Another lamentable creeping usage is not only pretentious, but it distorts and narrows what artists do. I refer to — rather than reference — the word practice, as in “Duchamp’s practice,” “Picasso’s studio practice” and worst of all, especially from the mouths of graduate students, “my practice.” Things were bad enough in the 1980s, when artists sometimes referred to their work as “production,” but at least that had a kind of grease-monkey grit to it.

The MTAA Reference Resource (MTAA-RR) attempts to archive most information regarding the art duo MTAA’s creative PRACTICE.

It turns the artist into an utterly conventional authority figure. (emphasis mine)

[…] there’s the implication that artists, like lawyers, doctors and dentists, need a license to practice. (emphasis mine)

[…] the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or dentist, is trained to fix some external problem. It depersonalizes the urgency of art making and gives it an aura of control, as if it is all planned out ahead of time.

It suggests that art making is a kind of white-collar activity whose practitioners don’t get their hands dirty, either physically or emotionally.

13. to exercise or pursue as a profession, art, or occupation: to practice law.

[…] Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood has in recent years become one of New York City’s hippest areas. And with its easy accessibility — just a short ride on the L train from Manhattan’s Union Square — Williamsburg also stands apart as an ideal destination for visitors looking to explore another side of the City.

“Williamsburg is a haven for the young and the hip,” said George Fertitta […]

Thousands of you took part in the search for Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2007, and the vast majority of you chose a small word that packs a pretty big punch. The word you’ve selected hasn’t found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it’s now been awarded—might just improve its chances. This year’s winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t (“leet,” or “elite”) speak—an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double “o” in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for “we owned the other team”—again stemming from the gaming community.

Merriam-Webster’s #1 Word of the Year for 2007 based on votes from visitors to our Web site:

1. w00t (interjection)
expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”

Word on the street tells me ArtNow won’t be the worst fair I see this week, which frankly frightens me. I made it through the first floor of galleries before I gave up on the chance of seeing anything moderately interesting, and walked next door to Flow. […] Consider yourself warned.

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We need your support. If you:

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— are one of the hundreds of teachers who use Turbulence works in your new media/digital art courses

and/or

— are an artist who has received a Turbulence, Networked_Music_Review or New American Radio commission

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We cannot continue without your help. We MUST raise $25,000 by December 31, 2007.

Tom Moody wrote: “Art about the art world inherently blows”

I can never understand why some folks think certain subjects are inherently bad. It’s obvious to me that no subject is inherently bad — even the art world.

If a certain piece is naval-gazing bullshit, fine. If you think a certain subject is being over-explored (like skulls perhaps?), then say it.

But, to declare one subject off-limits because it “inherently blows” makes no sense.

Actually, good art about the art world is perhaps even harder to pull off because of the risks of a) naval-gazing and b) subject over-exposure.

The iCommons Auction runs from 19 November to 14 December, 2007. This is an innovative auction of paraphernalia from some of the world’s leading Internet figures. From Internet activist and Stanford Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig’s coat that he wore in countries around the world that invited him to talk about free culture; to pre-prints from best-selling novelist, Cory Doctorow’s forthcoming, to-be-Creative Commons-licensed novel, Little Brother; and from #13 of only 20 plush toys of Firefox Japan’s mascot, Fox-keh that took the world by storm, to four of Indian intellectual property expert Lawrence Liang’s favorite Bollywood films: this auction is a celebration of free culture from around the world from those who make it and build it every day. All the proceeds of the auction will go to developing and sustaining iCommons’ global projects.

“NETworking” is the first Israeli museum exhibition devoted to Net Art. It presents 12 works from the Computer Fine Arts collection of Doron Golan. The works included in this show highlight a number of the fundamental qualities that characterize Net Art: the visualization of data; open-code access and connectivity; hacking and online voyeurism involving critiques of authorities and economic powers; the creation of online behavioral codes and the negotiation of cyberspace from various perspectives.

[…] then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.

Without further ado: In art school, I learned:

• How to champion and defend my ideas.
• How to distinguish between personal and professional critique.
• How to respectfully and constructively critique my peers. How to attack the ideas of my colleagues and still have drinks with them that same night (and maybe even sleep with them — hey, it is art school)
• How to test drive a hundred different ideas through sketching, cobbling, and envisioning them, before finally settling on which one to go ahead and build.
• How to tell when I am done a project that could just as easily be improved endlessly.
• How to tell when an idea that is precious to me is actually holding me back. And then to feel good about throwing it away.
• How to have the confidence to present my ideas in public without fearing that they will be stolen. And how to take it in stride when they inevitably are.
• How to distinguish between taste, technical skill, and empirical efficiency.
• How to detect bullshit, and to avoid generating it myself (note that not all art school grads learn this).
• How to go the extra mile to make something high-quality.
• How to recognize talent in my peers.
• How to collaborate with my colleagues effectively to reach a common goal.
• How to be deeply competitive without being a dick.
• How to make something new just for the sake of being new.
• How to build off of, and give credit to, the ideas of my predecessors both contemporary and in history.
• How to save ideas that I’m not ready for and keep them for future use (usually in sketchbooks).
• How to start all over again from the beginning.
• How to teach all of the above.

The artist Steve Mumford originally went to Baghdad in 2003 to work as a war artist, embedded with the U.S. military, both writing a journal and making drawings and watercolors of what he saw there. In early 2007 he returned to Iraq for approximately a month, where he worked at an army hospital. This is the second of three reports on that trip. The first, “With Good Company into Iraq,” was posted on Mar. 8, 2007. The archive for Mumford’s original “Baghdad Journal” can be found here.

gumbo@dumbo
Art Under the Bridge Festival in Dumbo, Brooklyn
September 28, 29, 30th, 7pm to 11pm
Front Street & Adams Street, Brooklyn
Video Projection on the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage

I’ve been working with a group of artists over the summer. We have been finding ways to collaborate with each other through an open dialogue and discussion about art and group praxis. The name of the group is Artists Meeting;

Participating Artists include Leesa Abahuni, Nicole Abahuni, James Andrews, Daniel Blochwitz, Chris Borkowski, Ursula Endlicher, G.H. Hovagimyan, Thomas Hutchison, Lara Star Martini, Nsumi Group, [PAM], Joao Salema, Raphaele Shirley, Jason Wee, Lee Wells.

We will present our first public collaborative video installation this weekend at the Art Under the Bridge Festival in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We will project two 30 foot by 40 foot videos onto the south side of the Manhattan Bridge Anchorage from the loading dock just off the corner of Front and Adams.

[Songtag] mentions how one of the Fenton photographs was posed or staged. That we’re always disappointed when we learn that a photograph has been posed. Then she goes on to talk about the difference between fake paintings and fake photographs. Namely, a fake painting is a painting with faulty provenance — say, a painting that is purportedly by Vermeer, but turns out to be painted by somebody else. But according to Sontag, a fake photograph is a photograph that’s been posed.

Camp out with pro net surfers and net surfing clubs as we talk shop, play games, pitch tents, and make a hypertext mess big enough for mom to clean up in the morning.

Will it be possible to place H.264 streams into the traditional FLV file structure? It will, but we strongly encourage everyone to embrace the new standard file format. There are functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264 which we could not overcome without a redesign of the file format. This is one reason we are moving away from the traditional FLV file structure. Specifically dealing with sequence headers and enders is tricky with FLV streams.