just said yes to an e-­‐book because it was better than, like, a notebook.” In another another of the many exchanges I have with colleagues while procrastinating on these remarks, I told a friend who edits an online publication that I didn’t know what to write, in part because my perspective is firmly writer-­‐based and “P club aside I don’t think I do anything differently in print versus online other than structural things like making use of hyperlinks.” She messaged me back “I find that you do write with an online sensibility for print, your style and tone. I think that’s one of the things I like about your writing.” I was curious by how pleased I was at her response as if it granted me some sort of currency or legitimacy, and at the same time I had no idea what she meant. My pleasure made me slightly queasy. Ten: When I left WNYC in 2010, that was the end of the Performance club or that’s what I figured until the following year when I was approached by two former members who convinced me to relaunch with their help as an independent entity. This new iteration of the club received a Creative Capital Warhol grant in 2011. On the website you can still find the following proclamation. “We intend to build the club into an independent multifaceted real time and web based center for interactive discussion forums involving audiences artists and other writers, as well as an informational hub on the NYC performance scene.” I made good on this officious grant language for about a year and a half, hosting monthly events and online conversations. I paid contributors and curated conversations. I joined Twitter. Eleven: Earlier this year, I was guest curator for dance space projects platform 2015. 6 weeks of performances workshops and readings entitled “Dancers, Buildings, People in the Streets.” The main performance spine featured arranged marriages of artists from disparate experimental traditions in New York. Two of these artists, Caitlyn Gilliland and Will Rawls, decided that instead of a studio practice they would create a social media one, wading through the pop cryptic world of text acronyms and emoji to find a common language of artistic desire and mediated intimacy. What they finally created consisted of a staged reading of this dialogue. The audience seemed split between those who found it intensely moving and those who wondered why they didn’t dance. One critic wrote “their bodies seemed as well matched as their minds, so why not dance together? If they took yet another step and explored partnering it would have been worth 10,000 words.” There’s always so much anxiety around language, the violence it does to nonverbal forms, simultaneously how inadequate it is. Twelve: Some time ago I got an email from the Warhol Foundation asking for numbers. They were doing an internal review and were looking at how past projects were faring. I remember when I had the blog at WNYC. Some days I used to feverishly check my stats. A lot of fretting was involved. The Warhol request was not unreasonable and it came from folks who have been unceasingly supportive and understanding, minor miracles in the foundation world. I can’t remember if I answered that email. It appears I may have deleted it. There didn’t seem to be any way to answer without sounding defensive for dismissive. For example, the sentence I don’t measure success through site visitors is obnoxious on so many levels, where even to begin? How do you explain that you junked the entire concept of the book club for live art in favor for building a space for criticism of art for weird little chunks of writing that most people will have zero interest in? Is there a way to say that the island of misfit toys suits you more than the mirage of inclusivity? That you’re worn out by the evangelism game artists and writers are supposed to play. I have no appetite for convincing anybody of anything. Also for lasting, we don’t last. Why should the things we make be any different. Thirteen: I’m so uninterested in anxiety around criticism. It just seems like a given. Fourteen: I ended the Arthur Arviles profile with his quote about wanting something small and respectful. A reader emailed me to say “I loved the kicker and I hope you realize that the fact that they put a refer on the front page of A & L means the top guns like it too” those two impulses, the romanticizing of the humble effort and the desire to be widely seen seem as the crux of many a present-­‐day difficulty and weirdness, just think of the slow blogging movement. It’s so tempting to make a fetish out of the small and local. It’s so tempting to measure your worth in social media likes. Both of these things are themselves so obvious and off stated as to be embarrassing to mention. Fifteen: When I was running the previous version of the Performance Club, I began noticing that at our monthly outings I no longer watched shows with the same eyes. I wasn’t there in that alone in the crowd capacity that the traditional critic of live art feeds on. I was watching with a communal eye in connection to the now very specific bodies around me, bodies for whom I felt responsible. Is this so different from the imperceptible transformations that occur when your office is enveloped by the Internet? There’s something profound here which I will but draw a circle around for you to ponder, Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts. All those bodies hunched over their machines. I’m back to my own stupid self, Jonathan Burrows writes in his handbook. The computer as compositional space and gathering place, studio and market, room of one’s own and rooming house, the critic as cyborg, writing alone in a crowd. Thank you. Ayesha Siddiqi, The New Inquiry So when I was first asked to speak on the subject of community and connectivity, the broadness of those prompts reminded me of how much time we spend completely enmeshed in them and how much that living in it keeps us from really questioning exactly what our relationship to these subjects is, and when I thought about it a little bit, I realized that its implications captures everything from the tension between DYI and indie for content creators, publishers, as well as the tension between establishment media and what’s called new media, the tensions between corporations and the surveillance state, and how—what was described as shifts in power or empowerment for typically marginalized voices has really been just a masking of new vulnerabilities. So the first thing I wanted to talk about it is that DYI versus indie notion. Over the past few years we’ve been living in this moment, that seems really optimistic. That seems to encourage everyone to do it yourself, because you can now, right? Anyone can start a blog, start a zine, start a publication. There seems to be a greater ease with which you can pursue creative pursuits, because the infrastructure that you typically needed to have is being provided for you whether through an app or website committed to that. But what we have instead is the fact that DIY is no longer indie. Those two no longer mean the same thing because you’re absolutely foreclosing on your independence by pursuing DIY projects and by that I mean you don’t any more own that which enables your project. So even for a publication like New Inquiry, for example, we’re just as vulnerable to the platforms that produce and host our content as we were hoping to avoid being vulnerable by trying to not be a corporately backed or a grant-­‐based publication. And while you no longer need to have, say, websites or offices that can host the infrastructure, what instead you’re giving up is the opportunity to own that which is enabling you and that’s not a problem that’s unique to independent publications, it’s something that anyone who uses social web is a part of. We are a all part of signing up for things that we’re generating value for, and a lot of the questions that the subject of community and connectivity raises is labor and its valuation and who ultimately ends up benefiting from the use of social web platforms. So for platforms like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, all of its users are the ones generating value for it, right? We’re essentially running their product for them for free. And in doing so, certainly there are some obvious benefits, so you know we’re in this moment that typically marginalized voices have greater access to the community and connectivity that we’re here to discuss today. They can reach each other, I mean there’s obvious gains to be had there, but we’re also increasingly mistaking visibility for power. And for these typically marginalized voices—and it’s interesting, the people I’ve noticed at this point in time that have the most angst around the Internet or the social web, people who work in media and are like, oh, gosh, Internet is just the worst, right, Twitter is terrible, and of course all of these opinions are being voiced on the Internet and on Twitter. They’re typically people that the rest of the world has been pretty kind to and the people that have almost the greatest investment in these spaces and spend a great deal of time on this them are people that the rest of the world isn’t that friendly to and it was initially spaced to escape the daily hostilities and aggressions and of course for people of color, people who aren’t straight, queer, gay, LGBTQ communities. These are really vital developments. Our ability to produce and establish community, our ability to connect, the way its been facilitated for the social web, has in fact changed many lives. And when in one category I spend a lot of time thinking about is students of color who struggle with mental illness issues and the ways in which that mental health resources are either completely designed not to serve them, but actively reproduce colonial violence in the way in which those administrators are trained to deal with people of color that they may encounter. And how so many young people had then turned to the social web to generate their own survival scripts to produce ways of coping with things like depression, anxiety, thoughts of self-­‐harm, and that’s a form of quote-­‐unquote life hacking that I’m way more interested in than cutting up an old takeout container to make a plate. It’s bizarre how what the word “life hacking” gets used to mean and its association with tech pros when there are people doing far more interesting and innovative work just for the pure pursuit of being able to move through the world with relative grips on their sanity and safety. So while those communities are being developed and are being incredible resources and incredibly empowering which I want to distinguish from actual power I absolutely recognize those benefits and I’m happy for people who have access to these spaces and conversations and can more freely speak their truths and learn from each other. This is relevant to, you know, anyone from young people connecting over shared experiences on mental health communities, on Tumblr or other blogging platforms, or the fact that the establishment media is no longer shielded from the necessary critiques that people outside of it can offer and how so much of what’s described as Twitter backlash is really the resistance to the historical and still currently ongoing erasure of voices and discourses and essentially colonial perspectives on culture writing so I’m absolutely optimistic about what it means for media and publishing that a lot of typically marginalized voices are able to speak out and speak to establishment media and to each other and there’s a great deal of power in the affirmations that that enables and allows. While all of that is happening, all of the, you know, the visibility that follows those critiques or the types of thinkers and writers that gain attention aren’t—don’t have then the access to actual capital versus the social capital that their visibility on social web may accrue for them, and it’s also important to distinguish visibility from, you know, the fact that what it can oftentimes really produce is the same social—same vulnerabilities that their social position, the rest of the world had for them. So a lot of the writers of color, young thinkers, black women, trans individuals who are creating content for these corporations, they don’t own what they’re putting out there. They’re entirely subject to the corporate ownership of those platforms, and they’re also vulnerable to what that—to all of the harms that that visibility can bring them, whether it’s routine harassment, a lot of, you know, what’s called—what’s attributed to Twitter or something unique to these individual platforms is really just the misogyny and racism that exists elsewhere anyway, and the way that those patterns of oppression replicate themselves, it’s the same sense of entitlements to the ideas and labor and bodies and images of people of color and of women only now it’s on these platforms instead. And so there’s the micro-­‐level of you know, individuals who are then subject to something that’s as unfortunately routine as harassment to being stalked online, from online to their real-­‐world lives, having their addresses revealed and released, having their pictures taken and circulated without their consent. These patterns then also—and those vulnerabilities are also present for anyone trying to produce independent alternative projects, and what I’m seeing with the rise of a different form of digital DIY culture is the foreclosure of indie culture and that means that sure, it may seem exciting to have a website that you describe as a magazine, or to kick start a project or to, you know, connect potential audiences or consumers to the thing that you want to put out into the world, you don’t—no longer need the same skillset, you don’t need to be a coder, you don’t need to be a manufacturer, you can just use the apps and websites that are now designed to do that for you, to fill those gaps, right? But that, I mean for New Inquiry, that’s not that. We when we first started didn’t need our own payment processing system, Amazon payments existed and that meant complete vulnerability to the whims of Amazon and the potential that the minute that they decide to no longer offer the service that our project is built on, we would be dead in the water, and it was only narrowly that we escaped that reality recently because when I became editor in chief one of the first things I wanted to do was get away from Amazon and it just so happened that they did in fact decide to end the service that we were using and we just barely in the nick of time were able to transition to something else. But there is no real solution to that vulnerability because as anticorporate as you may want to be, you may be forced to engage in the corporations that are now the intermediators between your production, your creation, and your audiences and you can see that across social web and so as much as social web has motivated, propelled real shifts in media and publishing, it’s producing new kinds of cooptions and oppressions. So one of the things you may be familiar of is the way Facebook treats its users and when I talk about community I think about what it means for people to get together online the most basic sense of the word and what community means to the people that own the platforms that everyone is getting together at, right? So capital-­‐c Community means something very different are than Twitter, Facebook, publications like BuzzFeed or means something very different to them than it does to the people getting to know each other on these platforms. And the behavior that that—that’s encouraged the ideology that gets subsequently produced, there’s a very friction-­‐full exchange there. It’s not as—I mean people who are on Facebook aren’t there with the assumption that they’re you know passive participants in the maze that this corporation, the lab rats in this corporation’s maze but increasingly the way Facebook talks about its users is just that, it’s a sense that these people can fit into the algorithms we produce as much as the numbers Facebook uses to produce its algorithms. And the fact that what you see on your timelines is something that Facebook designs, so for a publication that’s sharing articles, Facebook at its own whims decides what gets promoted, what gets seen in people’s newsfeed, what doesn’t based on the words that they’re into that day and the number of likes and shares on Facebook have less to do with perhaps that piece of content than the way that Facebook has decided it’s going to be presented to you. There’s slightly different pattern of that same social control that happens on platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. These spaces were increasingly just shortening the gap between, you know, the cultural production of cool by the alternative and its cooptation by corporations, and essentially at ever-­‐
increasing rates, teaching corporations to be more efficient at advertising to us, because we’re with our communities being so public, inviting them to take even more detailed essentially, you know, snapshots of the ways in which people are making their community and mimic those patterns in order to better advertise to us. So you see on Tumblr promoted posts being designed to look like any other Tumblr post but they inevitably stand out quite starkly because the language and image style that they’re relying on is one that was produced and people are familiar with because they made it themselves with references that are relevant to their own community and it’s very, very obvious when someone who’s not part of your community tries to do that, thinking of all the slang generated by you know, black teens on Vine that way way later will eventually move to white and nonblack communities and then a Denny’s Twitter account telling you that their pancakes are on fleek. So what is cool and not cool has become markedly accelerated and that cooption is not what’s interesting. Advertisers being corny because they’re a day late and a dollar short is only interesting because it’s good for a laugh. What is interesting is that within the surveillance state, that acceleration reveals the relationship that these platforms, which we always forget are just actually corporations, are you know, mistaken for these bastions of democracy. When the social web was first blowing up and places that couldn’t really be described as digital natives, places like CNN and other media outlets were quickly trying to catch up investing so many resources and having, you know, robust online presence, and the subject of community engagement, you know, became an entire department that media outlets have, what is interesting about that is all of the voices that make these spaces vibrant and interesting and worth being on, because they’re offering commentary you won’t get elsewhere because they’re breaking news on the ground, that other outlets are slowly struggling to get at. At the end of the day, they’re only more—they’re only producing for free all of the methods that places that have always had money and always had reach and resources are able to use and I think this is more insidious than simple cooption because the Internet is supposed to be a force that’s more democratic, supposed to be a force that produces more connectivity and community, who is it ultimately connecting? And visibility in a surveillance state is not power, and all of the historical vulnerabilities that have existed for marginalized voices are simply migrating onto digital spaces and all of the exciting and vital work that people are doing to make their lives a little easier to bypass or life hack all of the deficiency in you know, their workplaces or classrooms or day to day experiences by connecting or communicating with each other exist in an ecosystem that’s primed for their continued exploitation, that remains in many ways hostile to them, the misogyny that a female academic might encounter at a publication or within our department at school is easily replicated by misogyny you encounter in your Twitter mentions or in the comments section of something you write. The entitlement to the emotional intellectual labor of people of color that exists in establishment media and academia is easily replicated by the entitlement exercised over these people’s work online, and all of the places that we were meant to subvert by being online, by bypassing traditional, you know, paths that were barred from us by being able to avoid and then eventually make irrelevant gatekeepers to genres like cultural criticism, those gains have to be seen in light of the fact that all of this exciting interesting work, whether it’s done, you know, whether it falls within the category of cultural criticism, or as I was referencing earlier, communities dedicated to helping each other live a little bit more honestly in their public realms, or connect over subjects that would be taboo in their day to day, you know, they—in the—you know, in the long game, these are communities that I’m still really concerned about. Because all of what can be seen as empowerment, people finally being able to speak and speak to each other and say what needs to be said, I think a lot of what’s called empowerment on the Internet is referring to stories, sharing stories of their own lives and of each other’s and being able to just simply speak. That has not, and I don’t see it under existing conditions, translate to actual power. These are still interactions mediated by corporations. Those corporations and who runs them is still fundamentally the same as—you know it looks just like power has always looked in this country, very white, very male, and very removed from all of the communities and people, people of color, LGTBQ individuals that participate on these platforms, so as much as I’ve appreciated the past few years of all of the rest of us getting to speak and getting to be heard, which is a relatively recent and exciting development, we haven’t reached power that is truly—that can truly compete with historical power structures. And seeing the same patterns of erasure, violence, entitlement, that exist offline be easily adaptable and have evolved to online spaces and to see that these communities, whether it’s someone bullied by members outside their communities, whether it’s, you know, TCOT activists trying to search your address and circulating your pictures because you’re a Muslim that’s going to bring down America, which is something that any Muslim who tweets online will hear at some point in their life, that’s something that we haven’t yet found a way to evolve, and so all of the words that I found being used to describe this moment in time, and even use myself, things like this is empowering, this is exciting, or for movements like Arab spring or for movements like black lives matter, have to be understood within the fact that ultimately these quote-­‐unquote content creators, whether it’s a makeup reviewer that you know has an audience of millions online or a Twitter user with thousands and thousand of followers and has huge reach, they don’t own what they put out there, because we’re all just running for free these platforms and these are at the end of the day corporations and I think the understanding of the social web as less an organic and natural digital space that we’re all getting together and sort of holding hands around the fire which is kind of the sense for typically marginalized communities, and the world that these communities have been able to generate, there’s no ownership, there’s only again, free labor, and for me, that’s not new, and that’s not encouraging. And that’s what I hope conferences like this, and the conversations that have thus far been brought to the fore are able to effectively recognize and intervene in. Otherwise, everything that’s exciting about now is, you know, in a few years, going to seem like a lot of applause for very little gain, for the same old. Thank you. Alexander Provan, Triple Canopy So I’m just going to jump right into this without describing Triple Canopy very much, but I will mostly speak about Triple Canopy, which is a magazine based mostly in New York as well as a few other places around the world which does various activities all of which we understand as publication in which we argue should be understood by others as publication. So when—I also was going to have a more linear presentation that reflected directly on these images, but I canned that, so I’m just going to occasionally scroll through them and I they may or may not relate directly to what I’m saying. So when Triple Canopy first formed in 2007, we the editors were motivated by the increasing characterization of the Internet as a venue for the unremitting production of content and by the corresponding feeling among magazines and art institutions that they somehow had to participate in this production. That they had to solicit interactions, pursue accessibility, conjure a virtual body of enthusiasts, while also preserving their financial models. At the same time we were frustrated with the frequent valorization of online forums or social networks or publications that seemed designed to generate fleeting or inflammatory interactions among users who gathered because they shared interests or hobbies or political affiliations or supposedly identities. Were those really communities and not just marketing ploys? If they were communities, were they to be lauded, mimicked? Should magazines strive to create such communities or perhaps they could simply be found if you knew where to look. How many unique page views and what kind of bounce rate makes for a legitimate community? Perhaps we were anomalous, but as far as I remember none of us considered ourselves to be part of any online community. I don’t think we were interested in creating one, really. In fact we wanted to argue against the fragmentation of culture, its branded platforms with particular breeds of content likely to appeal to narrowly and quantitatively defined groups. On the most basic level we wanted to establish a magazine that would through its rigorous editing, its Catholic interests and its considered presentation of work address people as sophisticated and unpredictable readers who could not so easily be classified by profession, age, locale political orientation, ethnicity or consumption patterns. We wanted to create a space where readers as well as contributing artists and writers could expect to have absorbing, rewarding, stimulating and even profound experiences that would not soon be forgotten. This was probably a bit of a fantasy. Or at least this idealism may belie our actual readership in the intervening years. Nevertheless, I think this agenda speaks to Triple Canopy‘s orientation. Toward technology and the discourse around it to our concern to how we can create culture and meaningful bodies of knowledge in what is increasingly a resistant efficient particularized world. “Culture is also something personal,” John Dewey writes in Democracy and Education. “It is cultivation with respect to the appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with the narrow range of acts instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency.” Dewey saw in the early 20th century an atomization of experience into “separate institutions with diverse and independent purposes and methods. Business is business, science is science, art is art, politics is politics, social intercourse is social intercourse.” His description of the conflation of culture and efficiency seems twice as true today. As the line between the Internet and real life disappears, as our consciousnesses are molded if not overtaken by our screens, we want Triple Canopy to serve as an alternative to tech world fantasies about crowd sourced knowledge production, an algorithmic cultural creation to a star system cultural economy that pays a few people a lot and a lot of people little or nothing, and to ossify cultural institutions that neutralize everything that they survey. We want to support work that resists and expands to the present and keeps supporting it until it finds its place in the world which may take years. We want to keep enlarging our sense of what Dewey called “the unity or