[NetBehaviour] [spectre] post-doc grant programme (blocked postings)

[Joel Weishaus]

Rob;

I can't pretend that you don't make some good arguments here.
However, admittedly working in a specialized corner of academia, as an 
artist in Engaged Humanities and Depth Psychology programs, I can't 
condemn academic scholars outright, especially as there are some whose 
work influences mine, and whose integrity I've come to respect.

As for the canon, the best work that enters it is only after the artist 
is dead and the dust has settled. So that the artist-at-work isn't 
tainted by rising prices, grants or prizes. I best know the world of 
poetry, and of poets whose work was lauded when they were young and then 
succumbed to thinking they could get away with anything they wrote 
thereafter, sort of like Duchamp, Warhol, and now Koons.

Digital Art is fascinating to me because most of the artists are young, 
and are using tools some of which didn't exist until a few years (or 
hours!) ago. However, because of this, many are dazzled by the 
technology, instead of patiently learning their craft within the larger 
arena of art and history of ideas across fields. It is sort of like how 
Hollywood has adopted computerized effects to make quick bucks from the 
superficial, instead of hiring the best writers and cinematographers, as 
they used to do. So what I'm wondering which digital work being shown by 
Google, et al,, will survive even this decade, much less this century.
I also think that critics of Digital Art on the level of a Greenberg, 
Rosenberg, Stein, etc., first need to appear, and not those who are 
academics (to take your side), but (self)educated amateurs. Edward has 
the talent!

-Joel






On 9/6/2014 1:00 PM, Rob Myers wrote:
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> On 04/09/14 06:24 PM, Joel Weishaus wrote:
>> Interesting that we're reading this differently.
>>
>> My take: I read her last paragraph as meaning: Before the kind of
>> art history that's now practiced in universities, only white men
>> were canonized. Now art history is being re-written to include
>> woman, African-Americans, and non-Europeans.
> Yes this is the positive self-image of Pollocks' political programme.
> And of the art-history I was taught two decades ago in a provincial
> English art school.
>
> Part of what I am doing here is examining the ways in which its
> effects contradict its stated intentions.
>
>> Here's an earlier paragraph:
>>
>> "The real problem is that even in the game of source hunting and
>> influence tracing, ideology is already at work. Influence, linking
>> artists and artworks in a one-way direction, such as family
>> descent, is a dressed-up way of protecting the canon (and the art
>> market), and this machine-aided form of looking for similarity
>> would only reinforce it."
> Pollock is arguing that the software doesn't look for influences
> outside "the canon". This Manichaeanly reinforces "the canon", and the
> art market. Protecting "the canon" and the art market are presumably
> bad things to do.
>
> But Pollock is involved in the same work, only with inkier fingers.
> Increasing the reach of "the canon" hardly decreases the importance of
> nodal works within it, and those works newly added or related to "the
> canon" will see their value within the art market increased or in some
> cases newly created.
>
> This is why I argue that switching to Moretti-style study of
> populations of works can be of use to soi-disant progressive art
> history. It can move beyond merely laundering regional canons and
> adding a few works to the market to turning the entirety of art
> production and reception into objects of critical study.
>
>> The Digital Humanities also has a similar program for literary
>> history, which is just as superficial, if not silly. When scholars
>> become programmers, the soul of scholarship is lost.
> I enjoy writing greatly but society no longer needs the pen-wielding
> colonial administrators that academia trains. For scholarly regard to
> be something other than historical re-enactment, it must engage
> critically with and *through* digital methods.
>
>> It makes me think of art critic Jed Perl who asks the question of
>> critics looking at a piece of art, "What do you/feel/."
> We can check that with consumer EEG headsets now. ;-)
>
>> Okay, so I'm heading into territory where coders will come after me
>> with pitchforks. Of course, virtual ones.
> - ----∈ ψ Ψ ;-)
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