xkcd – A Webcomic – Neutrality Schmeutrality
xkcd – A Webcomic – Neutrality Schmeutrality
Neutrality Schmeutrality
Neutrality Schmeutrality
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stimulus
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Wikipedia Art: so irrelevant we can’t stop talking about it (updated)
More 50-50, keep / delete discussions around Wikipedia Art, but now the debate is on Rhizome, and by the gatekeepers of, and participants in, the art blogosphere. I particularly love Curt Cloninger’s response to Tom Moody on Rhizome. Moody is a kind of anti-Lichty, being just as voiciferous in his dislike of the project, as Lichty has with regards to what he deems as its importance. Yay, platform. Happy to provide it for both of you. You’re great collaborators.
iDC discussion has some nice tidbits, too.
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Durova: Wikipedia Art and media restoration
Durova: Wikipedia Art and media restoration
A worthy re-post, not really related to the Wikipedia Art project. I don’t think my own work is exactly suitable, but hopefully some of my readers might be able to get involved.
Wikipedia had one of its more interesting deletion discussions overnight. Â A page called Wikipedia Art lasted about a day. By site standards the deletion was mundane, but the editors who created it were not. There’s an untapped opportunity here and I’m reaching out to them. The artists Scott Kildall, Nathaniel Stern, and Brian Sherwin were active in it, apparently with a measure of support from the academic art world.
There are untapped synergies between Wikipedia and professional artists. One of them is illustrated here: a portrait of actor Mark Harmon by professional photographer Jerry Avenaim. This photo is scheduled to run on Wikipedia’s main page tomorrow.
Mr. Avenaim himself didn’t nominate the portrait for featured picture. Another volunteer noticed its high quality and put it up as a candidate where it nearly failed the minimum resolution requirements until I noticed the photographer was already an active Wikipedian and contacted him. He was surprised and delighted to learn his work was under consideration, and supplied a larger version.
Now here’s good news for Jerry Avenaim: as Picture of the Day for February 17, 2009 the portrait will receive an estimated 6 to 7 million page views as a main feature, plus about 30,000 direct views to the image hosting page. That’s more attention than his work would get from a day on the front page of The New York Times. Thank you, Jerry Avenaim, for doing well by doing good. Here’s a link to his blog.
I would love to establish contact with the Wikipedia Art participants and help them direct their considerable talents into productive endeavors. Posted to the Village Pump discussion about this. Let’s hope it yields fruitful results.
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Wikipedia Art is dead. Long live Wikipedia Art
The art work / page has been deleted from Wikipedia, approximately 12 hours after its birth. But it is not dead, merely transformed – performatively un-uttered and soon to be resurrected in an/other form. Watch this space for upcoming/ongoing press and archives and interventions that are all part of Wikipedia Art as a work. In the meanwhile, my favorite fragment of the piece thus far is the performance it engendered here and here. (These will be archived elsewhere soon, under the necessary GFDL license.)
It should be duly noted that:
- Wikipedia broke their own rules in deleting this post, citing that it broke their rules, which should never be broken. The discussion that began surrounding its deletion was NOT closed, and thus the page should have been given at least 24 hours (most are given 3 to 5 days). Endorsers of the deletion claim that the ends justify the means, but rule-breaking begetting rule-breaking by the enforcers seems like a stretch for truly objective readers / editors / Wikipedians. Admitting that’s the case, fearing the “setting of a precedent” – as some express in the above links – does not make it any better; worse, in fact. Obviously, even if the Wikipedia community does not see Wikipedia Art as a “valid” intervention, they have proved it to be a necessary one (and thus valid on a much larger and more important scale).
- The Wikipedians behind the delete (and lock-down – no one can recreate the entry) also went so far as to erase the entire history of the Wikipedia Art page – there is no record of the “work” (in its initial manifestation on Wikipedia) and its transformations, other than in the debates linked to above (and a few other snippets of arguing I didn’t bother posting right now).
Poor form, gentleman. We’ll have archives and updates live on WikipediaArt.org soon.
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Jimmy Wales likes Wikipedia Art
That’s right. The co-founder of Wikipedia has joined the Facebook Group for Wikipedia Art.