integrity of experience” and we want to engage the world at our own speed. This leads me back to the question of for whom a magazine might exist especially a magazine that operates primarily online and so can theoretically be for everyone and just as easily for no one. I’ll talk about this in rather reductive terms, community on one side and public on the other side and I won’t attempt to define community. Maybe we can fail to do that later. But I’ll—I’ll briefly distinguish between community and public and explain why but it’s helpful to think of Triple Canopy‘s work in terms of public and not community. So obviously a community may may be foundational to or may arise from the activities of a magazine. That’s certainly the case with Triple Canopy, but our motivation has not primarily been to support or dramatically enlarge the community that birthed the magazine and it has for the last almost ten years sustained it. This has to do with what I said about the atomization of culture and the way in which the digital economy has come to understand and profit from individuals as quantities of relatable data points. It also has to do with the way the world community is used. So often used to identify voluntary non-­‐economic unequivocally good activities rooted in empathy kindness selflessness in blogging and so often fallaciously. Since we don’t have that much time I’m just going to continue by reading an excerpt from an excellent book on the subject. It’s Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community. She writes, “What I call the discourse of community, positions community as the defining other of modernity, of capitalism. This discourse includes a romantic narrative of community as prior in time to ‘society,’ locating community in a long lost past for which we yearn nostalgically from our current fallen state of alienation, bureaucratization, rationality, it distinguishes community from society spatially as local, involving face to face relations where capital is global and faceless. Community is all about boundaries between us and them. Boundaries that are naturalized through reference to place or race or culture or identity. While capital would seem to denature, crossing all borders and making everything, everyone equivalent. Further this discourse contrasts community to modern capitalist society structurally. The foundation of community is supposed to be values, while capitalist society is based only on value (economic value). Community is posited as particular where capitalism is abstract. Posited as its other, its opposite. Community is often presented as a complement to capitalism, balancing and humanizing it, even in fact enabling it.” That’s the end of the quote. The sound that happens when quotes end. Thanks for that. None of this is to discounter communities as they actually exist or to discount the power they can exercise. But it is to encourage wariness of the use of this term, especially I think when it pertains to the digital economy, which describes a particular kind of value to our expressions and interactions. Alternatively I want to talk about how a magazine can, through the presentation of work, through various modes of address and circulation, constitute a public. For a long time, Triple Canopy has looked for the work of historian Michael Warner, specifically his book Publics and Counterpublics. Warner draws on Jurgen Habermas’s analysis of the bourgeois public sphere but he works to figure out how Habermas’s model which is built on the universal value of rational discourse and so widely and rightly criticized can be tweaked so as to allow for a public sphere that’s composed of numerous publics, not a single hegemonic one. To that end, Warner describes counterpublics as being formed in opposition to the dominant discourse and the norms it tries to instill. Publication is a particular form of making public, a discreet set of practices. Not every radio broadcaster, blog post, exhibition, or pamphlet counts as publication. We can think of “to make public,” not just as making something public but as making a public. Which is more complex than simply making information available. Temporality is crucial here. A magazine can organize time through the regular delivery of articles and issues. As Warner writes, “A public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse. No texts themselves create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time. Only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and when a responding discourse can be postulated, can a text address a public.” So and maybe it’s a little idealistic to think that a publication can literally organize time and situate a reader within that certain notion of time, but this is more or less what Warner suggests and he also suggests that a reader will recognize one’s self as inhabiting that time at the same time as however many other readers may exist. So how else is a public formed according to Warner? A public is self-­‐reflexive. People recognize themselves as being part of a public when addressed as such by a text. Which is to say a public is form of discourse. A public is composed essentially of strangers who choose to join one another through discourse. A public can just as well enable one to recognize one self as not being addressed and so as not being part of it which may lead to the generation of what he calls “counterpublics.” A public is made by capturing people’s attention and doing so repeatedly, regularly via the circulation of texts through time and the expectation that this will continue to happen. Different publications, whether academic journals or Reddit forums possess different temporalities. Ultimately I think a public provides a forum for the social world in which it exists through time, through media, and through this kind of mutual recognition. This may seem like a rather abstract idea, but I think for Triple Canopy at least it has actually animated and on a daily basis shaped the work that we do. And it compels us when conceiving of a publishing platform to ask questions like, how can the platform, the structures and concepts of publication, support the tools we use and support the people who use them? How can the website hold activities on the web in print and in person, hold them together and communicate how they relate? Can an issue of a magazine reasonably include a book, an installation a single image, an artist’s edition and a reported essay? Can multiple issues occur simultaneously or one for a month and one for a year and is the magazine issue the best metaphor for a coherent set of inquiries in whatever form that starts at some point and eventually ends? How can a magazine effectively annex various kinds of communication networks and face to face interactions and bodily experiences for and as publication? And can a magazine shape a public and resultantly shape our social world? So this is—these are images of a recent project we did, which is emblematic in a way. It’s called pointing machines, and it was—it began with a long period of research and discussion among the editors, and was initially instantiated as an installation at the Whitney Biennial and these are some images from the various paintings and prints and objects that were included in that installation. The issue hinged on the historic and contemporary reproduction of images and artworks and the various kinds of audiences and meaning they can attain, through painting, through photography, through 3D printing, through publication, through Zazzle and so on, and that body of research and that initial instantiation of the project was used as a prompt to write other writers and artists and scholars and performers to contribute to the issue over time and then the results of that issue which is still ongoing are on our website. And I will stop there. Thanks. Brian Kuan Wood, e-­‐flux journal I thought to talk to you today about the latest project that we’re working on at e-­‐flux journal, which is a project for the Venice Biennale, a kind of massive four-­‐month publishing project, but it’s called—it’s coming up here. It’s called Supercommunity, and of course I thought, like, OK, there’s something like I want to talk about it, I want to show this to you, but then like something about it seems a little bit too right, you know, to be talking about Supercommunity at the community and connectivity panel at Superscript, like something is corresponding a little bit too much, so maybe it’s meant to be. So I’ll start by with just a brief introduction of e-­‐flux journal. We basically started—sorry, I’m just checking the Internet here. I’m checking my email. So e-­‐flux journal started in 2008, it’s a monthly journal edited by myself and Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle. And it started really as an attempt a kind of—yeah, a kind of really almost desperate experiment in trying to find a way of creating a discourse or a collection of writing or a kind of language that could address a certain kind of global spread, that has happened in maybe like the last 10 to 15 years in art, where we basically take for granted that the community of the discourse of art now takes place basically in most places of the world. Right? And so if you take this for granted, though, it really starts to shift the foundations of what you consider to be an artistic canon or what you consider art history, because in many places in the world, artists who are working, they have a kind of relationship with art history and what is often conceptualism, often a history that is based in certain capital cities in the west. A certain relationship with a canon which, you know, is a little bit too close and a little bit too far, right, where they know the history, maybe better than many artists working in New York, but then also feel a bit distant from it, where like the history doesn’t actually apply to them, so it’s like it’s not your history. It’s a very common post-­‐colonial condition which is installed into the working conditions of many many artists today. So then how do you create a certain kind of discourse which has a certain kind of amnesia, which has a certainly kind of visceral directness, right, which also is reflective, and how do you—how do you to create something that does justice to this new kind of community in art that we take for granted? So this was the kind of idea that we had in starting the journal in 2008, and so and since then, yeah, we started—there was a PDF version of the journal. It’s the journal is basically ten issues a year, it’s free, online, we made a PDF version, which is distributed to a network of distributors in different parts of the world, who basically receive this PDF, and can print it and sell it at whatever they want, so you know, they receive a PDF, they print it, they can sell it for 3 Euros, they can sell it for 300 Euros, they can give it out for free, it’s up to them because many people were asking for a printed version. I don’t know if these are kind of boring details about format, but you know, this is what we’re working on. Lately we started e-­‐flux conversations because the journal has been sort just an online transposition of a paper publication, right, where it just, you know where we are like a printed journal but it exists also online. So there was very little dialogue, dialogue was usually taking place between people or privately, so in the last year e-­‐flux conversations became a kind of a, yeah, kind of a discussion platform, a kind of discussion platform for dealing with a lot of these issues, the issues that we deal with in the journal but in the discussion format. So this is kind of still new, it’s about five or six months now and we’re trying to understand what this strange community of people who are really kind of taking hold of e-­‐flux conversations, what they’re actually, like what their character is, because it turns out that actually, there are like really a lot of smart people out there with really a lot to say. So it seems to attract a certain kind of—it does attract a lot of like, you know, flaming and this kind of things that you see on YouTube, that they’re actually very substantial arguments but they’re short-­‐
form micro arguments so it’s really something that I’ve never seen online before so we’re kind of listening and trying to see what happens. With this. And what the community tells us. We also do a series of readers. The—I think it’s the 9th reader that we just came out, I think 4 months ago, in collaboration with Sternberg Press, the last book is called The Internet Does Not Exist and this is a kind of, you know, of course, the title is a kind of a provocation, but it has to do with a lot of the things that we’ve been thinking about today. The Internet Does Not Exist, it’s a kind of like it’s a collection of essays from that we published in most of which have been published in the journal, but as a provocation, the editorial concept of it is really that the notions and the images and the figures that we have for understanding what the Internet is, have—they’re really just not sufficient anymore, right? Like you can imagine some kind of information super highway, like this stuff doesn’t really work anymore and so at the same time, a lot of people think, that for example, if you want to understand how the Internet functions or how the communities around the Internet function, how this kind of communication function, you should maybe also good kind of like old school Marxists will say you should look at the material base of the Internet, right, look at where the servers are and look at how they’re connected and that will tell you who’s in control and how the Internet works and it’s the State Department and it’s the NSA, you know, U.S. Department of Defense, you know, all of this is kind of true, but it also doesn’t explain exactly what the Internet is actually doing to us, right? What the Internet is doing to us, what it’s doing to our lives, to our economic lives, to our personal lives, right, is actually something completely different, so this book sort of wants to depart from the notion that actually the Internet is something which you have to describe through some kind of other figures, right? So things like emotional blackmail and things like this, right? Labor extraction, right? Like what are the figures that we can use to describe the Internet? But of course I mean it just reminds me, there are also people who are doing really, really important work with the actual infrastructure, artists. You have someone like Trevor Paglen who is actually looking for the undersea cables, right, so we still think of actually the information super highway as a kind of abstract notion, but then like someone like Trevor Paglen is actually diving down to find these undersea cables that are stretching across the Atlantic ocean, for example, and he knows about like the actual US submarine that actually goes and kind of kinks the cable to tap into it to monitor the communications. So this stuff is of course really important, but it’s also something that is not a dominant figure that we use to think about how the Internet functions. So, yeah, so just to tell you a bit about the Supercommunity project, after—I mean basically we’ve been thinking about—we’ve been thinking about these things with e-­‐flux journal for I guess 7 years now, and a few months ago, without much advance notice, we got an invitation from the Venice Biennale to participate as the journal in the biennial and we proposed to do a kind of four-­‐month daily publishing project as the 65th issue of e-­‐flux journal and the concept of it is Supercommunity and it deals with a kind of notion of community which has—which a kind of notion of community which is not something that we actually want, right, which is autonomous, like a warm communitarian, it does not have the warm communitarianism that can cozy up mammal style like everything is going to work it itself out. Actually it turns out that we’ve had many mass revolutions, we have a lot of people connected to each other and actually sometimes it works out it turns into some kind of new fascism, something that we don’t want and we didn’t ask for. So this poses a real problem to sort of well intentioned artistic standpoint, right, where you believe that your work or you are on the right side of the barricade and the work you’re doing is by its very nature improving the world and making the world a better place, actually it seems that not only are you know, if you look at gentrification, not only are artists the problem, if you look at something like climate change, humans are part of the problem. So how do we look at these without being the heroic saviors, so it tries to think in these terms, through, there are kind of short form, also quite cheerful text here considering the topic. Yeah, but notions like corruption, cosmos, we have planetary computing, is the universe actually a gigantic computer? We have “Cosmos” which is guest edited together with Boris Groy, “Corruption” together with curator Natasha Ginwala, “Apocalypsis” together with Pedro Neves Marques, “Political Shine” on surface reflection and bling as kind of a new ontology. “The Art of Work,” “Art,” “The Social Common,” which is together with Raqs Media Collective, and the section on Cuba, which we’re doing here with Coco Fusco. So I thought I would basically finish by reading you the editorial that we—this is the cats. And I’ll conclude that with. And you can actually you can read along with me. No, please don’t. But with your eyes, please. Having no body and no name is a small price to pay for being wild, for being free to move across (some) countries, (some) political boundaries, (some) historical ideologies, and (some) economies. I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me. I grew out of something that used to be humanity. Some have compared me to angry crowds in public squares; others compare me to wind and atmosphere, or to software. Some say they have seen me moving through jet-­‐lagged artists and curators, or migrant laborers, or a lost cargo ship that left a trail of rubber ducks that will wash up on the shores of the planet over the next 200 years. I convert care to cruelty, and cruelty back to care. I convert political desires to economic flows and data, and then I convert them back again. I convert revolutions to revelations. I don’t want security, I want to leave, and then disperse myself everywhere and all the time. I’m not worried about famine, drought, wifi dead zones, or historical grievances, because I already stretch across the living and the dead. I can be cruel if that is what’s needed. Historical pain is my criteria for deciding the pricing of goods and services. Payback time is my favorite international holiday, when things get boozy and a little bloody. Economies have tried to tap into me. Some governments try to contain me, but I always start to leak. Social contracts try to teach me to behave, but I don’t want rights. I want fuel. And if you think you can know me, I’ll give you such a strong dose of political and economic instability that you’ll wish you never tried. e-­‐flux journal has been trying for years to give me a face and a name. The editors think they can see me move in the trees of the Giardini. They think they can find the supercommunity in how plants experience pain, how humans experience pain, how jellyfish talk to each other, how acacia trees warn other acacias. They think they can see me in how the world talks to the world. The editors think they can trace my footsteps by asking artists and thinkers to consider how the supercommunity assembles through a growing series of themes that reflect the profoundly contradictory scales of thinking that are currently altering the collective consciousness of contemporary art, and by publishing these essays, statements, and prognoses in individual installments over the course of the Venice Biennale. For instance, they think some artists and writers from New Delhi can see how I’ve always rendered any social contract uneven and unequal. They think I increasingly use corruption as a vehicle for getting around. They think I helped a bunch of Russians hack the Enlightenment to design spaceships before the Communist Revolution. They think I extract labor from artists with false promises, when all I want is for them to stop thinking so much about survival and focus on their work. They think Cuban artists know something I don’t know. They think I build infrastructure out of surface gloss and lighting effects. They think I mash physics with universalism to build a gigantic computer. The supercommunity loves a miniaturized version of the world as an idea. From human understanding the supercommunity harvests protocols for the mobilization of goods, services, and ideas we didn’t ask for: it moves a lot of things around, but never forward. The supercommunity wants a maximal version of the world that floats any governing idea so long as it never governs. I grow larger and healthier when forms of international solidarity are stripped of their progressive promise, and when those solidaries are put to work munching up real estate or vying for control of towns and villages. I am the alphanumeric calculation of visitor numbers and the force that floats those figures to source outside infrastructure for the next iteration of the fair. I make language into everything and nothing at the same time. I can sort you faster than you can recognize your own image in the mirror. And in fact, I will replace your image in every mirror. Think of it this way. I need to attend international exhibitions to update the methods I use to sort the communities of the world. The world is not yet in alignment with its own communitarian desires. There are certain areas where resources have pooled precisely because those resources cannot be used. They function like banks in which the money is safe because it can’t be spent, because in many cases the knowledge, content, talent, human minds, or natural resources moved away a generation or three ago. The supercommunity sources internationalist good intentions to match those resources to the talent that floated away—to seek refuge in another country, another national pavilion, a yacht moored in Riva Dei Sette Martiri, an artist’s incessant doubts, or an exhibition boycott. The supercommunity discovers the places where these errant resources hang in limbo, and patches them back into the venues where they didn’t know they always belonged. This is what makes me bigger than any political demand you ever thought you had. I have a lot of work to do for the Biennale. I have a lot of work invested in the Biennale. Don’t bother with choosing me or not choosing me to represent you. I am the supercommunity, and you are only starting to recognize me.” PANEL DISCUSSION:
Connectivity and Community
Claudia La Rocco: So as Alex suggested we’re going to start with failure. We thought we’d start with a discussion of terminology. Last night at dinner and as I think all of our talks reflected, we all have varying degrees of ambivalence about the language assigned to our panel, the phrase one of you uttered the phrase being against a language of metrics and boosterism. So we thought we’d start with some words, community, connectivity, responsiveness, value, what are the politics of these words? Are they adequate? Are there better alternatives and do they create a false consensus? Have at. Ayesha Siddiqi: I mean I think certainly for the corporations with departments dedicated to so-­‐
called community engagement, the issue false consensus is very, very real and relevant to them but there’s also so many people using the Internet for whom community is a word that is newly available to them, describes a very novel experience, because they’re able to find peers where they didn’t elsewhere and the ability to transcend geographical and even although not to the same extent economic barriers towards connecting with each other. I mean think of say, you know, members of diaspora, first generation immigrants, the queer kid in a very conservative high school, these are people for whom the Internet has been remarkable in terms of giving access to community, communities that are in the process of being built. But again, as I mentioned before, that’s a conversation that can’t be divorced from the existing and you know, definitions of community that we’re all sort of grappling with and what they mean to different people. Alex Provan: And I didn’t mean to demean the genuine feeling of connecting with others in a togetherness that we associate with community, and I mean I think—I wish there were another word to use as a substitute, but I meant mostly to differentiate community as a discursive construct that is often used quite imprecisely if not irresponsibly, and that—that is of course not the same thing as the kind of—the feeling of community that you’re describing. And I guess what I mean and what this book I mentioned speaks about, I mean it’s a kind of anthropology of community, one that—the most extensive study in book is of a queer theater organization in San Francisco and she’s primarily interested how this discourse around community shuts down and creates certain kinds of exclusion which are generally concealed in our usage of the term. Brian Kuan Wood: Yeah, it seems that the kind of bad-­‐faith use of these terms has, even though on the one hand one can criticize that they’re being used disingenuously, but at then at the same time it seems to be a lot more interesting to start to see them as being completely structural, right, that these are actually the protocols that we are—that we can only be following. This is like something that we were thinking about with the—with like the “Politics of Shine” issue in January and then in the part in the Supercommunity issue, where advertisement and like a projection of purpose and advertisement of what the community is or could be, this is the only—is the only way to actually exist, right, like the opposite of, you know, inflating yourself or seeming bigger than you are, trying to market yourself the opposite of this is like some kind of obsolescence or this is at least how it’s felt that we will just simply disappear if you don’t kind of project your image forward. And the question is, really, like what kind of like strange communal dystopia does that contribute to? I mean with this I always think—I me I think it’s also very important to approach these questions on many different scales where also there is a strange kind of parity between the way like that marginal groups operate and the way that if you go up to higher echelons of power, that the way that actually power functions, like marginal practices are being used on, like, on vastly different scales and I always think of this— La Rocco: Can you give an example? Wood: Yeah. And I always think of this Dutch like brilliant Dutch designers, Metahaven, who are great researchers and always kind of stumble upon these extremely large scale phenomena, like they did a text on state branding where they basically beautiful formulation where they said, actually, most—it’s like also has to do with the question of the state we were talking about yesterday, like basically if you look at tourism advertising for like Greece or Spain or something, everyone knows the logo for Espana, like a circular thing, like you have it embedded in your mind, right? But these are actually more recognizable to us than national flags, so I remember who can remember the Spanish flag? Like I kind of can, but I can really remember the tourism logo, right, so this kind of marketing, this kind of marketization, it has such powerful effects that we somehow have to find ways to take it very seriously. Siddiqi: You just said a few things like one that marketization of borders, right, has implications for the ways that communities are policed because then it relates to the way that those borders are able to be cooperated and replicated and re-­‐instituted by places with a great deal of more power what you said about the inadequacy of the term community and the necessity for perhaps needing new vocabulary to address the different types of community at work, I think it might be productive to compare the word community to the word public, the various sorts of public settings. At dinner last night that was one of the things we talked with was the ability to to be in a moment which we have ever-­‐increasing public and more dialogue, whether it’s a culture of TV criticism in the age of shows like Mad Men or Breaking Bad or the ability for marginalized voices to sufficiently antagonize the racism or the misogyny of establishment media and while there’s an idea of an ever-­‐
