DRAFT to unit 3 Essay- 1st Five Pages

Kasey McLaughlin
“an essay that extrapolates Weinberger’s evidence and claims and applies them to a specific discourse community.”
How the Internet has changed the critique/idea of perfection on art
The Coloring Table in my kindergarten class was always a place of competition. As I made the rough decision between a light pink and a yellow for the skin color of an abstract rendition of my mother, my friend Andrew held up his and Peter’s pictures and asked me, “Which is better?”. Now, as I sat in my first Art History course of college, my teacher compared slides of two famed works of art and asked the class the same exact question. The lesson she was trying to delve into questioned how we determine, have determined, and will determine how a drawing, sculpture, sound, or action is considered a “tour de force”.
What piece is better, the one displayed on the walls of MOMA, or the painting hanging in the walls of a wealthy art collector in the Upper West Side? One could wonder why the art collector paid thousands upon thousands for a canvas with two lines of color on it, while a man from Nowheresville, USA might chisel a perfect replica of the empire state building from a tree trunk and it is sold for $29.99 at the local souvenir store. Much has to do with where and who the art is being made for. Many artists will never be as lucky as the one who sold his work to the wealthy art collector. This is why so many have taken their creative genius to the masses. After all, selling 100 sculptures for $29.99 is a better bet than spending a lifetime wishing to be discovered by the editors of NY Arts Magazine.
Canadian film director hit the nail on the head when he explains the difference between today’s art and that of the past: “ Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered to its interests.” Where is this modern day idea of art displayed for the masses (not to be confused with the idea of “art for the masses” behind the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Bauhaus school) nowadays most seen? The Internet.
With online journals, virtual tours, and places like YouTube.com, where anyone can show off their creative abilities to the world at the click of a mouse, the Internet has become a melting pot of diverse art. Therefore the question of “Which is better?” holds even greater weight. The Internet allows for much more leeway granted to the artists on judging what is “good” art and what is not. David Weinberger states in his novel Small Pieces Loosely Joined, that perfection is now “just a measure of how good a thing is”. From this statement we can conclude that the better and object/artwork is, the closer it is to perfection. Weinberger uses a “perfect circle” as an example of perfection. A perfect circle is understood by most as one with “no straight lines or squiggly curves”(Weinberger 77).
Most people can grasp the idea of a perfect circle, and can differentiate a “good” circle from a “bad” circle by noting what is visually closer to perfection. When this idea is applied to more vague visuals, such as a painting or sculpture, it is necessary for the critic to be more open-minded. With discourse communities for artists to relate to one another online, there is more opportunity to learn different viewpoints and share with one another.
Back to the visuals that have no known “perfect” form to be defined by and compared to, using the example of one artist/blogger- Barney Davey. Davey claims that negotiation is the key to success as an artist. In a professional artist’s case, the “better” artwork is commonly considered the most expensive art. He evens makes the bold claim that it is just as important as perspective or color theory. On certain occasions, he explains the method to selling artwork his gallery would use:
Rather than let a disappointed buyer attempting to negotiate such a piece leave empty handed, we would endeavor to show them some items that we thought held great value and were under priced. We might make that transition like this, “That artist’s work is in great demand and the firmness of the prices shows it. We do have some artists that we feel show great promise and whose work is priced to show appreciation if our evaluation is accurate. Can I show you some of his pieces?” (“The Fine Art of Negotiation”)
By making it sound as if the buyer is getting a deal, he takes advantage of their lack of knowledge to obtain more money. In real life when one goes to buy Davey’s work, he will not outwardly state that he is selling you a piece of artwork for $3,500.00 for the sole reason that he knows he can persuade you into buying it. On absolutearts.com however, he feels free to share his knowledge with less successful artists. Much of this has to do with the distance. Barney Davey, businessman that his is, would never share his talent for negotiating with the competing galleries down the block, yet what harm would it do to help out an artist halfway across the country?
It is this feeling of distance that make many other artists more comfortable sharing their thoughts and work with one another via the Internet. When an artist displays a controversial piece in their home, or in a local gallery, there is the fear that those who may disagree with the idea of the piece will harm them or make trouble for them. Out on the Internet, one can get their view across through art without the fragility of having it on their own turf. A prime example of the overconfidence a person has when posting art online versus displaying it for the public in real life is a video reportedly filmed by a non-resident Indian in New York. An enormously controversial video, this is a taping of a man dressed to look like the highly revered Mahatma Gandhi. The Gandhi look-a-like is shown on YouTube pole dancing and making crude gestures. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting are trying to keep the YouTube site blocked from their nation because this video was agreed to showcase “bad taste” (Information Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi). While action may be taken by the country to censor this video, the artist’s safety is salvaged and identity not revealed. Whereas if this man had displayed his dance in the streets of New Delhi, there is a good chance he would be hurt.
While the ability to create art with no identity behind it is a comforting aspect of the Internet, it teeters between being a good thing and a bad thing. Those offended by the Gandhi video would view this freedom as unhealthy for the public. At the same time, some may enjoy this freedom because it allows more art to be seen. To some, it is worth viewing a couple horrendous “masterpieces” to come upon mind-expanding art that you would not have found without the Internet. Weinberger compared this idea with real life very astutely when talking about search engines: “Let’s say that #14 on the list has the information you’re looking for. Success! And yet from another point of view, this has been an embarrassing failure: if someone asked you a question and you gave thirteen wrong answers before hitting the right one, you would not be filled with a warm sense of accomplishment…we understand that we are asking a search engine to…find precisely the ones we want…and don’t take longer than two seconds to do it.”(Weinberger 75-76) Time is of the essence to us and the Internet saves time.
If more art is seen in a short amount of time, we obtain more information to compare and are prone to opening our minds to new ideas. The people dining at the Esplanade Plaza on a warm March evening were witnesses of a “happening” that would give them the chance to open their eyes to new types of art. A “happening” is a performance art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work (WIKIPEDIA?). They watched as artist Andrew Wielawski returned to the plaza to completely destroy a lovely sculpture he made the previous year. The idea was that there would be an interesting performance of art in the destruction of the object considering people’s reactions and other factors. It was an artistic experiment, which turned out quite well. In the end he had given away pieces of the broken sculpture to inquiring guests. While some people scoffed at the nonsensical destruction, others were awed by how it brought the group together and created an appreciation for the piece. Thanks to absolutearts.com, Wielawski was able to share this with others that would find his story interesting. Many replies came in blogging about how intrigued they were with his conclusion. Some even said that he had inspired other artists to create similar happenings. If these said artists expand on Wielawski’s idea, that will be a growth for the art world. With the convenience of this discourse community for artists to read about and expand on ideas, we are on the track to more and more new art. This creates more to compare, raising the bar to a higher standard for the creative genius, even if we have to sort through some offensive videos first.