How’s that for some credibility? If only these guys agreed (still marked for deletion).
The group. Or click image to see that he is a member – this is for real, people.
Facebook Group for Wikipedia: member name, Jimmy Wales
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Wikipedia Art update (and updated)
Lots of cool edits to the page – see the history as well.
Huge debate roaring as well. My favorite quote here (followed by mini argument) is by Wikipedia user “shmeck,” aka contemporary artist Shane Mecklenburger:
KEEP The Wikipedia Art page is a self-aware example of Wikipedia’s mission of collective epistemology. It enacts and exposes Wikipedia’s own strengths, weaknesses, potential, and limits as a system of understanding and as a contemplative object of beauty. The page is also a self-aware example of the strengths, weaknesses, potential, and limits of new media art as a an object of contemplation. New media art is an example of how the boundaries between art and every other discipline from epistemology to microbiology disintegrated (see interdisciplinarity) in the 21st Century. This page is an example of how a Wikipedia page can go beyond simply existing as a Wikipedia page, while retaining its basic utilitarian Wikipedia function. Those who care most about Wikipedia’s mission would probably agree that Wikipedia already is a collaborative art form. If you feel that Wikipedia is a beautiful thing, then at some level (whether or not you admit it) you consider Wikipedia an art form, with its own codes and conventions. This is an example of something that explains art, explores art, and is art all at the same time. Deleting this page would be a statement that the exegesis of conceptual art and/or new media art has no place in Wikipedia, except on the tired, lifeless, and opaque conceptual art and new media art pages. Why shouldn’t a tiny, obscure corner of Wikipedia-brand collective epistemology be preserved for an instructive, self-referential, and ever-changing living example of what an art object can be in the 21st Century? Should this page be judged invalid only because it refers to itself? This artwork can only exist as a Wikipedia page that refers to itself. Therefore, deleting would not only send the message “this is not Wikipedia”; it would also be saying “this is not art.” comment added by Shmeck (talk • contribs) 00:27, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
++++ The above is a wonderful commentary, but Wikipedia is not your web page to wax eloquently about what you think ought to exist. Bus stop (talk) 00:34, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
- Comment: Thanks, but isn’t that what everyone is doing here? Talking about what ought to exist on Wikipedia? You haven’t addressed a single one of my points.
—- UPDATED, more nice stuff
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- This sort of artwork already has strong precedents in history – the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse, Debord’s idea of Situationist detournement, and although I am not part of this collective, I fully intend to include it as part of my chapter for the upcoming book of distributed writing commissioned by Turbulence.org, and it will be mentioned as part of my talk on new art practices at a guest lecture at Denver University on 2/16/09, and I have already written on it on my critical blog in London. Therefore, the reference is to the emergence of the concept, which now exists outside Wikipedia, and is paradoxical but not solipsistic. I think that the person suggesting the idea of letting the idea grow is well-reasoned, and a time for review (say, 90 days) could be set for re-evaluation.–24.14.54.88 (talk) 22:17, 14 February 2009 (UTC)–TS
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- Comment: Please note that, transgressive though they were, the Surrealists played “exquisite corpses” using their own notepaper. They did not try to scrawl it the margins of a library book. This is the problem. Nobody objects to a Wiki based artwork. The problem is that it can’t be inserted into Wikipedia because Wikipedia is not just a Wiki. It is an encyclopedia. It is no more appropriate to add non-encyclopaedic content here than it is to write stuff in library books. I have refrained from using the term “vandalism” because I think this is all a big misunderstanding rather than a deliberate attempt to damage Wikipedia. None the less, that is the effect it is having. —DanielRigal (talk) 22:24, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
- Comment: I would very much beg to differ on the point of the Surrealists. Dali would lay in traffic, Artaud organized a riot aginst Dulac’s first screening of the Clergyman and the Seashell. If the Surrealists would have found it “appropriate” for the message, I am absolutely sure they would have done Corpses in the library. The way I see it, if it gets pulled, it will become by definition a case for reinsertion as an “event” in New Media art history. However, I know the project is being watched by a number of curators with great interest.–Patlichty (talk) 23:36, 14 February 2009 (UTC)