increasingly active public sphere with ever-­‐decreasing amounts of power, so a really active public sphere that has no power. Provan: And this relates to what you were saying about visibility in a surveillance state, right? However much agency and presence you might have within the public sphere, that might—that could very easily have no political effect or no possibility of achieving any political effect. There’s not a direct influence. Siddiqi: Well, it was positive political effect, because they’re certainly seeing policies being—that were produced with respect to the political effects of these online engagements, so the ability of I mean state agents have always been able to, and have to infiltrate various political organizations, but I’m thinking of all the cases that a Facebook status has led to the harass and detention of people, so whether it was recently a black man who expressed dissatisfaction with the police on Facebook and it was perceived to be an active threat against a cop and he was charged or the student in England who—whose academic research at a university on terrorism was interpreted to be, you know, researchers becoming a terrorist and he was put in jail and those are not uncommon. There have been a lot of people who’ve you know, been met with significant, like, you know, state, political repercussions for the things that they have expressed or shared online and the ways in which those expressions can be used as evidence against them and so that’s just one of the ways in which the social position of anyone is replicated on their—within their online presence and it’s still—we are not escaping the policing that state does, and we’re not escaping the borders and cooption that corporations always practice on us when we do what we’re doing differently online. La Rocco: And I also think that there’s this incredible dislocation, right? The differences between how we use these technologies and then how we view how others are using them. I think of, you know, all of the incredible and ferocious shaming of people who’ve said things, you know, that have met with disapproval on various social media and this idea of how can anybody do this, you know, how could anybody be so stupid as to do this, but of course we’re doing this all the time, and there’s this way in which—you know we’ve been talking about various speeds and what are the speeds at which we want to exist, and one of the things that occurs to as being related to that is the—there’s a way in which the ability to improvise is being completely leached out of our culture, because everything is so quickly, both set in stone and decontextualized. We were just saying that right after our talks it’s fascinating to look through Twitter and see all of the ways that we’ve all been misquoted or taken out of context and that that’s immediately but that’s something of course that we also do all the time to other people, so there’s this idea we think of the, you know, the state and the corporation as an abstract and an other, but it’s as you were saying it’s absolutely us. We are the appalling supercommunity. Wood: Yeah, I mean with this this seems to come also, it seems to come with like a profound dislocation of notions of public and private that used to be quite clear, where we don’t really know the difference anymore between—yeah, I mean also on different scales, between like also on private feelings and between interior feelings and outside world, almost like some kind of—yeah, almost like in like a Russian novel or something, where you have a hard time distinguishing between grand narrative and personal and private emotions but then also just economically or politically public sphere and private sphere are intermingled to the point where it becomes very hard to sustain this moral division between public good or you know, private self-­‐benefit. And in a way it’s kind of—it can be almost like liberating to just kind of like, you know, chuck these notion, because they’re really, if you look at how most publics were constructed formally, it really came from the state, right? Publics are usually confined by nation, and they’re usually subsidized by states, and you know, I mean. Provan: I think publication and circulation of media has a lot to do with that. I mean, not to go back to Michael Warner, but he has another book called Letters of the Republic which is all about the formation of an American national identity, not through coercion of the state, not through, you know, some sort of false consensus, but rather through the development of communication networks, and through various documents and publications through which people could recognize each other as readers and therefore as part of a public, which, you know, in certain ways preceded the constitution of a nation. Wood: Right, right, Michael Warner is really important for this as a queer theorist, right, because queer theory, he’s writing about counterpublics, because as I remember in the essay, at least it is actually antagonizing and working against a public consensus, so in a way, like queer thought is so interesting for always having trouble with the cleanliness of the division, if you want to for example even just in queer politics, like if you want to bring the queer community above water, you just equalize gay marriage and then you have taxpayers and everybody can be a nuclear family like in the Jetsons or Leave It To Beaver style. Provan: Are we entering the Jetsons period finally? Wood: Maybe Jetsons is a bad example. It’s a really important debate within the queer community, like, are we supposed to actually—like are we supposed to actually be, do we want to be accepted and normalized under these terms? Wasn’t there actually something about deviant practices and there was something to be defended in being marginal. Maybe we don’t want to be a part of the public in these terms. Maybe we want to have our private culture. Siddiqi: I mean what you’re saying about the porousness of the membrane between public and private, immediately for me provokes the questions of erasure and entitlement, because dissolution between public and private and the way it’s carried out on the web, how many of you have seen articles which are essentially a series of tweets captured and aggregated so this popularity of aggregation as a form of content creation and publication to various outlets and there have been a number of very well funded established media outlets that entire sections that are populated by exclusively through aggregation, and of course what and who they’re aggregating is not something that is compensated, it goes back into the patterns of the exploitation of the people who are newly accessing public spaces, spaces in which they’re able to speak and participate. But again it’s not on equal terms, it is again an exchange that is normalizing free labor and what I’ve—you know, the way I see people talk about this use of, you know, to use a particular example of tweets in this particular way, is it’s a bit unsettling, because you know, oftentimes you’ll hear the argument, well, it’s publicly available. It’s right there. You posted it so you must, you shouldn’t be surprised then when people then share it or take it outside of the, you know, to use the word the community in which it was shared, so if you’re having a conversation online with the community of your choosing, that is not necessarily to say that—to welcome outsiders, people who are necessarily not part of that community to come in and take what you’re putting out there for their own ends and purposes, and this has real consequences, because I mean the people who are aggregating that material in those tweets are generating sites of revenue for themselves, those pages filled with the uncompensated words of others are creating revenue through ad clicks for all of these outlets and whichever outlet that may be, I mean — Provan: Huffington Post especially. Siddiqi: Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, there’s no one who hasn’t been guilty of doing this. But the argument I’m repeating again is if it’s publicly visible, we are entitled to use it, I mean it’s a bizarre like replication of rape culture logic of visibility meaning that if I can see it, I’m allowed to take it. And that to me is related to the question of borders of community and how they’re maintained, how they’re policed and who gets to really own them and enact them. So all of the people I secreting and establishing interesting, necessary, vital vibrant communities online, the borders of their communities is not something that they’re able to exercise control over and their exposure to not just violence and harassment from others, the but also exploitation in more subtle, but perhaps no less violent ways, from people who are trolls, right? I mean that’s another word that gets used very often, but has a range of meanings of what constitutes trolling, because that’s a way of antagonizing communities. La Rocco: And the question of context becomes so important. Thinking about performance pieces that get replicated online. There’s been in recent years an explosion of technologies that can really go a bit further in terms of capturing, you know, live performances and on the one hand this is great, right, because these works can be disseminated and everybody can see them, and on the other hand, you know, a lot of works, if you take them out of their very specific context of who’s in the room, who is the community that it is initially for, they become something else entirely. I remember performers in a particular group being really upset that they had been recorded, and they no longer own that image, right, and then the image gets, you know, edited and put up as a clip on YouTube and it becomes pornography, because it’s the context is stripped away. And I think that was a—we were talking about this last night, right, the what is the sort of the tension between wanting to control the work that you’re making and then this, you know, this drive for dissemination and for circulation. Provan: And it’s especially easy to control it if nobody cares about it. La Rocco: Yes. Provan: Which is why most of us probably haven’t had so many problems in this regard. Siddiqi: I mean I guess what we’re talking about I guess is the attention economy, right? Wood: I always think of, I mean also with the public and private kind of thing, I always think of this reformulation of the gated community, in terms of as a kind of productive principle for marginal groups that Marjetica Potrč, I think she’s a Slovenian artist, she described the kind of model of the gated community that was being used by marginal communities in the Amazon to resist the corporate like resource extraction, and but she described it as this almost like a certain kind of like a panopticon or something where on a very in a very basic way, you have your security is ensured through like a one-­‐way—through one-­‐way visibility, where you can control who enters. Like you can leave and enter as you like, but you control who enters. So you can see out, but no one can see in. So it becomes actually like a technology of opacity of protecting yourself and maintaining a certain kind of amount of control over what you do. La Rocco: I wonder how you each relate to that and with the particular, you know, publications and organizations you’re involved with, and yeah, just how you navigate. Siddiqi: How we navigate what? Sorry? La Rocco: Navigate, you know, the desire to control your work. If that is a desire, to have it correctly contextualized with understanding that, you know, what the economy is that we’re in, and the, you know, the need or the pressure to have everything be circulated, be disseminated. Siddiqi: Right. Provan: And that’s been a big issue for kind of something that has an animated concern for Triple Canopy. I think we started by looking at various magazines from the 60s and 70s, which were new media projects at the time, Aspen was especially important to us, and like Aspen, for instance, was a magazine in a box that was delivered to your door, and within that box, you could find foldable sculptures, records, films, texts, and it was in some ways an exhibition packaged as a publication, and it made a very convincing argument for an expanded notion of what the magazine could be and for the various material supports that can constitute a magazine, and it also—it also I think opened up new relationships between authors and readers and publishers and editors, and not by coincidence, Aspen commissioned Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author and published it in in the box with these various media and to encounter that text now in a reprinted in a collection of essays is kind of travesty. But it has this additional force within that environment. So we started with this idea with a highly regulated environment in which to encounter works of art and literature. And we, you know, developed a platform which made it especially difficult to—for that work to travel elsewhere. You couldn’t print anything, the pages were organized horizontally, so to copy and paste an entire essay, you would have to scroll from slide to slide to slide and go through the same manual operation many, many times and generally people don’t even have the attention to read something for more than two minutes, much less to spend five minutes copying and pasting so that was an effective and somewhat antagonistic move that you know, probably diminished our readership. But you know, nevertheless, we have—like we care about developing an issue over a period of a year and a half, and we’re very insistent on certain pieces responding to other pieces in certain ways, whether or not that is how they will be encountered by the majority of readers, which is why it is especially surprising when a project that we publish becomes extremely popular and starts to circulate in an entirely different environment that we have no control over whatsoever. Which is not to say that that is regrettable at all. It is just not—at least initially it was not part of our calculus. I was also curious how you thought about Performance Club about the kinds of discussions of live art that ensue after the performance ends? La Rocco: Yeah, well it used to—I guess the initial iteration of the Performance Club existed in what I didn’t realize until yesterday it was was a golden age of comments on websites before they migrated elsewhere. It was astounding to me how immediate the conversation—how immediately the conversation began and how strong and thoughtful it was, and it was quite—it became very easy to see that there was no community that I had created, right? It was just there already and it wanted, it wanted a place to go to. And so I sort of got lucky with what I built. Provan: But that also happens at a time when people are interested in these particularly vexing questions about how to represent and preserve and circulate performance, and it’s not like you establish this as receptacle for videos and increasingly realistic representations of an experience, of a performance in the time and space, right? La Rocco: I think when it comes to performance that I’m a hopeless luddite and I just think you have to be in the room. It’s fine to watch a video but it’s not the thing. It may be the same way a PDF printout of something you made. It’s not the thing, right, it’s just a facsimile. Provan: I think it also has to do with how you imagine something being received in five years, ten years beings and maybe valuing that over its immediate reception. La Rocco: And just thinking about the ways in which you know, the ways in which I understand things that happened in the past performance, thinking about, you know, visual art and performance in particular. It’s through writers, you know, it’s through—unless—I mean most of the time you know, I understand, you know, Marina Abramovic’s walk across the Great Wall because of Cindy Carr, you know, and not because of the detritus that was at MoMA as part of her retrospective. And I think the conversation around ideas within performance was always more interesting to me than you know, one of the constant criticism of my criticism is that I don’t give enough description, which I also thought that—I was very happy with that criticism. Wood: On the issue of distortion. Speaking as an editor it’s really terrifying to have things munched up and changed into other things because you want a certain amount of control and precision. Like, there is this, but then on the kind of—in terms of like the way that image and texts circulate online, I think it’s something that in a way, at least for the journal, it was something that we never thought of really so much formally or as something that happens formally or technologically, but maybe we kind of preempted it by thinking of in terms of this kind of like global distribution of discourse, right? So the distortion that we originally saw was—wasn’t so much like—it was like a kind of original distortion. Provan: The premise of distortion. Wood: Yeah, in the actual foundation, like the canonical foundations that actually that has been already scrambled, and so the question is like how to actually speak about art in a coherent way granted that the shared references are already kind of so fragmented that automatic consensus can’t be taken for granted. Of course, this is a kind of, you know, this is not something that exists so much in like in New York and in the US in general, of course, because the canon in this part of the world is kind of subsidized by institutions and which strengthen the idea of this kind of clear lineage, and progression, but this is—but in many place this has already been distorted and unrecognizably. Mangled. Corrupted. La Rocco: Here’s—there’s a little bit of a belief that we’re not being positive enough. Our public. Provan: You may have gotten the wrong panelists. La Rocco: Yeah, sorry. Sorry, you guys. Wood: This is positive. Provan: This is just being here, being negative together is so positive. Siddiqi: None of our critiques offer a rejection of anything. It’s mostly inspired for an idea to have a better status quo than the one we’re trying to address here now. La Rocco: I guess I would ask this—well, I mean it’s beautifully, the language is beautiful, the sentiment is not beautiful, but you said that visibility in a surveillance state is not power and I wonder if you were—either of you two would have thoughts as to what is power and what does true ownership look like? You know, is it possible? We are getting questions about the best web platforms for creating community in a positive way … Wood: I think it’s really important as Ayesha was saying that yeah, suggesting which is like that even though in spite of all of this distribution of agency, that the—like still and this is really, really important, like still the centers of power are still really the same, like the police are the police and the government is the government, right? And but then with this, I always think of this thing from 2010 that was kind of like a weird pilot project, maybe people might have heard of this in the UK that David Cameron did called Big Society, which is kind of a strange thing for one of the conservatives to do. Provan: There’s no such thing as society. Wood: But then you flip it. Provan: There is such a thing as big society. Wood: But then you flip it and you make it bigger, so now after his predecessors. Provan: Zero times 100. Wood: Yes, exactly that. There is no such thing as society, suddenly now there is, no, there is society and there’s a big one, but what was it? There is basically a kind of conversion of the functions of government into a social network, it was like the welfare state turned into Facebook where you know, rather than having schools and hospitals and these kind of like silly old-­‐fashioned things, right, you have the government functions as you know, where also the government has to give resources, then you start to—– the government actually tried to kind of like roll back its role from a supporting—something that supports with resources and supports as a kind of like weird telephone operator that basically patches people together, so it administers to like big website and it was a pilot project, I don’t think it was actually implemented but I think he was kind of testing the waters to see how wacky things could possibly get with this where basically if you break your leg or something, sprain ankle and I need a doctor, they will find you a doctor, where you say if I want to learn something, I want to learn particle physics why, Big Society will find you someone in your neighborhood who can teach you about particle physics, right. La Rocco: That person always exists in one’s neighborhood. Wood: It so profoundly liquidate the traditional function of the state which is to administer and manage like the resources of the people, it converts that—it converts that so profoundly that it actually starts to become kind of—that’s then that’s Jetsons, and Manchester isn’t getting any funding from London and starts to scratch its head and says what is the contract that is holding us together if no resources are changing hands. La Rocco: It also assumes a certain privilege of who would be hooked into these networks to begin with. I mean it made me think about something I heard about, you know, how in Detroit many people have like ambulance plans like that if you were in an accident, that you have somebody that you call to take you to the hospital, because the ambulances don’t work, which is, you know, you can get a—
you can get an $8 cup of coffee, but you can’t get an ambulance. Wood: Yeah, but these are basic life functions, also, that the state performs. They can’t be deferred to—you can’t Facebook your ambulance, like, so then the why question is then how to like return to ethical questions of how power is supposed to operate, when there are all of—when the terms have changed so much, and where the terms have changed, but also the kind of the way that the ethics, the way that the ethics have changed around them. Siddiqi: I think the thing that’s changing is what types of labor and the types of labor that are making these platforms valuable, their interpretation, because I don’t think—I mean that lack of power that I was referencing was actually a reproduction of the same social vulnerabilities that people experience offline, right? So when you’re talking about public and private and racial entitlement, where power still is, and isn’t, I mean as much as these corporate platforms produce their own ideologies and condition certain behavior, Facebook especially doing just straight out experiments on its users and trying to elicit particular emotional responses and making various industries increasingly independent so it’s not just your DIY project that’s dependent on say Instagram censorship rules or say if WordPress decides to shut down one day and the work that you may have been putting on there for years disappears, etc., it’s also the sense of entitlement to ownership we also practice as individuals and who we’re taught to expect to feel power over and so as much as different types of people are using these platforms, they are not at all in the same boat and by this I’m talking about neither obvious examples, a woman online has a very different experience than a man. A woman talking about American foreign policy and she is wearing a hijab in her avatar has a very different experience online than anyone else. A lot of American foreign policy pundits who are white and/or male, they’ll have their name or something in their Twitter bio in Arabic script it’s like a popular trend to do. And it’s so funny to see that when it’s such a like, you know, bullshit hipster gesture, and all of the people for whom, I mean of—again, like a person of color’s experience online is conditioned by being a person of color. So as much as there is a new distribution of agency, the social vulnerabilities are the same, and the storytelling and the ability to own narratives by producing them yourself from within your own community for your own community, makes more salient the things that are going to make you a target, and so your racial, national background, your sexual orientation, and so that’s what, as much as we call out the corporate seats of power, we—it’s useful to also recognize the ways in which we participate in those power dynamics, because again, we are also doing, that the entitlement we may feel over the image of—you know, I was thinking about this on the last podcast I recorded was about this, the entitlement we feel over black images, right? So when you look at the trends of sharing—
communicating via memes and GIFs and vine, right? So you are how many times has the reaction GIF or the meme in that conversation been of a black entertainer, from say a reality show or a rapper? And the particular entitlement of that culture product, you know, by everyone else, that’s not really new, that’s part of a tradition in American culture, and is replicating like very longstanding historical relationships to—who the producer of culture are and who are the people that ultimately gain the benefits of it. And just thinking about how much that entitlement to the way we use, you know, pop cultural icons as personal avatars, the very grim juxtaposition of that to, you know, the country in which that’s the norm, we don’t have a comparable ability to, you know, empathize with that black pain. I mean if we did we wouldn’t have as many police shootings as we do, right? So it’s this, I think so many of the things that digital culture makes visible are existing facets of our society and culture. And what’s new now is our ability to more effectively intervene in them because it’s not just a racist newspaper, right? It’s us on Twitter. And I think in carrying that relationship to the circulation of imagery and the ways that we talk about these things is just as useful as calling out the, you know, ideologies and practice by the corporate platform owners. La Rocco: Should we take questions. Provan: Yeah, I mean maybe that we could talk briefly about something else, but I’m just curious about how—hike, we could talk about the circulation of images and words in terms of how in a concrete situation power might be exercised. I mean I think it might be useful to talk about what, Olga was describing earlier in terms of the Tania Bruguera situation because it’s a very straightforward metric for figuring whether or not anything that we do has anything to do with what we can do with exercising power in a meaningful way. Of in this case we can’t know what will happen in the coming weeks and months, but that is, I think that to me is at least a more tangible, if not more meaningful way of understanding what kind of power we might possess and whether it’s worth anything. Siddiqi: Well, I also want to use the same thing you did in your presentation, you made a really great point about not treating community as a—like to mean exclusively like positive. To have positive connotations and I would want to do the same thing with power, right? It’s not that these things don’t have power, it’s that they have a particular power and it may or may not be used for good. So think of the “Je Suis Charlie” phenomenon and Charlie Hebdo and how that became and people who were unaffiliated tweeting their alliance with an outlet that was producing commentary that aligned with a longstanding active state agenda and the ways in which, you know, so many—so much of the theater of solidarity and protest, that “Je Suis Charlie” and Charlie Hebdo and the response produced to me, to me it very clear the through lines I think you alluded to before, between borders of state and culture and marketing and I mean I’m thinking that among the responses was all of these various heads of state standing in solidarity with this racist publication and saying that the way that—and the way that the stakes were, you know, incorrectly framed to be that of freedom of speech. Wood: Freedom of expression. Siddiqi: Exactly who was advantaged in that conversation, because the participants spanned various seats of power or lack thereof, but the actions were firmly within — Provan: That’s why I think it’s useful to talk about people organizing everything and speaking in order to achieve a very specific end. Rather than in order to, you know, enrich a spectacle of solidarity. KEYNOTE:
James Bridle Paul Schmelzer: In introducing today’s keynote speaker, I’d like to begin with a quote. “The cloud renders geography irrelevant. Until you realize that everything that matters, everything that means you don’t die is based, not only on which passport you possess, but also on a complex web of definitions of what constitutes that passport. In the new battles over citizenship, those definitions are constantly under attack.” That’s James Bridle, London-­‐based artist, writing in his Walker Artist Op-­‐Ed last July on how the response to terrorism by some governments means the redefinition of the terms surrounding citizenship, including in the UK and elsewhere, full deprivation of citizenship for individuals with suspected links to terrorism. In the ten months since he wrote that, Bridle has continued his examinations of the evolving nature of citizenship, and just yesterday he launched a new project that continues exploring the relationship between citizenship and the cloud. Co-­‐commissioned by The Space and created for Southbank Centre’s Web We Want Festival, Citizen Ex, available at citizen-­‐
ex.com, is software that allows you to see your “algorithmic citizenship.” That is, it shows you all the places your browsing data passes through whenever you use the Internet. That is, countries governed by laws, including some that might involve your data—and you don’t know that you’re passing through those locales. As the project website states, Citizen Ex calculates your algorithm citizenship based on where you go online. “Every site you visit counts as evidence of your affiliation with a particular place and added to your constantly revised algorithmic citizenship. Because the Internet is everywhere, you can go anywhere, but because the Internet is real, this also has consequences.” Citizen Ex is a timely example of the ways Bridle’s work, which encompasses art-­‐making, criticism, and writing for outlets including the Guardian, Wired, Domus and his own site, booktwo.org, engages with the contemporary. I use that term deliberately. At dinner last night with James, the term “political art” came up in relationship to his work, and it’s not a term that he prefers to use, but you can see why people do. He has addressed through his projects things like surveillance and technology all the way to the US Covert Drone Program. One of his projects you may have heard of Dronestagram. It basically simulates a drone’s-­‐eye view, pairing Google Earth images of locations of verified drone strikes with news accounts on those kills. To my mind it’s something of a disruptive technology, because it’s this place where the rest of us are putting photos of our dinner, or kids, or our cats, or our parties, and here he’s reminding us of what our governments might be doing in these covert drone wars. He simply says he’s responding to the world around him and the one we live in through creative means—rather than dealing with political art. It’s just the world we live in, it’s his sensibility that he uses in approaching this world. And that’s what our next panel is about. “Artists as Cultural First Responders” is about how artists are using the Internet and technology to respond to this moment through art, through writing, through platforms of other publications and institutions. I’m not sure that’s all he’s going to talk about in his keynote because he’s doing double duty: he’ll be on the following panel, and he’s also giving the keynote right now. I welcome him to our stage. Thank you. James Bridle: Hi. Thank you very much for having me, thank you very much for that invitation, thank you very much to the Walker for bringing me all the way here, it’s my first time at the Walker in Minneapolis in Minnesota, and it’s wonderful. And thank you all very much indeed for being here. I’m not really gonna talk about any of that. Which is weird because it’s exactly what I came here to talk about, but the last six months, year, I’ve been really focusing on my own work, I’m just making stuff and putting it out there which I’m very lucky enough to be able to do at this moment in time and I haven’t actually been writing too much about it or actually engaging like with criticism outside my own work, but I’m both like a bit bored at giving like artist talks, even though I will do a bit of that, and also kind of really wanted to respond to a lot of the stuff that’s been discussed over the last 36 hours which means I’ve basically been writing this on the fly. So it may be all over the place. It’s definitely going to be discursive at times I’ve felt like I’ve been live blogging the other speakers who have been really excellent. I just don’t want to repeat it. That’s just enough apologies now so I’m going to get on with it. I’m heard as you heard a writer and a journalist and an artist and a number of other things. I feel like I’m mostly speaking as an artist because it gives you that permission to speak about other things or to speak in a slightly different register but I want to talk to my colleagues in criticism and journalism as well because I think we’re all in this together to use a to use a horribly tory phrase. No, I’m just going to shut up and talk. Let’s start with these. Has everybody seen these? Has anyone seen these? If you spend a lot of time on Google Maps like I do, you may have encountered these things. They are—you will see them as images. They’re planes in flight. But they’re specifically captured in a particular way. I call them the “rainbow planes,” and I found them as I was kind of hunting around Google Maps for various reasons and then I kept finding more of them and then I started actively looking for them because I think they are extraordinary, they are beautiful and strange and emblematic of I’m not entirely sure what, or I wasn’t but they spoke to me in a certain kind of way so I figured you should just obsessively collect them and keep talking to them and try and work out what on earth is going on here and it took a while and it ended up getting to by various round about works work I was doing in satellite imaging in other contexts and stuff but ended up getting there and what the rainbow plane is it’s an artifact of satellite mapping. It’s a glitch. But like all true glitches, it’s not just a mistake it’s kind of an opportunity to look through into the underlying systems that produce this image, because it is a glimpse into—it’s not a mistake, it is a fundamental result of the way in which this image is created and constructed. The rainbow plane is—what happens is satellites don’t have cameras on them, right? We’re getting increasingly used to satellite imagery, it’s kind of extraordinary, it’s kind of amazing, you can take out your phone and scan through satellites and scan the entire earth ‘s surface it’s kind of like having a superpower but we’re not looking at photographs. What you’re looking at here is an image that’s constructed out of data. Satellites have a sense about them that records radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum and it extends beyond human version, as well. They’re recording the infrared and the ultraviolet. They’re seeing in wider spectra than we are and they record red, green and blue separately when they make these data images and when they reconstruct those images for humans to be able to view them, they overlay the red green and blue and so occasionally you find in these satellite images these artifacts which are produced by fast moving objects because the red, green, and blue have been kind of stuttered by the fact that this plane is flying very, very fast indeed. And so when this image is constructed, it leaves this extraordinary kind of rainbow. But in that, you can see how the satellites see, right? It’s a reconstruction of the world through the eyes of the machines. It’s a moment at which we can see how technology has a way of seeing the world. But it’s also to me emblematic of something that we’re trying to learn from it. Something that the network is kind of trying to teach us, which is a new way of saying alongside or through or within those technologies. This is like John Berger again, right? We were there yesterday and I want to pick up from where from what Ben Davis was saying about, because I think it’s really important we figure out what’s changed since these kind of statements were made. Berger made these statements 40-­‐odd years ago and even this, which is right there at the beginning of Ways of Seeing. In Dziga Vertov’s film called The Man with a Movie Camera was made 40 years before that and he’s already talking about this kind of machine vision. He’s already trying to understand what’s changed in this kind of human vision of the world and what it means for us and so if we’ve got anything new to talk about here at a conference which is entitles Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, then the key to that has to be in the second half of the sentence, right? It has to be changed what’s changed in those 40 years. And Berger was talking about the eye a lot. But I want to talk about networks and the difference in images that is produced not just in distribution and assemblage but out of the way of construction and the way that construction is kind of shared now amongst many of us. Ben asked the question yesterday about how many people have seen Ways of Seeing. How many have read it? How many have seen the film? Thank you, and Berger’s thing of constantly looking deeply into paintings and seeing the details and stuff. So how many of you when you go to the galleries, really peer at the surface paint? Thank you. How many of you have viewed source on a web page? That’s a good number and how many people write code? Still, that’s a good number. That’s really good. I’ll be honest that was better than I was hoping for. It’s unfair that last question I’m biased towards it because I trained as a computer scientist it’s and kind of my default position and there’s’ a lot of noise at the moment to teaching everyone to code and as if it will magically save the world. Computer science in that sense breeds a certain myopia, I believe. It can be a useful myopia, it teaches you to break the world down into structures and processes, into small discrete steps to make them understandable. That kind of analysis is kind of useful to address other large and complex systems that we may find ourselves embedded in, but I’m not sure that teaching everyone to code is the best solution. You shouldn’t have to be a plumber in order to take a shit, right? You shouldn’t have to fully understand everything. But plumbers do have a general knowledge of management of water resources which is knowledge that may perhaps be seen certainly useful to us as well and we should possibly pay attention to those fields of knowledge. I want to go into a little Bergeresque wonder. I want to introduce you to some friends of mine. I call them the “render ghosts.” You know them, right? They live in the unbuilt buildings all over town, you’ve seen them. I’ve been really fascinated by these images, these renders, these constructions for some time for the roles that they play in the world for the way they’re constructed and consumed. For me they’ve almost attained, particularly living in London was overrun with this stuff, they’ve basically become public art. And I’ve been kind of studying them and trying to learn their techniques and in particular I’ve become fascinated with the people in them, as well. You watch them long enough and you see these same people going about their day and becoming familiar and they’re deeply weird, these images, right? They’re supposed to be the future, this place we’re going to inhabit, but they’re full of this very odd juxtapositions and strangeness, like the potentially toxic plants which are going to fill up these privatized public spaces. They’ve always got children playing in them because it’s supposed to be about a the future, even though it’s a future that we’re never going to inhabit. And in fact they’re never going to inhabit it, either. They have to move out as soon as the buildings get built. They live in relationship to the future in just as precarious of a way as we do. And sometimes you can kind of catch them looking back out at you. Sometimes kind of hopefully, sometimes slightly more fearfully, you can even watch them despite everything, falling in love. They spend a lot of time on balconies. They really love their balconies and they like to party up there. And it seems to be very important to them. But a lot of the time these images are also as I had said deeply revealing about the world. This is one of my favorite ones. This is just around the corner from my house in London where they’re happily building a new chain of designer outlet stores in one of the less lubricous parts of London and this render is overlaid on top of a real street and this gentleman on the mobile phone in the pin striped shirt is added to the real image as are the German luxury cars and the 4 wheel drive in the background and just in the background you can see an actual local slowly kind of being blurred out of existence by the overlaying of this stuff. They can also be quite strange and interestingly beautiful. This is an image by a visualization studio called Picture Plane which have become friends of mine who have taken an incredibly detailed approached to this, even in fact using for example the sky is from 18th Century landscape painting as the background to their renders of these new housing developments in south London. The care and attention they seem to put into these things, I wanted to work with them and I warranted to look at ways in which this particular approach to image making could be possibly turned to other uses. I worked with them to construct a series of spaces, and very specifically I wanted to look at spaces which weren’t made visible in other ways. The Dronestagram project which you heard before was very much a project taking an event, an occurrence, a thing that was going on in the covert drone war for which images were not available and finding those images in another context and making them available, to kind of fill in gaps in imaging when images are not provided in these circumstances, that lacuna is often you know, very revealing about the nature of the event. But of course we have the technology to address that now, we can intervene in that kind of image-­‐making process. I obtained planning documents from a number of sites that related to immigrant detention, judgment and deportation in the UK. This is an airport outside London where people are deported in the middle of the night. It’s actually a private jet terminal, so in the middle of the day you have celebrities and business people flying out and in the middle of the night they use it for deportation but it’s an entirely private place and there’s no way to take photos there but plans are available at your local department office. This is the courtroom in central London where special immigration appeals are heard. No photographs of this space are available, but it’s possible to sketch in there which is what we did. And what’s interesting to me is not just that it’s possible to recreate this image but it’s actually possible to portray this architecture. What’s interesting about particular court is it’s used for the provision of secret evidence. Secret evidence is a provision under UK law where evidence can be provided to the court without the defendant being allowed to know what evidence is being presented. A court-­‐appointed mediator is allowed to see the evidence, but the defendant nor the defense team are allowed access to it and this form of secrecy takes a form in the courtroom itself. It solidifies as architecture because you have this curtained-­‐off witness box on one side, actually a partition here which allows security personnel to watch the court without being visible from the public on the other side. So you have the infrastructure and the architecture of the place, but that is also rendered invisible and made visible to us by the technologies. Likewise you can represent various realities which we don’t necessarily have access to. And this representation is regularly denied by power. And this is that particular airport at night. This is the detention center near HeathrowAirport where people are kept. The thing that’s also odd here I think that I’m not representing the individual stories of detainees and migrants themselves as important as though stories are, because what I’m trying to address is the kind of unaccountability and kind of ungraspable vastness of the system which produces this which through me I have to talk about through architecture and infrastructure, because again, to me as a scientist I see complex agglomerations of architecture and infrastructure and I see the laws and social processes that produce them. But through this kind of process of journalistic investigation, academic research, artistic impression and the deployment of the new technologies, some possible way of seeing the world anew is made possible. Back to those figures, the render ghosts. Who are they, where do they come from? Do they know they’ve been kind of rendered into the network in this way and digitized, distributed and spread around the world. I don’t think they have, and so I wanted to tell them. And find out. So through talking to architects a lot, I found these banks of images. These are a sample sheet for one of these collections of imagery, in fact one of the very first ones, because what I discovered was that for a long time there were only a couple sets of these available. There was a particular set of a few hundred figures that had been shared around because of all the Internet almost all practicing architects architecture studios and if you looked carefully you saw the same people, like this suit guy recur endlessly and endlessly again around the streets and I’d see them also all over the world. This is that same image set called “business people.” See the bloke in the white suit at the bottom. Here he is visiting the Whitney. This was actually on the boards outside the museum and he looks like he’s about to throw himself off but he’s waiting for it. I said, I wanted to know about these people and ask them questions and understand what was going on. And so I set out to find them. And there’s a thing that—so I went to do some research about the origin of these images. This is rendersearch.com which was not successful, I discovered that they were based in Albuquerque in New Mexico, so I started running targeted Facebook ads against people who lived in this area, trying to locate them this way. I was also trying to understand this company that produced them, because they weren’t answering my calls which I thought was rude. They did once actually and then they hung up on me. And so I went to Albuquerque, and there was no one at home, but I was there, so I was running like more local newspaper ads, putting up signs, all this kind of thing. I really have no idea what I’m doing at this point, right? This is where the obsession with the network takes you is you dive really deep into it and what happens then was that I actually met a guy at a bar as you do, who turned out to be a local investigative journalist as you do, who had a load of state tax records on his phone as he did, apparently and what he told me was that in fact this company had only formed in the state subsequent to the release of the images and that they were not in fact from here at all and that—as in fact, everyone in New Mexico had been telling me since I arrived, these people are not from here, they don’t look like New Mexicans there’s something wrong in every way. So I was in Albuquerque where I’d never been before for this purpose and I’d never seen that telly show so I had no other kind of frame of reference to be here there. I was figuring out what to do so I decided to take a couple of my favorite render ghosts on a road trip. We went out into the desert, and I took them to Los Alamos which seemed like a sensible place to go if you’re trying to understand the Internet. Which is kind of essentially what I was trying to do, right? This is what a huge amount of this kind of work has been about for me is that I’m trying to build some kind of sensible and useful model of the Internet that can I use, right? We had that mention of the cloud earlier. The cloud being like this incredibly dangerous metaphor that kind of hides the operation of huge systems behind a kind of veil of like you don’t need to worry about this, it’s completely fine, even though you are engaged with it all the time and it’s not some magical distant far away place but something that surrounds us totally at all times and we’re constantly accessing and affects every moment of our lives apart from sleep but they’re trying to get in there, too. So this is what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to understand the Internet so I can operationalize that understanding and use it. And Los Alamos seemed to be a useful place to be. It’s one of the historical birthing places of this kind of thing. It’s not entirely true that the Opernet was developed in response to the development of the bomb, but the connection between military technologies, the Cold War, and previous to that kind of aiming systems that developed the computer, the Cold War development of these distributed networks, laterally things like you know kind of XBox Connect and these visional based systems that came out of warfare, they all kind of originate in this big bang at Los Alamos for me so it seemed like a useful place to go and you have realizations going out in the desert like that and you figure out things and what I figured out there was what I was looking for was not a better description of the Internet like going to a place that is kind of completely pointless because the history isn’t there, the history happened and the history is all around us and the history is something that is now becoming completely widely distributed over all of these things. The history of the bomb and just like the kind of history of the Internet but I understood that I was understanding that as a metaphor through the Internet, that my understand of the Internet actually allowed me to understand that. And thinking about how to use the Internet to understand everything else, that actually I realize I’d been trading myself as a computer scientist as a person on the Internet to actually use that understanding and apply it to lots of other things. So like—I was going to spend the rest of this talking a bit about criticism and the Internet. Which I could go that way, as well. Ten years ago, in my capacity, another previous capacity as a literary editor and a publisher I was attending a lot of publishing conferences we’ve all been there and we were all involved in a lot of the same kind of conversations that it feels like we’ve been having here. About the changes that have been wrought by these technologies and particularly by networks and it strikes me then and it strikes me again now, that this perceived crisis is not like some horrible visitation from the outside, right? It hasn’t been forced upon us by devious programmers or even in fact by large corporations that have definitely seized the ground now. But what it brings to us it a kind of a moment of clarity when we first perceived the ongoing catastrophe take my favorite things, books, and how they exist in the network. All of these publishing companies, there’s less of this now thank goodness but one of the big fears of the early predatory Internet was piracy, right? Was this horrible fear that something was being stolen from us, because it was really about that, right? Underneath all this talk about lost revenue to publishers and this kind of thing, the fear of piracy is a fear of the loss of control of the text and the meaning that kind of comes from that and the authority which stems from having control of that meaning. And it’s like kind of fear of kind of an other control of the text in many ways. And this is my favorite example of that happening, right? These are two copies of a novel collected in Peru by my friend Andrea Franckie who runs a thing called the Piracy Project, which kind of collects this sort of thing. Because Peru is at such a great distance from the central Spanish literary production, which is unsurprising still in Spain, there’s a lot of piracy in that part of the world. These are both pirated editions of a best-­‐selling novel published in Spain, and it takes a long time for it to reach the end of the supply chain, and so it gets incredibly pirated because it’s popular. These are both pirated versions and they’re also different translation, the texts differ, characters have different names in various places, like the thing has become unstable, and this is what happens, that piracy and that instability is what happens at the periphery, but the periphery is everywhere now. Like they’re still senses of gravity and that stuff but the network has shifted that relationship to some extent. But also this is what happens to all texts and what has always happened to all texts. All of them disintegrate and disperse, are written and rewritten and overwritten and become the property of those who discover them and are appropriated and re-­‐appropriated and misappropriated, nobody has control of this process and nobody has ever had control of this process. The difference that has been wrought by digital technology in this example is not that it’s destabilized the text but that it has revealed the text as always being utterly and fundamentally unstable and digital technology has given us a place to see that truly and properly for the first time. You see the same effect in online forms of knowledge production, as well, take Wikipedia, take the fact that Wikipedia articles are assembled of these agglomerations of professional and amateur writers, they can contain all kinds of inaccuracies. They never conform to this mutual point of view. But like, so what, right? What the hell ever has? I don’t believe that that was ever the case. This is a printout I made many years ago of a single Wikipedia article, right? The changes, I printed out the change log of that article. One of the brilliant things about Wikipedia is you can see every edit that’s ever been made to an article, and so actually the difference in Wikipedia and when you do that, you get a 12-­‐volume set of books which is the size of an old school encyclopedia. And this is visibly distributed system unlike these previous encyclopedias, with Wikipedia, can you pull it apart, you can see it’s previous versions, you can trace some of the IP addresses of the contributors, you can see when it’s changed by someone who works for a corporation or who’s you know, an IP address within the House of Representatives around election time. You can see when that article was hastily compiled in response to a news event or something, you can see when it’s been built up carefully over time over many kind of sources, all of that kind of stuff and all that is visible to us. It’s a creation of something that is if not totally visually and appreciably more democratized and accessible not only in terms of its writers, but in terms of its readers, as well and that’s made, again, startlingly visible to us and the construction of the web is also the construction the discussions that we have on it and even the fact that it’s co-­‐constructed by those technologies is visible to us as well. This is a list of the top 30 editors of the English Wikipedia. All the ones highlighted in yellow are bots, right? They’re software systems. 