February-April 2009
Wikipedia Art - A Fireside Chat (March 2009)
“[Sherwin:] art that anyone can edit– a mass collaborative project that welcomes all.
NS: … Wikipedia is actually controlled information, with a hierarchy, just like the news media, academia and other encyclopedias. Yes, anyone can edit, but each topic or discipline is mostly edited by a slew of continuous volunteers with egos and agendas, just like everywhere else. Those who do a lot of editing, who simply have the time and inclination to write and discuss details, have more clout and are taken more seriously. And they are, both wonderfully and scarily, somewhat anonymous. Through their own self-propagation and self-congratulation, they truly have a lot of power.
The artist David Horvitz played with this, with affecting the real world and propagating himself, by editing Wikipedia. Horvitz altered the Wikipedia entry for Ian Curtis – lead singer of Joy Division – to read that in the last moments before Curtis committed suicide, he glanced at one of Horvitz’s photographs. The falseness of this tidbit was eventually found out and removed from the page, but not before it became part of the mythic story: many Curtis fan sites still include Horvitz in their account of his death. In other words, Horvitz didn’t just edit Curtis’ Wikipedia page; he edited his story (history).
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The core “activity” of Wikipedia Art plays with, addresses and redresses, the invisible authors and authorities of and on the web / the google / the wiki…. It is an art work that is composed on Wikipedia, and so is art that anyone can edit. If people edit the Wikipedia Art page, then they performatively edit Wikipedia Art itself.”
There were two follow-up pieces to this on MyArtSpace, both in April 2009:
Art Space Talk: Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern
Wikipedia Threatens Artists and Fair Use?
