[-empyre-] RE: empyre digest, Vol 1 #102 - 5 msgs

[John Haber <jh624@columbia.edu>]

Jeffs:
>>and I would contend that the internetwork as a publishing media assists 
in avoiding such a pitfall for you no longer need to "own a press" to get 
your ideas into the eyes and ears of a broad spectrum of "others"

I'm really hopeful we can make a crack in the system -- and hopeful that 
the legislature won't make our work illegal!  Still, while I don't wish to 
be negative, I'm cautious.  From the seller's side, most of my artist 
friends have had Web sites, and some brave souls have put together really 
good online collectives and joint exhibits.  And yet I don't see them 
becoming exactly famous.  I can't even promise any of them have sold a 
single work this way!  (It'd be ironic if the key gain to them from sofware 
would be that at least CDs make it cheaper and easier to show your stuff 
around to galleries, compared to slides.)  From the buyer's side, we all 
know how overwhelmed with information the Web has made people and how much 
they should be aware of the unreliable nature of much of it.  In other 
words, I'm not sure we've solved yet how the Internet can help people 
either get attention or find work.

I've got my Web site, a kind of online magazine of art reviews and essays, 
and I can attest to both drawbacks.  From my point of view, I know I turn 
up in Google a lot, but most artists, galleries, and curators don't know I 
exist.  (I'm on a lot of mailing lists but so far only one museum press 
list.)  From the reader's point of view, I get students coming to me every 
day looking for answers, and I know as a kind of teacher that I have to 
warn them:  learn research skills, cite your sources, and evaluate them all 
critically, but especially so on the Web, where anyone can post anything 
without peer review.  As I remind them to ask themselves, Who the heck am 
I?  Indeed, I hesitate to mention that side of me here, to an intelligent 
audience!

We definitely need to figure out how artists can undermine the system's 
rigidity.  Better online distribution and sales definitely has potential, 
I'm hoping.  Obviously I think that free distribution, or a kind of what 
Marx might have called primitive socialism, combined with working hard for 
a day job, in what the world still calls capitalism, doesn't sound that 
much like an assault on free markets.  <grin>

John
jhaber@haberarts.com
http://www.haberarts.com/