20 of the top 30 Wikipedia editors, the ones that make the most edits are software systems, they’re automated little programs that go around Wikipedia editing things, adding dates, correcting punctuation, all this kind of stuff. I’m not asserting that they’re making changes to the factual history of the world by doing this. But they are assisting us and they’re kind of working alongside us, and they are co-­‐creating with us this representation of the world. But again, because of the way in which this is done, that is kind of visible to us. The other big thing that people are upset about in the publishing world in the last decade has been like this idea of attention, right? The fact that people are you know, suddenly all turned to kind of jelly brains who aren’t paying attention anymore. This one really annoys me as if before the Internet people were all perfect students who all sat there quietly and read the book from cover to cover, and again, this is bullshit, right? And we know it is from our own experience. But yet we kind of persist in kind of complaining about this, as though it’s something that’s been produced by the technologies rather than something that’s always been with us that’s been rendered incredibly clear to us. The Internet didn’t cause it, it revealed and potentially accelerated it, as well, but that’s something that’s emerging from your latent desires, it feels like to me. And it should be said really clearly this is not true just for attention, but for opinions, as well. And I think this leads very follows very much from what Ayesha Siddiqi said earlier on that the Internet didn’t create legions of misogynists and racists and homophobes and it just turned over the rock and gave them a massively horrifically amplified voice. It’s like a Naked Lunch. You get say everything at the end of the fork. And as depressing and distressing as that is, it also makes those attitudes visible and undeniable and potentially actionable in ways that they simply weren’t before. I like this term used by the architectural theorist, Keller Easterling, which is disposition. She says that technology has a disposition, that it is encoded with certain kind of beliefs. And propensities to act in the world. But she also uses that disposition, uses a very careful analysis that uses that very kind of politics of technology to emphasize that it is something we can construct and hedge around that it is merely one kind of particular vector in the world and that if we persist in believing that we are kind of hostage to the dispositions of those technologies, then we’re just like, you know, we’re simply going to be acted upon by them rather than kind of engaging with them. And a lot of the analysis that Easterling does is this kind of analysis, which Brian referenced earlier, I think, quite well and referenced the work of Trevor Paglen which is quite close to the work that I do in his materialist Marxist analysis of the Internet which traces these kind of paths. I don’t think it’s an entirely redundant analysis for a number of reasons, because it’s not so remote and abstract now. None of this stuff is. It’s not about noting that these cable lines really exist or that they follow pretty much the patterns of colonialism and connecting the nations back to the sites of old Imperial power. The presence of that information on the network makes it far far more addressable, understandable, it’s possible to link it more directly to what’s happening in the world than it was before. I kind of have to believe that, because otherwise we have to just kind of have to junk the last 50 years of technology, right? Learning about how images and data systems work and networks actually function also for me permit forms of critique. These systems, regardless of who directly bit them, not ignoring that, because it’s important to know a little bit how, but understand that they exist in the world and that they’re here to educate us, not merely to be opposed, we can choose what to learn from these metrics, right, the negative reviews, the response, the audience to those kind of stuff. We can choose what to learn from those results. We can redesign them to better suit our needs. We can also avoid them in ways that were not possible before. Like we need these kind of examples in order to provide our counterexamples and this visibility of systems, not necessarily of people, is incredibly important. I’m sorry to pick on Hyperallergic here, but after all the discussion of ad networks yesterday I kind of had to check on this and it’s really important to remember that this is the reality of the funding and support models and networks which we’re discussing whenever we talk about how stuff gets paid for on the Internet. They’re predicated on surveillance networks being you can’t have ad revenue on the Internet without these kind of networks and I think there’s a parallel to a kind of James C. Scott analysis of legibility when it comes to previous forms, institutional and state arts funding because we all know we’ve had to conform in certain ways in describing our work in order to receive certain fundings or we’ve had to present in certain accepted forms of art in order to get this and this is just a more insidious form of that kind of conforming. Conforming as a kind of surveillant body as kind of identifiable and trackable. So on top of these networks we built these other systems that would make that surveillance and those actions visible in turn. Because something critical about these technologies is that they cut both ways. This power is not new but it’s no longer invisible. It has to be written down in order to be enacted by the machines. We’ve been training ourselves a mode of analysis that comes from the network and it’s increasingly impossible to ignore the deep tectonic underpinnings of these structures and that’s precisely why we’re capable of having discussions about things whether it’s zombie formalism or racial and gender representation. It’s why we’re talking about floundering materially short of money, short on self-­‐
esteem, because those things have been foregrounded by the actions of these technologies, and they’re impossible to ignore. As the historian Tony Judt said in a very eloquent warning to non-­‐historians and to those who said that history is over, he said, “by ignoring history you’re like a person walking around an old house, you can pretend the rooms are empty empty but you’ll keep bumping into the furniture.” You can’t pretend ignorance about this stuff anymore. The same is true of the network and the reality it presents to us. The network has kind of flattened out time, it’s substantiated an addressable history and it’s here to teach us this stuff. But I kind of want to go further than that, as well, into just—I’m actually finishing well ahead of time, that’s good. I want to go further beyond that just kind of building up those kind of layers, because that’s where I’ve got to, right? That’s the kind of analysis I’ve been doing and that’s where I feel good about this kind of stuff that it’s possible to address these things and build on top of them and understand the technologies, and therefore understand the world is the precepts of that, right? But I want to go further than that into what feels like uncharted territory, because I’m trying to figure it out. Because there are deep and serious problems with that approach, as well, and on which they underlie it and they can be understood possibly through this framing of the network, as well, because it’s not enough just to point at this stuff, right? It’s not enough to point at pictures or images or aesthetics and their deployment and the material frameworks, you kind of have to go deeper, I think into the ontologies of the discussion itself. Which are also being revealed. As I say in my own work I’m kind of thoroughly guilty of this. In making the invisible visible has been the guiding principle of my work. This series of work, the drone shadows, illuminate a particular use of a technology and they make visible its inherent visibility, as well, and it tries to raise questions about why that particular form of invisibility is so pervasive, not just in politics and the technologies of politics and warfare but in the technologies that we use every day, the social technologies, the noumenal networks of the Internet itself. The danger as Ayesha pointed out earlier is that of mistaking visibility for power. It’s a really good phrase that I’m stealing already as you can note. Visibility without reconfiguring the underlying power structures is kind of just yelling, just showing off after a while, right? The difficulty I’m starting to think is we’ve also fallen into a kind of trap about how we think about those oppositions, one that has a long history but one that has been reinforced and illuminated by the technologies, because this discussion of visibility and invisibilities doesn’t just happen in the margins. It’s happening at the height of international discourse and state conversations that are actually the kind of the central issues of our time. Take the struggle that’s occurring between state and non-­‐state access and privacy. The central paradox of the debate illustrated by these two delightful logos is this weird thing about how the NSA and WikiLeaks essentially share the same vision of the world, right? Both of them believe that there is some kind of central dark secret at the heart world that if we can only bring it to light it will make everything better. This is the ontology of big data, it’s the bad lesson we’re learning from the technologies. It’s this belief bounded on metrics and databases. That seems to align so closely with enlightenment ideas of just the general increases knowledge that slips through our critical defenses. It’s the bad lesson to learn, it’s the wrong lesson. It’s the opposite of the lesson of the confusion around piracy or the destabilization of text and knowledge that is what the networks are actually trying to teach us and it’s weird that we are stuck within that and a lot of that has to come from analysis para, I think, and how it’s captured the ground of this discussion very, very successfully on both sides and the problem occurs, I think, in art discussions and in art criticism, as well, in particular I think the need to kind of place artworks and events into a kind of discernible and authenticated lineage, to see everything in terms of histories and movements and manifestoes which to me is a form of sense making that have been largely discredited by the network. Even the places that criticism cannot or has no right to go, if it’s honest about its own position and capabilities. Visibility and transparency are the baseline but they’re not the goal. They’re acknowledgement to the situation but they are they’re not what we should always be striving for and to quote Tony Judt again “the job of the historian (or in this case the critic) is to take tidy nonsense and make a mess of it. An accurate mess is far truer to life than elegant untruths.” Andre Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto, which I came across the other day and struck full force by the statement made 100 years ago that we don’t seem to have learned from at all: “If in a cluster of grapes there are no two are alike, why do you want me to discuss this grape by the other, by all others. Our brains are addled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known. To make it classifiable.” I’m not saying that Surrealism is the answer now, merely noting that this sense is not new and we can reach back more than 100 years to find arguments for it engendered by not dissimilar technologically produced societal change, we just don’t seem to be very good at implementing it. And as a partial apology for quoting two straight up white men. I’ll also quote Cahun, who stated that “realities disguised as symbols, which for me, are new realities which are immeasurably preferable. I make an effort to take them at their word, to grasp, to carry out the diktat of the images to the letter.” Trust the evidence of your senses and your ideas. Trust the images and the sensations that you gain from the network because you have direct experience with this. Those things that we’re told about the authenticity is dying or the authority is not present in the network anymore or that people don’t pay attention and they’re not thinking so widely and clearly anymore, those aren’t true and we can deny them from our own experience. Stop bumping into the furniture, in short. The job of art for me is to disrupt and complicate, renew and criticize these networks by representing and building upon them. But the idea that visibility or making visible figuratively or not, is a way of solving the world is troubling. Demanding that things here make sense, fit into recognizable, even newly fashioned categories is a recipe for determinism, fakery, failure, and violence. The reason for the rise in discourse around the representation is that they directly challenge this revolutionary process. The frame cannot contain them and the center cannot hold. This is also the job of criticism. It has to make the same demands from the same position of understanding the material. I don’t see how criticism can function without making the same level of demands and responding to the same challenges as art itself. In a form of solidarity, but also for its own survival. It needs to acknowledge both its place in the network and like the network, its political position in reproducing and occasionally opposing the situation. It needs to account not for the power but the fundamental uncertainties and instabilities of a world which is not radically new, which has always been with us, but we we can no longer ignore. Thank you very much. Audience Member: Your example of the airport that’s used as both the celebrity and the detainee, deportation center, just made me think about privacy versus secrecy, and how there’s a tension between those who are allowed privacy and then those for whom secrecy is used sort of as a weapon. Just wondering if you talk about that a little bit. Bridle: Yeah—so you’re right, those ideas of privacy and secrecy, they’re not fixed things. Can’t be kind of awarded like badges and they can’t be kind of reconstructed. They’re negotiations and they’re positions that are negotiated from positions of power or otherwise. I think one of the most ubiquitous things happening around privacy online now is that it requires this huge buildup of knowledge in order to achieve it for one self and if you don’t have the knowledge or the power to kind of buy it so you’re kind of at an automatic disadvantage. But both of them privacy essentially, is the right to privacy, the right to those things is essentially the right to freedom of action, that you can do the things that you want to do. And surveillance curtails that in all kinds of ways so privacy is the thing that frees you from that. There’s a reason those things are under attack, right? There are structures that are deliberately attacking them. But those are not necessarily like addressable to single actors, particularly in these kind of very large network systems, because I get really careful when I say we built the Internet but it was largely constructed by white men in Southern California. But there are uses of the Internet to me like speak to all of our desires, that yeah, this is something that we, more generally than that, have built for us that we’re trying—that is trying to teach us something that we’re trying to understand and if the actions that it’s talking are like offensive to us, are like aggressively attacking things like our privacy, then that’s something that we’ve kind of—that aligns with other desires, that means that—I’m expressing this terribly badly, that is a kind of fundamental result of some of the other things that we wanted out of the system in different ways and it comes out not fully understanding that system? Different levels. I don’t know if that made any sense. Audience Member: Hi, I think that was a great talk. You did not meet any of the render ghosts; is that right? Bridle: No, still haven’t. I think they’re in Vegas. Audience Member: Is this continuing? Bridle: I’m planning to get there the at some point, yeah. Audience Member: I know you hadn’t really figured out but do you know what you will do with these people when you find them? Bridle: I want to ask them I’m slightly terrified obviously because it will get weird but it’s that part of that trying to understand. It’s just saying of what is your experience of this having happened to you, because at the moment they are unfairly and slightly sort of aggressively ciphers for me like of all of our experience so I don’t think it’s going to be helpful necessarily to find them and ask them that, but there’s like many of these projects, the things that you find out on the way are somewhat valuable, as well, but when I see them, I will simply ask them like did you know this was happening? Do you know you’ve been to these places and what does that mean? Audience Member: I think there’s an interesting hookup you got with Eric Crosby here if you get a chance to talk to him. He’s got something interesting, the Walker has something interesting coming in a common direction there. But I want to ask you just simply, could you connect the dots between your training as a computer scientist and how you’ve ended up in the art world? Bridle: Yeah, sure. I took computer science kind of under duress, because they don’t let you study arts and sciences properly like as a dual thing at least in the UK, you kind of have to pick one of the two worlds which is stupid and retrograde and ridiculous, but I was interested in the Internet because it seemed to be the new exciting shiny thing and it seemed to have some kind of meaningfulness and I mistakenly thought you got to be on the Internet by doing computer science which turns out to be entirely wrong. I studied artificial intelligence that turned out to be wrong, as well, but by the time I finished that I hated computers so much that I went to work in traditional book publishing, which is why I was at those publishing conferences and it’s why I was yelling at those publishing conferences because it seemed that everyone there was also there because they hated computers and was afraid of the Internet and seemed to see computers as being kind of and the Internet as being inimitable culture and was kind of destroying it and in reaction to that I started to get bag back into technology again and I became like the E-­‐book guy and going to these conferences and yelling at people that maybe they should not be afraid of the Internet because it was quite important but specifically I got interested in what was happening to books in that process. Like, what does it mean for them to to become digital? What does that do to the book? You know, how does it become kind of ephemeralized, where do our experiences of literature kind of reside when you can’t shut the book and put it on the shelf and there’s so much of that bound up in culture and our own experience of it that the books just need an extraordinary place to study that but then you get what happens to the literature, as well, what happens to the form of that, as well, and you know, these become places in which to study the effects of the network. Sorry, when I say the network, I mean like the Internet and us, like the complete thing. Like the effect of that on culture and therefore on us. That’s just where I was studying it and because there weren’t things to point at, I would start making things, like those Wikipedia books and that slowly got kind of through various routes ended up in the art world. The other thing being a project called the New Aesthetic, which was a kind of ongoing look at around why didn’t stuff look new anymore? Broadly. That was not particularly an art project, but I was using examples from all over kind of technological processes but it turned out to be a term that seemed to be incredibly useful to people in all sorts of fields, particularly in the art world where was mistakenly called a movement. But if it became something that was useful to people, then brilliant. It same a sort of self-­‐fulfilling thing in itself. There was a lacuna in the conversation that it kind of filled. That’s why I’m here today. Audience Member: I just wanted to hear the story if you have a minute, mind finding the first rainbow plane. If you can can remember the first time you actually came across it? Bridle: No. I can’t remember. I spent a lot of time on Google Maps. Like a lot. It’s kind of the default thing to go out and search for. So, yeah, I really can’t. The moment I realized what it was was when I actually came out of the Drone Shadows Project, because I—there’s a weird thing about the drone shadows, which is that they’re these huge physical full-­‐size installations that take a full day to install so that I can photograph them and put a picture on the Internet because that’s where they get seen and I’m completely fine with that so they are precursors to digital images as much as physical installations which is not uncommon these days and I did one in DC a couple of years ago and I got a satellite picture of DC. It cost about $400 to buy satellite imagery and even then it turned out it wasn’t like high res enough to be able to pick up my drone shadow. But when they deliver satellite imagery it comes in this arcane image, it comes in these different layers, and it turns out those different layers are actually the different, the results from the different sensors, so if you calibrate it right you figure out one of them is the red layer and one of them is the green layer and the blue layer but there’s also a layer that’s entirely clouds because they just use a very narrow frequency that doesn’t penetrate water so there’s a whole set of satellite imagery that’s just pictures of clouds so I had to learn how to process satellite imagery. Not quick all the time but in doing that I was I was like, ohhhh, that’s what this thing is, and that’s always a good thing. So that’s the story. Marisa Mazria Katz, Creative Time Reports Creative Time. So I’ve been with them for four years. And you know, there was something very natural you could say, inevitable about launching a platform for artists to weigh in on news at Creative Time. It’s an organization that has been commissioning artists to engage with urgent social and political issues since its founding four decades ago. So for instance, I like to look at this project. It’s a real inspiration for Creative Time Reports. So this is Gran Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Greed And Indifference Do. The Creative Time project was produced in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States. The political art action appropriated advertising and media strategies to spread information about AIDS and its social ramifications to a vast audience by pairing the piece’s message with an image of three interracial couples, both same sex and heterosexual, kissing, the image appeared on postcards that were circulating through mass mailings and on posters affixed to New York City buses. So how many of you know Creative Time, show of hands? OK. So for the very few that don’t, just a little bit of history. I want to talk about what our mission is. Which really underscores that artists are important to society, that artists should be weighing in on the times in which we live, and that public places, and public spaces are places for free expression and creativity. Now, with all of this in mind, Creative Time Reports genesis came about when our artistic director and president Ann Pasternak began asking questions. Questions like, if Creative Time believes the idea that artists matter in society, and if we want them to impact how we think about today’s most pressing issues, what are the public spaces that would truly magnify their voices? Where should they be participating? Where is public dialogue happening? And the answer we arrived to was online. So we thought now if we’re going to work in this vein, it entailed expanding our definition of public space, beyond shared physical spaces, and entering into a dialogue with news media. So we incubated this idea for a full year before the site’s launch in October 2012 and we decided it was going to be established and rested on several pillars, first that we would work with artists all over the world. And this really entailed me leaving my desk, so you know, every month or so I was in another country and several of which were you know, Tunisia Hungary, the United Arab Emirates, and Kenya. This wasn’t just to meet potential contributors but also to engage what does it project like this mean what does it mean for an artist to weigh in on the news? Than they confirmed early suspicions that a monolithic approach just wouldn’t work. The pieces we featured had to be as wide-­‐
ranging in form subject and language as the contributing artists were diverse. It also meant cultivating a deep sensitivity to geo political situations that have the potential to make our artist correspondents vulnerable. For instance, if an artist wished to remain anonymous, we pledged that we would hide his or her identity. So this was one of the first pieces that we did with an artist that made such a request and this piece was published on the eve of the 2013 elections in Iran. We also knew that if we were going to successfully weigh in on the news we had to be timely and we had to publish pieces that we were certain would align with the news cycle. So how do we, a staff of more or less two, sometimes three, you know, compete with megalithic media sites? We came up with a few strategies. First, we wanted to always stay abreast of upcoming events that have the foreseeable potential for life-­‐altering consequences, like the 2013 Kenyan elections which came 5 years after a vote that sparked violence resulting in over 1,000 deaths. We also wanted to unearth approaching anniversaries that resonate often bitterly with those who mark them like the 20th anniversary of NAFTA or the one-­‐year anniversary of hurricane Sandy. It also meant consistently taking on issues that are significant, no matter the month, like global warming, race, surveillance or immigration. We would ask ourselves, which artists are most poised as Howard Zinn wrote in his book, Artists in Times of War, to think outside the boundaries of permissible thoughts and dare to say things no one else will say. The second critical component of Creative Time Reports was cultivating partnerships with major publications that would then co-­‐
