Recent Comments
Re: “The Rise of the Online Gallery”
@mirroring: I agree that the work at JOGGING is sometimes more demonstrative than substantive , however I see that as encouraging. One of the reasons I see the free/web art model as robust is that there's nothing in it demanding a particular aesthetic. What Brad et al are doing is proposing a format and generating/activating a community of content developers, out of which some really mindblowing work will hopefully emerge. Its been great to watch that community grow.
However, I am sort of worried about the economic side of the free art approach. As described in http://thefreeart.tumblr.com/, it removes the (admittedly flawed) commodity based model without replacing it with a better one and instead asks artists to work for free. That subtext suggests both of a return to artists as independently wealthy individuals capable of running a career deficit, and of artists as amateurs or hobbyists. As a broke dude who believes sustained labor can lead to better art, neither appeals to me. It might just be a timing thing; I think we're headed toward a culture of reliable and popular micropayment (see Peter Sunde's Flattr for an early example) which could connect with free/web art in very interesting ways, so I guess I'm hesitant to see free/web art ideologically cemented in terms of a fragile and potlatch prone gift economy before new and emerging alternatives can be explored.