-ONLine Art COMmunities
-people with no art background judge art by their own preference tastes-but how are these tastes created? How does the internet allow for a narrowing down of personal preference??
-how this has economically changed art and its future implications
-democracyJ
-mass…messy internet.. anything allowed
-weinberger perfection
-medium-→ media
-convenience
-go into video art/ “happenings”
- Technology has brought down the cost of recording
-back to artist being discovered- how people have a better shot at it through the internet rather than hoping some bigwig finds their piece on vacation to the middle of nowhere.

Analysis of Source for Unit 3 essay

SITE: http://www.nyartsmagazine.com
The NY Arts Magazine is a popular source for almost all interested artists in Manhattan, as well as thousands of readers internationally. The creators of this site and published magazine have superb credentials. The founder of the magazine, Abraham Lubelski, is an American Contemporary artist, a renowned lecturer, a curator, and a panelist. He owns his own gallery in Manhattan and has had articles written about his exhibits in both Life and People magazine. He is known internationally and is highly regarded in the art world, as are the people who work for him in this magazine. The purpose of the site is to create an easier way to access artwork and gallery openings and reviews on art in NY. While the magazine is a great investment, the website offers the same information yet is free, and has archives of everything so you don't have to hold onto mounds of old magazines that take up space. It is also way easier to navigate the site than it is to navigate the magazine. If you want to see something from May 2005, you just type it into the search box in the site. The convenience is what makes this site better than it's hard copy twin.