publish our pieces, thereby distributing artist personal perspectives and critical interventions to thousands or even millions of readers. So our first such partnership was with Foreign policy magazine which was based in Washington, D.C. and the occasion was the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca undertaken by Muslims as one of the five pillars of Islam. The photo essay was by the Saudi artist Ahmed Mater, who showcases the rapid transformation of a sacred city now flooded with multimillion dollar real estate developments and these are just some other photos from the photo essay. This is a hotel that was recently built that overlooks the Kaabah. This is a gas station that he often frequents or sees on his way home to Jeddah. A year later, one of our more memorable piece, David burn’s op ed on the effects of soaring, sorry, what’s what it looked like in foreign policy. David Burn’s op ed on the effects of soaring rents on creative life in New York. Went viral through our partnership with the Guardian and what was amazing about this afterwards is that the Guardian asks us to become part of their comment network, which means that we basically are in constant dialogue with them about upcoming pieces that we’re about to publish and very often they will take them and republish them. So since for foreign policy we’ve partnered roughly with 2 dozen publications including Al Jazeera America. This was with a story about a photographer who’s been documenting the lives of migrants who’ve moved from all parts of China to Beijing and live in bomb shelters beneath buildings, often illegally, and then we’ve also worked with the New Yorker. This is Sylvia Plachy photo series, images that she took from the first Gulf War. So aligning ourselves with such outlets we initially released content as responses to the news. But this was hard for us, because it left us nipping at the heels of a fluctuating media cycle rather than determining our own publishing rhythm. So the shift in our strategy kind of came about, in 2013 with an artist we’ve all been mentioning today, with Trevor Paglen. He approached us with the idea of photographing the National Security Agency and other US intelligence agencies. So the project required a tremendous amount of legwork. Even when we secured clearances from each agency, which was the National Geospatial Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office in addition to the NSA. We still had to find a helicopter pilot who was willing to fly above these institutions. One of which was located in a restricted flight zone. So I accompanied Paglen on the shoot and created a short film that, together with the text written by the artist, explains the impetus behind the project. The piece that resulted—it’s called Overhead—was co-­‐published with the Intercept which was founded by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. So I’m going to show a little film about this. It’s the one that I was just mentioning it’s about 3 minutes long and it’s so much of what Creative Time Reports is about is we step out of the way of the artist within we let them speak, so I felt it was important that you hear a little bit about how this all came about from Trevor directly. If you could play the film, please. Trevor Paglen (on video): One of the things that is happening in society right now that I think is quite dramatic is a real shift in the way that we understand what is a relationship between the state and citizens, what is the relationship between the state and people in general, and that is something that’s really changing as a result of new kinds of technologies that have been developed, new ways of surveilling people, and new ways of storing data, quite frankly, and so I guess that’s where my interest in these institutions comes from, is just trying to understand how they’re influencing the rest of the world and to try to help develop a vocabulary, a kind of visual and cultural vocabulary that we can use to begin talking about this kind of thing. It’s very difficult to talk about something that’s so abstract, so I feel like part of my job is to try to point at something, to try to make an image that can be a reference point for a larger conversation. When we imagine organizations like the NSA or the CIA or the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, I think we tend to think about them as being very separate from the rest of the state and very separate from other civic institutions, and to a certain degree that’s true. These are secret agencies they have classified budgets; most everything that they do is classified. At the end of the day, however, these are not so dissimilar from your local library, and we have no problem going to the local library and saying what policies we want, what hours we want them to be open, have something to say about what the rules are. And we don’t feel that same sense of ownership over the agencies of the intelligence community and I think we should. What I hope is that these images will be first of all helpful to people to just try to wrap their heads around what some of these agencies are, to just point to them and acknowledge the fact that they’re there, that they exist, that they’re doing work. Beyond that, I hope that they can contribute in some small part to a wider cultural vocabulary that we can use to try to see these institutions, to try to understand them, to try to think about what it is that they do. And to try to think about the effect that they have on the society around them. Mazria-­‐Katz: So this piece debuted as I mentioned before with the intercept, but it came on the day that it launched, it was a really big moment for us to be part of this endeavor. And there were—the ripple effects were just staggering and we really took note you know, so in addition to the press coverage that the project got, Paglen’s images have illustrated stories about surveillance in newspapers and TV broadcasts around the world. Human Rights Watch used his photo on the cover of a damning report on US surveillance and the journalist Tom Engelhardt’s book, Shadow Government, used the image for its cover. So realizing that our most impactful pieces are often the ones that take the most time to conceive and execute, we recalibrated our approach to how and when we published. As a result of this thinking, we slowed down on how often we published and in a sense, we found ourselves working more along the lines of Creative Time, ensuring that our artists are grounded in communities they cover, to avoid the ubiquitous art world and media world in general pitfall of parachuting in to report on a crisis and leaving before any substantive work has been done. The slower pace essentially allows us to work with more integrity, to fact check all the more rigorously and take time to massage ideas that are still forming. Simultaneously, we’ve cultivating new paths for expanding our out reach and Creative Time Reports added several regional editors this past year, from Istanbul to Nairobi to Vancouver, we see these editors as our eyes and ears in cities around the world. Not only bringing new artists contributors on board, but also deepening our sensitivity to local conditions. The first such piece we did was with our editor Sheyma Buali who is based in London, Sheyma helped us usher in this piece from Lebanese cartoonist, Karl Sharro, just days after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Creative Time Reports strives to present artists engaging with pressing issues in an expanded range of forms punctuating news feeds and home pages around the world, with unexpected stories and images. We hope that our signature mix of art, activism and journalism will become an increasingly visible and trusted source for unconventional forms of expression with real political impact. Thank you. Dan Fox, frieze So, I’d like to begin by playing dumb. I’ve been worrying about this phrase “artists as cultural first responders” ever since the invitation to take part on this panel arrived. Worried because, I’ll admit, I didn’t really understand it. I turned it over in the light, tried to gauge the weight of it. I tried to work out what it was made from. I sensed that it might be something about artists as citizen journalists, perhaps, or Trojan Horse activists bravely storming the bastille of social media. But still, my initial sense was that it made me feel uncomfortable. It sounded—and here’s where I have to apologize to my lovely hosts at the Walker—it sounded melodramatic. For some reason I could not help but read the term “first responder” literally. Artists, vital though they are in our society—crucial though they are to our understanding of each other, to making the world a more interesting place—are not paramedics, they’re not firefighters, coastguards, or law enforcement officials. (Although some paramedics, firefighters, coastguards or law enforcement officials may well be artists.) A painting of a fire engine is not going to put out the blazing inferno engulfing an apartment block or rescue a cat stuck up a tree. A 3D-­‐printed sculpture of your left hand isn’t going to dig survivors out from the rubble of an earthquake or taser an innocent man. I could have pressed the curators for more clarity, but instead I decided to consult higher authorities. According to the United States Homeland Security Presidential Directive No. 8: “The term “first responder” refers to those individuals who in the early stages of an incident are responsible for the protection and preservation of life, property, evidence, and the environment […] as well as emergency management, public health, clinical care, public works, and other skilled support personnel (such as equipment operators) that provide immediate support services during prevention, response, and recovery operations.” Now, I know it seems willfully obtuse and pedantic to continue pursuing the literal meaning of this term “cultural first responder” but in doing so I discovered that the exercise of trying to find parallels between the real-­‐world definition of “first responder” and this creative context began to raise some intriguing questions. First of these might be about “protection and preservation”: is that what artists really do? What does it mean if “the interplay between platform and content” (to quote the description of this panel discussion) is a question of “prevention and recovery” rather than innovation, say, or critical intervention, or creative destruction. What if—to come at this from an extremely paranoid angle—artists are not the “first responders,” but the emergency incident itself, and that the “first responders” are not nice, cuddly creative individuals but those involved in the actual development of new technology platforms, plundering methodologies from art in order to monetize them, turn them into some time-­‐swallowing new app? Let’s say the artists are the responders. What incident might they be responding to? The Homeland Security directive refers to the “early stages of an incident.” This is something that other people during the course of the conference have already spoken about, so excuse me for repeating it. Given the topic of “the digital age” that frames this conference, we can assume on a grand historical perspective “the incident” to be the bracing Internet revolution we’ve been living through for the last 15 to 20 years. If that’s the incident, then it was only a small handful of artists that rushed to the scene at the “early stages,” and—until recently,—they were quickly abandoned. Think, for instance, about how quickly the art world in the early 2000s became embarrassed of 1990s “net art” and “media lounges” in museums. Think too, how the art world for a long time remained insulated from many of the changes being brought to the arts at large by the forces of social media and file-­‐sharing, and essentially remained analogue in what it produced. In a 2011 essay for frieze magazine, because I’ve got to get the advertisement in there somewhere, curator Lauren Cornell described how “unlike other industries, such as music and publishing, the art world wasn’t forced to react to cultural shifts wrought by the Internet because its economic model wasn’t devastated by them. The quality of Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), for instance, isn’t dependent on YouTube votes or the extent to which it circulates virally, and nor can one download and install a BitTorrent of a Rachel Harrison sculpture. The principles that keep the visual arts economy running—scarcity, objecthood and value conferred by authority figures such as curators and critics—make it less vulnerable to piracy and democratized media.” (I would like to qualify that slightly, by making clear that we’re speaking in broad brushstrokes here. Technology changes, and will surely come and bite the analogue arse of artists sooner or later. The stickier reality is that what we call “the art world” means many things to many people, and your experience of its conditions differs depending on where you are positioned in relation to it in terms of geography, economics, race, gender and sexuality.) But back to the topic. At risk of plumbing the depths of my own crass literalism even further: what does it mean, then, to entertain the idea that in recent years artists have not proven themselves to be “cultural first responders,” because there was no urgency for them to be so, but maybe “second” or even “third responders”? Maybe artists should not be “first responders” anyway. There’s something a little self-­‐
aggrandizing about assuming artists should be on the front line. An artist’s work may well be more valuable in the space of reflection, in mulling things over, assessing the situation across a longer period of time. On the front line, they might just get in the way. We also need to define what we mean by artists. Visual artists are the only creative workers who use the word “art” in the title of their own profession—writers, actors, critics, dancers, musicians, designers, film directors; they’re all artists too, but the appellation tends to get owned by visual artists—a bit like the way the country of “America” takes the name of two continents and owns it for itself. As we’re in a big institution which dedicates a lot of what it does to the visual arts, I assume it’s visual artists to whom we’re referring in this conference but I think it’s artists in the broadest sense whom we should be thinking about here. This is a broad generalization again, but conversations in the visual arts sometimes have a tendency to refer to other creative disciplines as if they exist as pick’n’mix sources of inspiration, or areas for visual artists to study occasionally in order to “critique” them, as if only artists are capable of having deep insights into what other people do. Indeed if the incidents to which creative people are responding are the technological and concomitant social changes brought by the Internet, then maybe it’s musicians, publishers, writers and filmmakers we should be looking to as the “first responders,” for it’s their means of making a living, of distributing and valuing their work, that have really drastically altered in the past decade and a half—they should be here at this conference because we’re all in this together. That said, a part of me can’t help but think that to call any artists “cultural first responders” is to buy into an older Romantic myth of the artist as seer, soothsayer, oracle. “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths”, as Bruce Nauman put it sarcastically. But words associated with the arts also have slippery meanings today, changing valences. For instance, in our lifetimes, the word “creative” has migrated from being a nice, friendly adjective into a noun, a common job title in large technology businesses developing platforms that many of us—artists or otherwise—use daily. What does that mean when we ask who gets to set the agenda for the “interplay of platform and content,” or talk about “media inventors who create altogether new modes of storytelling, makers who use online means to critique institutional power?” Some of the more powerful “media inventors” and “makers” are deeply embedded in the very institutions that need critiquing—not museums and galleries but government agencies, Silicon Valley corporations and tech start-­‐ups. They are the ones spinning new modes of storytelling about the world, positioning themselves as “disruptors” whose “creative technologies” are going to make the world a better place. I could be wrong, or simply stuck in my own little corner of the art world, which is quite possible, but I don’t see that many visual artists or arts writers making entirely new communications platforms that will revolutionize how you watch video art or call your grandma on her birthday. That might shift generationally, as more people understand how to take control of the engine mechanics, rather than being stuck with the given functionality of the software offered to us by the tech industry. Or maybe—looking around at how many of us are glancing at our various devices in the room and—sorry, I’ve lost my place—using platforms designed by technology companies they have no dialogue with or control over—“cultural first response” is nothing more than trolling conference speakers on Twitter like a child sniggering at the back of the class. At times I feel that the best “first response” might be to switch off your devices, throw them out and go live off the grid. We don’t all have to be making art that engages with technology; it’s still fine to make a painting. You can still write art criticism using all the tools that tech provides, but it’s still an option to write a long essay and publish it in a book made from paper. The idea of a “first responder” implies responsibility and authority. These days we’re all reviewers, we’ve all got an opinion about that exhibition, TV show, restaurant. But that assumes certain freedoms. I know artists who do not live in countries such as the US, and this is something Marisa spoke about very eloquently, artists who live in countries where being a “first responder” is impossible for reasons of censorship or harshly conservative cultural attitudes. There are critics who are more worried about being arrested the next day than whether they should accept a flat fee or be paid a dollar a word for their exhibition picks of the week. So we come back to the issue of second or third response. A second or third response might mean building a second or third layer of meaning, of encoding, onto what an artist makes, and that could be for reasons of security as much as anything. (Think, for instance, of how playwrights living under the Soviet Union used surrealism or science fiction in order to talk about their political situation.) Secondary or tertiary response might also mean taking a step back, responding slowly. The speed of opinion in the digital age demands instant response, instant punditry to news events, and the arts aren’t insulated from that. I’ve been working as a critic since 1999 and in that time I’ve felt the pull of the Gs, seen the pedal hit the metal; I have to get my review of the new Whitney Museum, say, or Venice Biennale, published within nano-­‐seconds of the doors opening; there is now an assumption is that art critics have to go at the same speed as news reporters, sports journalists and gossip columnists. But the one question we don’t ask often enough is “what speed” should be of the essence? A reflective review written slowly, published a couple of months after the event, can be just as valuable than the snappy one published in the heat of the moment. (As Yeats observed, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.”) Life doesn’t reveal itself to us all at once, and neither does art. Making things—whether it’s a piece of online art, an essay, a movie or a dance—takes time and there is value in refusing to live in the fast lane. Let’s quickly remind ourselves of the legal U.S. government definition of “first responder”: they are “responsible for the protection and preservation of life, property, evidence, and the environment.” Is the question we should be asking ourselves not one about making the new but valuing the old? As the conversations we’ve seen over the last two days have demonstrated, there is a sense of embattlement amongst some of us. The general tenor of the conversations this weekend has been that we are trying to protect and preserve something; striving to preserve imaginative, thoughtful, constructive responses to culture; defending a space in which you can live a life of the mind, a life of the creative hand, from the douchebags who have turned the world into such a harsh economic environment. On the other hand we need to ask what is worth protecting and preserving that doesn’t just shore up all the old structures. If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to swerve sharply off the main road for a moment and head in the direction of big, clunky, boulder-­‐like metaphors and some hastily conceived ideas. Just lately—and because this is the sort of nonsense that fills my mind—I’ve been thinking about a movie, made for TV in 1985, called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. The film is set in a United Kingdom run by a small handful of media organization and corporations. TV sets have no “off switch,” and the corporate oligarchy monitors the personal lives and data of every single citizen through the TV, which feeds a non-­‐stop diet of reality-­‐style shows voted for by viewers. A popular journalist named Edison Carter, played by the actor Matt Frewer, has recently been employed by one of these media companies, Network 23. His job involves running around the city chasing news stories using cameras that provide a direct feed to the TV network: he is a first responder in real-­‐time—journalist and producer all wrapped up into one. Carter has discovered that the network is pushing a form of subliminal advertising called “blipverts” that cause seizures and can kill people who see them. In the course of gathering evidence he suffers an accident, running his vehicle into a low-­‐clearance sign (which, in the UK, are marked “Max Headroom,” an abbreviation of “Maximum Headroom”). Network 23 thinks Carter is a goner, but worry about their ratings, so get a young computer whizz to “download” Carter’s personality and create an artificial intelligence avatar of him to cover up the disappearance. Unfortunately for them, the avatar is broken; it stutters, glitches. The Network gets rid of it, and it falls into the hands of a local pirate TV station, who tinker with the avatar, semi-­‐fix it, and create a new kind of TV show host called Max Headroom who makes sarcastic comments against a floating backdrop of vector graphics. In the meantime, Carter awakes from his coma, and uses Max as a diversion, allowing him to ultimately expose the Network 23 honchos for the crooks they are. What’s this sudden tangent got to do with artists as cultural first responders? Well, for one thing there are the superficial parallels in the plot between our present and those 20 minutes into the future; citizen journalists, social media, uploading news straight to the network. We’re all broadcasters now. Arts criticism is a branch of arts broadcasting, but writing has always been broadcast. Secondly, in Max Headroom there’s this idea of the artist as a gremlin in the machine, a renegade that infiltrates more powerful media forces, cleverly providing a meta-­‐commentary on the system. (Following the movie, the Max character went on to host music TV shows and appear on a record with the band the Art of Noise.) It’s a romantic idea, but as I mentioned earlier, now that larger business forces use the language of the creative arts—of disruption and subversion and virality—in order to innovate new products, maybe it’s an outdated look. To be inside something is not necessarily to critique it. Printing out Instagram photos and hanging them in a gallery isn’t “making work about the Internet,” it’s just ice-­‐skating across the top of it. On November 22, 1987, two television stations in the Chicago area—WGN-­‐TV and WTTW—
experienced a “broadcast signal intrusion”; the stations were briefly hijacked by a masked figure dressed as Max Headroom, filmed in front of a rotating piece of corrugated steel, emulating the moving digital environment that Max lived in. To this day, nobody knows who perpetrated the broadcast intrusion, nor really, what he wanted. But it represented, however briefly, a situation in which the means of distribution were seized. There are obvious parallels today in hacking that I don’t have time to go into now. But this train of thought—from Max Headroom to the broadcast signal intrusion reminds me that our present relationship to the Internet is merely part of an older story of the relationship between artists and the media and screen culture. Two quick examples. Between 1973 and 1977 Chris Burden produced his “TV Commercials” – he bought advertising space on local television Through the Night Softly, Poem for L.A, Chris Burden Promo, and Full Financial Disclosure. Through the Night Softly was a performance where Burden held his hands behind his back and crawled through fifty feet of broken glass on Main Street in Los Angeles. Even earlier, in 1971, the British artist David Hall made his seven “TV Interruptions”: seven short films broadcast on Scottish TV with no explanation or contextual framing. Did anything change in the ways TV affected us? No. The traction that art has on the world is by and large small, slow, incremental. The second, third, fourth response. Finally, and maybe most importantly, when the movie was made in 1985, the technology did not exist to produce an actual A.I. avatar. (Or at least it was beyond the budget of this TV production.) When actor Matt Frewer played Max Headroom, he played him dressed in heavy latex make-­‐up and a fiberglass suit. He was flesh and blood human, using analogue technology to play a digital character. There’s something about this layering that reminds me of our present situation: your social media handle is nothing but a prosthetic, you are still flesh and blood. The digital age is still also an age of bodily functions and bodily needs. As James pointed out earlier, Internet is cables and satellite hardware. All of which is to say that is that a first response might be laughter, tears, debating with someone in person, punching them in the nose or giving them a great big kiss. Using new technology in your work does not make you a better artist nor a more interesting human being, and it’s OK if your first response is the last response. Know what to discard, and know what to preserve and protect. Thank you. Claire Evans, Terraform (VICE) Hi, my name is Claire. I want to begin with a question that I thought would be far more left-­‐field until Dan brought up Max Headroom. But the question is: what is science fiction? Many people in response to this question throw together a collection of tropes. Science fiction is outer space. Science fiction is rockets and lasers and men traveling to the corners of the universe. But that’s only the simplest way of defining and extremely complex literary and culture form. In fact, there’s something of a cottage industry, among academics, in drafting new and more comprehensive definitions of a genre that changes as quickly as our relationship to the future itself. And because it means a lot of different things for a lot of different people, a singular definition for science fiction is hard to grasp. The boundaries are squiggly, and the more granular you get with the question, the more difficult the answer becomes: Does a science fiction story necessarily have to take place in the future? Well, no, every work of fiction has some temporal relationship with the world in which it is written, and even canonical science fiction texts like Star Wars take place a long, long time ago. Does science fiction have to be rigorous in its science or technological approach? Yes, there is a culture of science fiction—“hard SF”—in which that is an important quality, but some of the greatest science fiction writers of all time flubbed the science or considered it secondary to the central problems of their work. William Gibson, for example, wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter with little to no knowledge of the Internet, and Ray Bradbury famously put air on Mars in the Martian Chronicles. If we try to define science fiction by first determining what it isn’t, we enter into an equally thorny area. Why is Slaughterhouse Five shelved under literature in bookstores, when its protagonist is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, but equally literary books by writers like Joanna Russ or Ursula Le Guin or James Tiptree Jr. are relegated to the mothballed corner of science fiction/fantasy. And if we try to define where that slash falls between science fiction and fantasy it’s even more hairy. Because if aliens and robots and far-­‐future scenarios are permitted, then why aren’t dragons and elves, etc.? The truth is, a lot of different kinds of texts qualify as science fiction, books about parallel histories and alternate realities and futures so distant they might as well be mythic or ancient. Books where there are artificial intelligences on our desktops or extraterrestrial intelligences far off in the cosmos. In my study of the genre, which is informal but lifelong, I have only found onehard and fast rule about science fiction, which I am going to try and explain to you now. Imagine a world. It can be the earth if that’s easier for you to imagine. In 99% of science fiction, it is the earth in some failed capacity. Whatever the world is, you must think of it as a starting point. It can have as tumultuous a history as you like, but, for the time being, it is a world that exists in a world of present condition, with set physics and social dynamics. Now change one thing about that world. What kind of thing? Anything, it can be aesthetic, metaphysical, ecological, political. It usually takes the form of a question, which can be a technological question: What would happen if all the computers woke up tomorrow and said hello? What if we crack faster-­‐than-­‐light-­‐speed travel? It can be a deeply human question. What if we cease to be able to breed? What if we radically upend social structures? Pose and answer one of these questions, and you immediately create what genre critics call a “radical discontinuity,” which is a particular form of cognitive dissonance unique to science fiction that occurs when everything is familiar except for one, or a few, significantly altered variables. Radical discontinuities are what makes science fiction science fiction: Not rockets, not outer space, not far-­‐
flung time lines. They’re also what makes science fiction a particularly potent tool of “first response” for artists, because every radical discontinuity is inherently critical. By proposing an alternative to the world, either an aspirational alternative or an alternative that serves as a warning, depending on your proclivity for utopia or dystopia. Using discontinuity for critique isn’t isolated to critiques of technology or society. It can work for art, I think, or it can, although I don’t see it used very much. In a lot of science fiction that deals with art, music, you know, the market’s frequently missed. When you look at musical sequences in science fiction like the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars or the cave rave in The Matrix, it doesn’t tell you anything about the future, it’s usually just like this shorthand of exoticism, or something, but I think it can be done in art and it can be used in an interesting way for art criticism. I’m thinking of the work of Mark Von Schlegell, does anybody know his work? When we practice the mental calisthenics of determining the difference between the real world Yeah, cool! He’s a science fiction writer who comes from art criticism and has published a handful of really incredible novels and semiotext, but he’s far outside of the science fiction landscape that he can only really publish in, like, highfalutin European art magazines and exhibition catalogs, and he makes these incredibly funny and biting critiques of the art world that, I think, are an indicator of what could be possible if we took that idea seriously. So, for example, for one of his stories, he presents the future of contemporary art as a hybrid of “all the essentially harmless activities of the Western cultural tradition” in a new practice called “kulturnautics,” which is among other things a circus of mathematically impossible pavilions that are sprouting up rudely and constantly into the lives of the working poor. This kind of thing is really snakry, of course, but it represents, to me, again what is possible when we begin to think seriously about speculative fiction as a form of art writing or art criticism. No matter what the point of focus is, though, when we practice the mental calisthenics of determining the difference between the world that we live in and the variable world at hand in a science fiction, when we try to discover where the radical discontinuity has been made, and try to see how we, in our lives, in our world, might be led to the juncture at which those discontinuities are formed, we learn a great deal about what is seemingly natural to us in the world. It makes us reevaluate everything we take for granted. These strangenesses in science fiction can help clarify the normal, and it can help us to understand the inherently arbitrary or historical nature of some social constructions. It confronts us in a specifically cognitive way that is designed to leave us as readers wondering a great many things—it’s designed to pose questions like “where are we headed?” Or, whether we are complicit with the world, or whether we are really ourselves at all. Radical discontinuities don’t require temporal extrapolation. They do not require the future in any capacity. Which is another of the assumed hard tenets of science fiction. Yes, the easiest way to understand the effects of a discontinuity is to play it out over time and to see how it modifies and takes root in the world, but something like a parallel history, such as in Philip K. Dick’s, The Man in the High Castle, a novel which takes place in a world in which the allies lost the war, can do the same kind of critical work, while taking place in the present. And the kinds of science fictions that emerged from Mundane SF, which is a movement in the mid 2000s in science fiction—that was kind of like a Dogme 95 for science fiction—it called for stories that took place in the near future, with little technology, very little theatrics. It argued that, as in the manifesto it said, “our most likely future is one in which we have ourselves and this planet.” And it called for fiction that spoke to those realities. With these kinds of practices, science fiction isn’t something escapist, exotic, or inherently futuristic—it is just an attitude, an approach to critique that can be applied anywhere and by anyone. Great science fiction, the truly transgressive shit, proposes many different radical discontinuities at once, creating complex intellectual bombs that implode slowly in the mind, but the important thing is that it always remains tethered to the world as we know it, to the world as it was before the question or questions were posed, right? It always presents a clear road from the real to the discontinuous, a road we can imagine walking, because otherwise, there’s no through line. There’s nothing to hold onto, and therefore, it no longer has any position for real critique. It becomes just fantasy, pure escapism. Which, speaking of, is the line between science fiction and fantasy. For the fantasy writer, the creative act is one ever pure imagination. His or her invented world doesn’t necessarily need to hew to a physics consistent with our own. A fantasy writer is free to magically relax the structure of the cosmos at will. But if science fiction writer wishes to do the same thing, they must invent a reason why, a method how, and then cope with the consequences. It may seem like a small difference, it’s kind of a conceptual stance, but makes all the difference, because waking up is what lends gravitas to dreams. I deal in science fiction, partially for a living. Some of you may know me as a musician if you know me at all but I edit a rogue science fiction imprint of VICE called Terraform. It’s part of VICE‘s science and technology site, motherboard, of which I am the “Futures” editor. Terraform is where where we publish stories that speak to, extrapolate from, or are otherwise in conversation with the current news stories my journalist colleagues are covering elsewhere on the VICE platform. So, we connect our fiction in a very tangible way with the actual realities and anxieties of the present, and if somebody reads a piece of speculative fiction on Terraform and is piqued by the issues it raised, we have a very direct means for the readers to go back to read about what’s actually happening in the present day through tags and suggested articles. I sometimes explain Terraform to people by saying it’s tomorrow’s news today, which is glib, but fairly accurate. At Terraform, we deal in the near term radical discontinuity. This means we publish stories about things like drones, the gamification of war, misogyny on the web, forms of protest in the 21st century, and the ways in which our relationship to social media changes our relationships to one another, etc. We only publish once a week and our upper ceiling, unless something is exceptional, is around 2,000 words, which is equivalent with the standard, shareable news story on the web. So we can be quite nimble, and often commission fiction or draw from our slush pile depending on what is happening in the world. So, one of our favorite things to do is actually to commission journalists and non-­‐fiction writers to extrapolate the ramifications of their own beats in a timely manner. So, for example, during a particular hairy privacy scandal involving Uber, we had technology writer Paul Ford imagine a dystopia in which a self-­‐aware entity named Uber controls all resources. We’ve had the music Internet culture blogger Carles, formerly of Hipster Runoff, write us a picture of Coachella in the year 2065, as a scorching and inhospitable tent city in the militarized desert. Not everything we do is this literal, obviously because fiction is much more ambiguous than that, but we find that these kinds of stories receive the most engaged and immediate responses from our audience, because their themes are already highlighted in public conversation on the web. Ideally, their themes evoke existing but latent fears or perceptions about the direction of where the world is heading, and so the work of the reader to locate the radical discontinuities within them is simple, even intuitive. It’s been for us the most effective strategy for injecting fiction into people’s feeds and seeing it shared in the way nonfiction is shared. In some case, we’ve used Terraform as a platform for direct critical response to issues about which we are passionate, some of which are self-­‐reflexive. This year, there was a cultural upheaval in science fiction as our most illustrious literary awards, the Hugos, were in a sense overtaken, legally, but maliciously, through the gaming of a public ballot, but a very conservative group advocating for a political adventure yarn-­‐style science fiction which, perhaps, never really existed. You know, when men were men and saved damsels from aliens in space, etc. Considering that the Hugos have honored some of the great progressive and radical voices of the last 100 hundred years, you know, people like Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, Phillip K. Dick, and Octavia Butler, it seems disingenuous and myopic, to say the least, to imagine that it deserves to be in the hands of people who do not use science fiction in that way. Science fiction has always been a tool for the marginalized to imagine new worlds beyond the limitations of the here and now, and such nostalgia seems ill placed. In reaction, Terraform commissioned a story from Kameron Hurley, a Hugo-­‐winning writer, extrapolating what might happen when we no longer have the freedom to imagine our own future, if we let the trolls win. I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s not good. This is what science fiction does best. It uses speculation to shed light on the problems of the present, which, in this case, are the problems of science fiction itself. The kind of stuff that we publish on Terraform is, and that I love, spiritually quite close to what cyberpunk was in its prime: Fiction about the very near, the very close, the alarmingly corporeal realities of technology and what it does to us, our societies, and to our planet. I think that now, more than ever, science fiction and art has a responsibility to be engaged head on with the complexities of the world, because, frankly, we need its power as a critical tool. At Terraform, we believe that fiction isn’t just a place to go to escape from reality. It’s a place where we can come to understand, even take control over, what is real. To test code, you have to run it. To see if a building will stand, you have to build a model. And, for us, science fiction is the same thing—
science fiction’s functionality has always been to take the world as we know it, tweak some key variables, to create discontinuities and to let it run. What emerges from the experiment may not tell us anything meaningful about the future, but it’s a really, really good mirror for the present. The core science fictional gesture of radical discontinuity is not unique to the written word. It’s something that can be employed by anyone, any artist, any writer, operating in fictional and nonfictional spaces alike. It’s not watertight or isolated to genre, it’s more like a tendency or an impulse that can be manifested in any number of ways by anyone interested in reality. So, I hope that I’ve made clear that science fiction is a mechanism for understanding and I want to leave you with a second stupid question: What is reality? Philip K. Dick defined reality as “that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it,” a purposefully evasive definition which requires us to believe in nothing in order to prove the reality of anything. But by that definition, the future is real, because although it’s intangible, it doesn’t require our belief to exist. So, the future is real and it belongs to all of us and none of us at once, and the more we shore up its reality by writing about it seriously as though it were real, and identifying the variables which create it, the clearer our position in the present becomes. This, in my mind, is the real purpose of criticism, the role of criticism, not only to engage with the world, but to clarify our understanding of it, so that we can live better within it. As my favorite genre critic Robert Scholes writes: To live well in the present, to live decently and humanely, we must see into the future. PANEL DISCUSSION:
Artists as Cultural First Responders
Fionn Meade: I think one of the things in being—having been handed this sort of frame “first responders,” it was interesting that we all kind of stepped into a questioning mode around that idea of artists as first respondents in different ways. Including I guess maybe a background question here is this presumed newness of a sort of informal capacity that the web, you know, and the digital platforms that we’re now all talking about presented. Is in that kind of informality that was—is new and has presented a new landscape, has it been entirely co-­‐opted by the sort of promotion of the personal and the preference and in that regard, has that not created a kind of first responsiveness that actually is occupying a lot of space in terms of digital platforms, and if we’re not talking about first respondents in regards to artists, maybe we can just say what is—is this a counter kind of responsiveness that we’re talking about, so Marisa, in your work you talked about slowing down actually the pace of reports. Marisa Mazria-­‐Katz: Yeah, well I mean I think what we discovered was that it didn’t make sense for us to have artists responding to the news cycle, which is just accelerating almost, you know, constantly, because I mean you know, I think we wanted to give them the space to reflect and also, if we wanted to sort of upend traditional takes of the news, you know, that takes some thought, and it’s not something that we felt was really working to have somebody hear about something and then respond to it right away. We just didn’t feel that the artists we were working with, that their practice really like worked in such a way. Of course there are exceptions to this, but generally speaking we felt that if this site was going to actually be different, or have something else to say that it was about giving space, and giving more time. And allowing artists to work in a way that I think they more traditionally work. Rather than asking them to be journalists. Meade: And in the case of Trevor’s work, but also James your work, this effort to make in a sense the invisible visible, actually in general takes a sort of amount of research and development before the project is even shared? James Bridle: Yeah, but I mean I hope all artists do some kind of research or have some kind of background to what they’re doing. I think—I’d really like Dan’s point that the first response is not necessarily the thing, but I think the more interesting thing that a lot of stuff is the response a at all. We can agree that we necessarily should not be the first people on this. On the scene we will get in the way but we should definitely be there, and the thing that for me, the technology enables occasionally demands, sometimes makes difficult or like makes bad, is if there’s a better way of doing that, is that there is a kind of necessity of response. Which is very hard not to, and also the fact that you are responding is always kind of visible, because of the ways in which that work is then disseminated and displayed and so on and so forth so I think it’s less possible to just put a thing and go this is just my little response over here and you don’t have to worry about it. Like it’s going to be out there so there’s always going to be a context or response around it in some form. Meade: I also wanted to ask you, Claire, when you talked about radical discontinuities of science fiction in some way softening the sort of maybe softening the rhetorical onslaught of the future, that science fiction in a sense makes the future more porous, through its embrace of radical discontinuities. Claire Evans: I think it also prepares us for the future, which is kind of the tangled hierarchy that science fiction has, where did we land on the moon because a generation of engineers Arthur C. Clark or Isaac Asimov or do we have these glamorous cyberhacker cabals? It’s difficult to know what is predictive and what isn’t about science fiction but one thing that is true is that if we can become familiar with new scenarios ahead of time we can be prepared for them and we tend to think about them so that when the time comes we can have a good first response. It helps us to prepare and steep ourselves in kind of the rhetoric of tomorrow. Meade: And just Dan you were quite blatant in saying that in your view, perhaps artists are second, third, and beyond respondents that there’s there’s a delay inherent in to some degree degree in artistic practices practice, Victor Shklovsky, the Russian art critic says that art was a device it actually complicates and gives a sort of demand of the shape of attention, and that perhaps that quality is a question, how does that exist in the digital shift or in the digital predominance of communication transactional surveillance, the atomization of transactional surveillance? How do you maintain in a sense that notion of artist as a device. Fox: To slowing things down? Meade: Yeah. Fox: Well, it’s a question of choice, isn’t it partially? Choice of attention, choice of where you put things. As I said, I mean James is right to say that by and large what we do now will be made visible at some point, but you still have the—you can still go and live you know in a wood somewhere. You can go and not document what you’re doing in the studio. You can have a studio in the middle of a great big city and not take a single photograph of what goes on in there so there are certain choices about when you put something out into the world and how long you take to incubate it and who you talk about it with. You can have private conversations with people still. But again it’s like James said, there is this sort of, you know, demands to respond for various kind of digital platforms, that make us feel very, very anxious about, you know, you kind of anxiously have to sort of you, somehow demonstrate that we were there, you know, we were there thinking and having a response that was, you know, fully formed and well considered right there in the moment. And you think when you sort of get away from that. There is still a choice in that. Meade: So do you think, I mean Duchamps for instance when he adopted the ready made he said it was a way to move away from the proliferation of the retinal and from the self that had to be some degree guessed at or doubted in a way and that he saw more agency again, roughly 100 years ago in that, do you think that in your work in engaging kinds of the—with making visible and making invisible really in the end borders that are based in legal transaction? Do you think that that by surfacing that it’s a move away from in a sense the expectations of you as an individual artist? That has an individual studio practice? Bridle: I don’t know about like to the extent that like this is all, you know, just my opinions, like I think that in my work it’s—I’m putting this out as an individual, but I have an expectation that it will naturally travel and be explored in different ways because that is the nature of the medium in which I work. It’s not a broad brushstroke about artist practice in general at all but it is to me fascinating and brilliant that I know these things can be sent out and always have been in terms of the fact that people have their own encounters with the work and I don’t really see that something has kind of particularly changed in there though I do think that yeah, that it still doesn’t seem to have percolated into most stuff to any degree that, so many of the attitudes I was set up to write are still not being addressed. Or aren’t like particularly well considered when talking about this stuff, except that again like we keep saying that getting harder and harder to ignore, right, that we have actually built an entire system to make us all enforced creators of ready mades. That’s what it does is it’s a perfectly Duchampsian system. Meade: I was also struck in thinking through Tania Bruguera’s work or Tatlin’s Whisper. In Havana that what was interesting as well in a work that is seen as timely, topical, respondent, correspondent, almost, I’m curious your take you know, on this in particularly Marisa that piece is called Tatlin’s Whisper No. 6, so it’s actually informed by a series and choreographed performances of resistance and the space of resistance that actually goes back a number of years and what’s interesting to think about that is that the logic of that, so to speak, the artistic logic of that is perhaps less of interest in the coverage of her being detained than it is the fact of her being detained. Do you find that the logic for instance of a work like that in its sort of sequence and its terms, so to speak, comes across in the topicality of coverage around it, the reception of it. Mazria-­‐Katz: I don’t really know. No, I don’t think so. I mean it wasn’t really in terms of you mean the press coverage of what happened to her? No, it didn’t seem so to me, really, the project itself, I mean did you I mean when you were— Meade: Well, no, I was just curious in my view, no, basically what’s in the news, is the topicality of an artist being detained in Havana, and it often goes not far beyond that into what the kind of concentric implications are of the work that led here to make that decision to do it there and similarly what it might have meant that by doing it as an artist born there but from elsewhere what does it mean for artists are living in Cuba and do have a different sense of the limitations or constrictions upon expression there? A lot of that Coco Fusco kind of surfaced it in a way in a piece that e-­‐flux published, I bring it up because the topicality of it, the first responder part of it is because of the artist being detained. Fox: That’s what news demands, doesn’t it? What’s going to be headline news is not the critical thinking behind the making of the piece of art. You know and a really crass example of this would be the way art gets written about in terms of auction prices, you know, you post impressionist painting of some, you know, some flowers that people aren’t really interested in what led those flowers to be painted, what’s interesting is the incredibly wealthy Russian oligarch how much they paid for it. Mazria-­‐Katz: It’s a lot of times how we commission, too, is anticipating what’s going to be in the news and thinking about who are the artists who are going to say something about it and have something insightful to say about it, so for instance, you know, the Kenya piece that I showed you, we worked on that for 6 months before, and actually what happened was I—I arrived, maybe it was even longer than 6 months because I got to Nairobi, I met the author, and knew, because in 2012 everybody be was talking about the 2013 elections they were quite fearful of what would happen. So I knew that this was something that was going to be in the news and commissioned her almost immediately after meeting her and reading her work to write something because I knew what she was going to say was going to be very different from the traditional news take on the Kenyan elections but I also knew that her piece would probably get news coverage, too, and overall that’s the real—that’s the big goal of what we’re doing is inserting these artist’s voices into the news and with Tania with everything that was happening with Cuba it was sort of like a perfect storm and it all kind of erupted, right but I mean that’s very much how I work. I mean of course I really—I really make a special effort to get to know an artist’s work but I will equally look at what’s happening in the news to make sure that I’m doing something that people are going to be paying attention to. It’s of the utmost importance to us. Evans: Yeah, and if you’re going to commission this kind of thing I think there are parallels to what we do, because you have to look into the future to some extent, you have to look for anniversaries or pegs of some kind even if it’s as stupid as something as Valentine’s Day. A lot of that comes down to traffic, too, we know that on every holiday there’s going to be a flurry of posts on that subject around that holiday and different reactions to it and it’s not like artists are wandering into the line of fire without information. You have to look for someone who’s already interested in this subject and ask them because they’re the one, because kind of they’re the last responders, this have been there all along. I think those what you united to talk to. Mazria-­‐Katz: Also we can’t get an editor to pay attention to us at these bigger publications unless we kind of anticipate what might be on their radar, too, so that’s really important for us. Bridle: I was going to say that there’s a more subtle thing to do as well in terms of those Paglen photos which to me are the kind of answer to the difficulty that was being briefly discussed a couple of times of this material I’ll say of the Internet question of what does it mean just to point to it and show it is that those photos got reinserted into the media in a very different way that relied on sense causes but they used licensing and their major kind of tool for doing it and I think they’re such a fantastic example of like instrumentalizing the art in a certain way in way to sneak it in there and turn what could just be an image of the world of something far far more active and descriptive that goes out into the world that isn’t just writing you know, a news story but is actually something far more—yeah, targeted. Meade: In Claire, in your work, you’ve talked about how there’s a being both like a musician and a writer and an editor, the difference between sort of expected immediacy around live performance and providing the universality of music as a sort of immediacy which I only bring up because when you go to a show you’re expecting the artist as first respondent—someone who’s taking on immediacy but you’ve distinguished that from the work of not only the editing but the delay of science fiction, again not using the word delay but the implicit delay of science fiction that allows for a different critical space. Can you talk about that just — Evans: Well, I think that in this moment in time, all artists are existing on three or four different temporal tracks. As a musician there’s a part of my livelihood that requires being in a place with people in a moment and there’s an ephemeral quality to it but at the same time a musician must use the same tools that we use to make music to disseminate and communicate with people and that happens in a much more diffuse way. As a writer you write in a moment and you publish something and you seem to have a 48 hour window in which anyone could give a shit about it and then it’s over. But it continues to live, you know, it’s not just that window of time. If something is on the Internet and it’s in a place which is not going to go out of business any time soon and you have an archive of it online then people can continue to react to it for years. The longer you write on the web, the more you get emails from people about something written six years ago. I get comments on the blog that I haven’t updated in three years because everything is existed in the sort of simultaneous, you know, equivalence. Mazria-­‐Katz: You think 48 hours? I think that’s really generous. But — Evans: I guess it depends if you’re west coast or east coast, too. Fox: I really notice that too as an editor of a magazine that as opposed to use Christopher Knight’s phrase from yesterday in a way part of like the niche art legacy publishing is a glossy print magazine that has been going for many years, you know, but at the sam time it’s a magazine that has—we have blogs, we have social media, we make videos, we produce at different kind of temporal rates, but one thing I’ve always noticed about doing a magazine and the print magazine is how it’s consumed at different kind of paces. You know, and you get die hard fans who might kind of get an issue through the mail if they’re subscribers and they’ll read it cover to cover and provide some kind of response. But most people don’t. That’s not the way I consume magazines. The way I consume magazines is bit by bit and slowly and that could be a copy of the New Yorker that’s next to the loo and you kind of read slowly over the course of many visits or it’s something that you stumble years later in a magazine, you might be like Ben yesterday in his lecture was talking about his lecture and going to the library and looking at Artforum in 1982 and whatever and discovering new things. Publishing has its sort of slowness and some things that are very, very old can suddenly seem very, very fresh again, things that were overlooked at the time can suddenly seem very, very urgent so they kind of renew themselves. Meade: Do you think given that that there is a role, though, for—Paul Schmelzer’s project with Artist Op-­‐Eds, you know, has invited, like Dread Scott was responding to Ferguson’s or events like Ferguson, really larger implications than just Ferguson, like in the moment but maybe from his ongoing engagement as an artist I similarly I think Coco Fusco’s entry into Joe Scanlan’s process was really helpful and was performed a kind of mediating in betweenness that allowed people to have a more sophisticated conversation about the reception of that via the Whitney Biennial. I guess I’m asking in your role, do you think that a—do you think that that is something that frieze, for instance, finds new platforms for or new immediacy for or in terms of like providing that space for a kind of highly editorialized immediate? Fox: Yeah, I mean I think we’d like to do more of that we’ve been working with a slightly antiquated website for the last several years which has not allowed us to be as dynamic as we could. But I think different rates of response are really valuable in editorial work. I think there’s responding very, very quickly to something as it happens can be really important. I think the example about the Scanlan controversy at the Whitney Biennial. The whole conversation around that was, you know, something that has to kind of happen in the moment. Whereas it’s still possible, though, to have that conversation 6 months later, because these problems don’t go away, either. You know, I think that’s an important thing, a slow response is also a reminder that problems of for instance race in the art world don’t disappear because people stop talking about them in the kind of buzzy world of you know, social media or kind of what gets circulated very, very rapidly online. And I think that in a weird sort of way what’s printed on paper and like the slowness of distribution with that, kind of provides some sort of not just sort of archiving or not just sort of archiving role but also it provides, it provides a brake, you know, as in like a car brake, it slows things down. Bridle: Can I mess up that question a political bit by saying like these aren’t slow responses. Like a fast response is not necessarily a first response. Particularly in terms of the—because you’re asking meme who have been thinking about this for quite a while and actually their response may be a lot more thoughtful and in depth than a lot of the kind of immediate responses to stuff. I mean that is the thing about going out and asking different people who have worked on something for quite a long time is that you’re drawing on a huge extensive body of knowledge that a very fast media wasn’t and just because it’s published doesn’t mean — Mazria-­‐Katz: Just to add to that, one of the beautiful things that about I think asking an artist to respond, you know, versus a journalist, because working as a journalist for so many years there’s all these rules that you have to abide by and you have to work in a certain way whereas the artist can draw on so many different sources, work in different ways, embed themselves in communities and don’t have of the rules that journalists might, and that I think then produce also something that can be very different, and— Fox: Yeah, I think that—that also brings up this distinction between the arts journalist and the arts writer. You know. There are very different types of writing about art. There’s writing about, you know, who’s moving where in the institutions or what things are being sold for or what is very newsy or very sort of fact based and requires journalistic skills, proper professional journalistic skills but then writing a monographic essay about an artist’s work or a historical movement or something requires other skills, that requires skills to do with imagination and empathy and maybe deep sort of historical knowledge or having followed someone for a long time. Maybe it requires sort of different kinds of literary skills. And so you know, when we think about this idea of like first response and this circles back to what we were just saying just now, it’s about like who has the best set of tools for a given situation, and there isn’t a one size sort of fits all kind of solution for this. Meade: Right. And that—I think you—this was a Twitter question, how do artists respond differently from critics and journalists, which I think you were just sort of getting at. But is there—I mean is there in a sense a—do you feel like you’re creating space through your projects, in this case I would say this to Claire, Marisa, and Dan as editors, you know, are you creating platforms that you see as being like sustainable in that way that can actually and if you are, what are those, how do you differentiate the time registers of your responsibility as an editor and publisher that invites artists into a particular format? Evans: Wait, define sustainable? Meade: Sustainable meaning something that you think will like you said, stick around, be there for a period of time, not just disappear. Evans: I mean, working on the Internet you will always have to keep in the back of your mind the possibility that the platform will someday disappear and reconcile yourself to that and try to sort of live it up while you can. That’s always been my attitude. Bridle: But different to publishing a magazine just on a shorter scale. Evans: Sure we’re talking about slow and fast but these are condensed time scales we’re talking about years at the most and the world is vast is time is vast and even our books will one day turn to dust so we have to reconcile ourself to that to some extent and make work that lasts in people that reflects people. Bridle: Something about the quality of the work. Like the first responders, it’s ultimately about getting people to make work and getting it out there and the response, like maybe that’s the difference between the artist and the critic or there are shades towards it, but ultimately is that you just want to get the thing out there and say the thing and then you know all those other processes can happen to. Mazria-­‐Katz: I’m not sure hopefully this is part of this, but our platform is interesting because it’s almost—it’s whether or not people come to our site, you’d absolutely love lots of visitors to our site, and you know, it’s great, but what we really aim for, it’s not emphasizing the platform as much as it’s the insertion. And that’s been—that’s been a really interesting thing to try to work with, because with the emphasis of numbers and metrics and Google analytics and how are we doing and all these things and then what happens when you kind of take the ProPublica model, which is, you know, it’s which is also just like us inserting into mainstream newspapers, you know, what does that mean for you, and where will we be, you know, we may not be around, but these pieces will still live on in these other sites, let’s say, and that’s something that has been part of our process is realizing that if the goal is that artists are being read and discussed by people all over the world, how are we best going to serve that around that was—that was a really conscious decision at the very beginning for us. Meade: And it was interesting to hear that it was really slowing down and taking the time to think of maybe more strategically about the insertion of the work or the artist into a different level of circulation and distribution. That created and efficacy that otherwise you wouldn’t have had, but do you feel as though you’re influenced by your partners in that regard? Mazria-­‐Katz: Our partners want the people that often that they haven’t ever heard of, or are doing things that are really interesting that are not on their radar. So in order—I mean I’m not sure if I’m answering the question, but when we think about our partners, we think about what can we bring them that they aren’t going to be able to do themselves? And having Creative Time and the knowledge of the art world and artists, we really bring something to them that otherwise I don’t know that they would be able to even—they’ve ever even heard of, so I mean that’s how we try to think—we try to think of how can we, you know, sort of help grow or expand the kinds of pieces that they are putting out into the world. That’s where we see our role. Fox: I mean just speaking about our work on frieze magazine, in a couple of years ago we started making our own short videos, which is something you see a lot you know news organizations doing, but not so much in the sphere of like specialist art magazines, and they’re just like short 10-­‐minute films that we do with a production company in London and they’re all paid for out of the editorial budget of the magazine, but we—it’s been very much like a kind of learning as we go process, making these things. But what we’ve discovered is that it’s opened up a new sort of function of the magazine for us, which is possibly one of record, one of like, you know, possible kind of like archival value, which print doesn’t really sort of do in the same way. So for instance, was it last year, I think it was last year we produced our first 30-­‐minute documentary, which we did in association with the BBC, which was about the history of the Glasgow art scene, and through the magazine, through the kind of contacts we have, you know, we were able to speak to a whole bunch of people in different generations in Glasgow about how the art has developed in the city, we were lucky enough to be able to use the BBC’s archive to pull in the archive footage. We also ended up being one of the last people who got inside of the Glasgow School of Art before it was hit by fire, so what this documentary ends up being is this sort of snapshot of Glasgow at a certain moment before something happened which was very symbolic to the city and now we have this great 30-­‐minute record of lots of different people of lots of different generations speaking about their, you know, their connection to the city. And it operates in a different way to something in print, you know, because we don’t have an editorialize voice. Of course we make editing decisions in what you show, but it’s talking heads basically artists and curators and writers talking to the camera, you can hear the grain of their voice, see what they’re like, see the environment. I think that’s something that technology has allowed us to do as a magazine or to start exploring as a magazine. Meade: But I mean that’s also partly why just the Walker commissions inviting artists to make works that respond to signature artists in our collection that already have an interest in say, Derek Jarman, was that interest in surfacing new platform that could invite that kind of expertise, that kind of ongoing, say engagement the allure of something that already has a momentum, do you see the magazine devoting more time and space and resources to that and what’s the balance of exploring perhaps really meaningful new platforms for artists but at the same time providing as you put it a kind of legacy role of—or not legacy but a kind of convention of reception that is still valuable because it has an inherent convention? Fox: Yeah, I mean I think there are questions of just economics. We don’t—these videos that produced out of the editorial budget and we don’t have any extra money for them that is raised by advertising of these videos and we’re able to produce them because the production company are friends of ours and we get mate’s rates basically of their facilities but I think what’s interesting for us as a magazine is how it has raised this question of like horses for courses, kind of what are the right writing skills for a certain type of platform situation? So the writing skills that you need to write a 400-­‐word review are different to the writing skills you need to write 2500-­‐word monographic essay about an artist which are different to the writing skills you need to write for the moving image which requires more concision, more sensitivity to speech rather than to word you know words on a page so I think it’s another kind of writing that we’re learning about. Meade: But isn’t the acuity of new forms of writing responsive to this kind of immediate attention and I mean we’re describing things that don’t sound that different than they have been in terms of approaches so I guess I’m asking is there a new kind of artist that is sort of this first responder that’s adopting the acuity of immediate response because I feel like we’re sort of talking about the counter to that. Bridle: I just want to say that—I keep wanting to make science fiction metaphors basically and this is a really long one but something about the way you just talked about making that Glasgow film is you were basically making a science fiction without knowing it because you were predicting something into the future, I mean you weren’t predicting it, I hope you didn’t set fire to the place, but there was a weird thing that happened there. And not all artists, but a huge number, but also in terms of when you make stuff that’s deliberately intended tock into a news cycle and stuff you are doing a kind of futurism that is predictive. The difference to that to the kind of pure reactive thing that we criticize is that it’s done from a position of kind of thoughtfulness and consideration and so we’re coming to it with like a domain awareness and a history of research and that kind of thing that allows you in hindsight to go oh, yeah, I was doing science fiction because I was looking in a place in which there was some kind of moment in a moment in which you were kind of projecting yourself forward in the time that you make or write this thing. And that’s the same thing that happens to archived pieces that get resuscitated or whatever they all exist in those kind of time lines and when they get reacted essentially speaks to the quality of thought that went into them in the first place. Evans: I think artists and journalists have had the skill of because if you’re paying attention to the world, this is actually a kind of William Gibson thing, you can trace the nodes of things that are latent and see where they might intersect, because you’re looking and so that I mean it’s pa form of looking into the future but it’s also just awareness of the present. Bridle: What Gibson does in terms of that reaching across the network and picking things out it’s like particularly it speaks completely to that flattening of time because there’s no temporality to the thing at all. He just has what appears to us to be a temporal foresight which is actually kind of a spatial one because he exists in this wider network but I think a lot of artists of a certain kind and the ones that have been worked that that’s what they’re doing, they’re kind of spreading out to these networks and being absolutely more aware of them. Meade: Rather than rather than being determined by them. Bridle: Yeah, absolutely. Meade: So that anticipatory predictive quality is actually different in some ways than discussing it as a perhaps respondent, correspondent, imbedded reacting to the incident. Bridle: I think it relates to what we had talked about last night when I complained about this label of political artist or activist artist which is like one that I get a lot because I make work about drones and war and stuff. And like I don’t object to it because it’s a—I find it weird that it’s just applied to me because I’m making work about these things as though making work about anything isn’t about these things or making work about the world in which you encounter is not some kind of form activism or involvement in the world and I feel it’s quite similar to this are you an artist who engages with stuff or not? Well, we do, we live in the world, hi. Meade: I think it might be because we have—we have this great group of people, but also it’s our last opportunity for audience questions, I thought I would open it up to the audience for any questions on our conversation. Audience Member: My favorite science fiction short story is Roadside Picnic, you know, in which we as a human race are dealing with the detritus left behind by an alien invasion in which they seem to take no notice of us whatsoever and I just wondered in instead of a question I’d like sort of a comment, I feel like it’s relevant to this conversation, in the sense that you know, like we are grappling with our responses to these things that to these technologies and to those modes of working and modes of like socializing that we still don’t quite have a handle on, and yet are trying to make proclamations around and, you know, determine our future according to like the clumsy ways in which you know we’re moving forward in the present moment. Evans: Yeah. I mean the like the cosmic zoom out is always really important. I mean it’s you know in the midst of all of this deep conversation about essentially invisible things, that matter a great deal to us, we must always remember that you know, we’re on a rock and you know if an alien is passing by, they don’t necessarily have any understanding or interest in what we’re talking about. It’s useful to remember that sometimes, even if it’s just like this kind of theoretical construct, like we may not be alone into the universe, and if we aren’t, then you know, we are just as important as the other guy, and we know nothing of what’s going on with them, so—you know. Bridle: As well about the indeterminacy of our present and the acknowledgment of that which I think is often possible in art is not possible in politics that within—it’s full of people going no, I am right about this and that is one of the major problems with the world. The refusal to kind of acknowledge a little bit of, you know, contextual difference or dissonance in that, and that’s what those kind of stories teach us more and more, and that I don’t think it would be impossible to spread that allusion a little bit further into other forms of public discourse. Meade: There’s the sense, though, that I mean this gets at a very—like a very important gap which is that art that the politics of art are—art that embeds critique kind of promises a political accomplishment that it doesn’t deliver and it actually often thrives on that nondelivery or the ambiguity that’s created around not delivering in a sense that the political agency, there’s a—which is very different than being in the position of political power. Bridle: Yeah, I don’t and I’m afraid to and I’m disillusioned by the inability of like that kind of political forms of those things to come true on a lot of the claims that we make like we haven’t got that figured out yet and yeah, if you want to do that, you should probably be trained as a lawyer. We know that other things have bigger structural things but at the same time that’s not the only thing we’re trying to do in the world, either. Audience Member: Hi, just continuing on this idea of power, in your various subjects, I feel like the issues have come up like issues of curation, issues of systemic disposition, I was just wondering what you guys had to say in terms of the role of values and the implementation of values and who’s making the decision that sort of generates the values that result in decisions that affect all of our disciplines. Fox: Well, I—that’s a big question. Audience Member: Sorry. Fox: It’s a big it’s a very, very good question, and a big question. All I can—all I can say to that is maybe just a sort of reiterate something that was trying to say earlier in my talk, which is that I think we need to not be myopic about first within just speaking about the arts generally, about what fields we work in, you know, this idea that the kind of artist, visual artists are somehow the most interesting ones and people that do things in other fields don’t have political agency or what have you. I think it’s a conversation we’re all involved in. And then secondly you know not being you know, I think like being aware of your own sort of biases in terms of where you come from sort of metaphorically and literally, physically and I think it’s something you need to maintain some vigilance on. It’s not at all easy to do. But yeah, sorry, I’m really that’s a really inarticulate answer and a very platitudinous one, I sort of apologize, but I think maintaining vigilance about those things and not be locked down into a specialist conversation of your own field where what we’re doing here as professional art critics or what we’re doing here as artists who work in just in the visual arts, I think not getting bogged into your own sort of lane that’s crucial, also. Evans: And being transparent, also, I think a lot of people are afraid to have an opinion about something, because they’re just always the possibility that you’re going to get trolled for it, which is a very real fear and I think it affects some people more than others, but we shouldn’t sacrifice our capacity to speak openly about what we believe in. Bridle: That transparency, I’m in terms of it’s good, because it like it means we’re actually like being serious and genuine in saying what we’re talking about, and like expressing our values clearly. It also hopefully builds some sort of solidarity with other people but it also opens us up to proper critique about stuff, as well that want to be challenged on those values. So sometimes I have I get like really scared when I express something that I feel really strongly about in my work, and is the reason for doing it but more often than not it’s good that that comes out because it gets reinforced because there is genuine good strong criticism that I understand what the fact that’s really, really happening so I understand that it’s necessary to state values for both of those. Audience Member: So you think those are occurring organically out of the conversation sort of between systemic and organic. Bridle: The values are? Audience Member: Yeah. Bridle: I think there’s probably some sort of I hope it describes what I considered to be universal ones and there’s the more kind of actionable ones that happen with the encounter with, but that should always be open to some kind of critique in conversation. Fox: Otherwise it just becomes ideology, doesn’t it. Audience Member: We spent a fair amount of time kind of bemoaning the lack of power that comes in a lot of our positions and what we’re looking at but first responders are somebody who has a lot of power, right. They often frame the narrative because of they’re first draft. They often talk when the most people are listening so that narrative is picked up by a lot of people and so the question becomes, I guess my question is, I know it’s hard to be first responders as artists but how do we get there? I mean what can we start doing to be in that position? Bridle: I think that’s really good. And I think we should shy away from actually trying to occupy that position from everything we’ve said if in fact we believe in the values essentially of those things we said. Like I don’t have particularly great strategy for doing that except I think actually stating these things clearly and loudly remains important. That we shouldn’t, while being, you know, reasonably reticent about the actual political effect some of this work might have, not shying away from we think it should and holding you, know, saying loudly and clearly, what we think is actually, I mean I don’t necessarily do that much and I don’t right now on this stage in front of you feel like I have a huge amount of power, I feel very lucky to have it, but you know, that’s when we get to say those things. How we say them, a little bit harder. Fox: Yeah, I think you make a good point, though in being the first person to say something is often a really scary position, because you’re advancing an opinion that people haven’t necessarily commented on and you’re opening yourself up totally for kind of being trolled or criticized or what have you and it’s a very brave position to take and I think that if you do take that position it’s just a case of being open to the fact that you can modify your views, and the people who are listening to you make that first, that first statement, that first kind of salvo, you know, kind of reaction, shouldn’t like take you down for that, either, because it’s a very—you know, you’re putting yourself in a very vulnerable position and people need to respect that vulnerability, I think. Meade: Yeah, that idea, which is a valuable one, that the act of criticism is or critique is self-­‐education in public. Fox: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Meade: And not in a sense making a judgment that is universal. It is a modified—it’s putting one self in a position of — Evans: And it’s difficult because things last, you know and if you make an opening salvo in a times of crisis that turns out to be misguided then that stays with you unless you have the capacity to go back and edit it until your opinion is like Wikipedia style up to date but we have to remember we all have the right to make that opening salvo. Bridle: But also it doesn’t have to be the thing that is said first or loudest, either, but to say the new thing, as well. Again that slightly temporal difference that when the thing that is said that is new that should be kind of supported and critically engaged with very carefully, that that doesn’t have to be the thing said first and loudest. Fox: Yeah and I think if you’re a critic you also have to remember that you’re perfectly within your rights to change your mind, which you know, a lot of people don’t expect of critics. I think you’re totally totally able to disagree with yourself. Disagree with the younger version of yourself. God knows that I’ve written some crap that I can’t believe I said at the time. I would never say now. Evans: But that’s kind of nice that you have a historical record of prevailing opinions or whatever it was that you’re writing contained within your own body of work that you can create your own history and you can’t have that record unless you take the risk of saying the thing in the first place. Meade: Unless there’s a burning last question maybe we can end there. And thank you for the conversation.