A more or less common joke in 2013 is to refer to an imaginary Hate button, or a -1 button, in reference to the ubiquitous Like/+1/Favorite buttons that appear to adorn every single thing in the world wide web these days[1]. I think it's an idea worth thinking about for a moment.
What if you had Like and Hate buttons for pictures, and what if you bubbled to the top pictures for which: the sum of likes and hates was large relative to the number of views, and the difference between number of likes and hates was small relative to their sum.
What results is pictures that lots of people react to, sufficiently to mash a button, but which people are more or less evenly split on. Many like it, many hate it.
I dunno about you, but I think I might like to see those pictures,
[1] Yes, I know that some places have up/down voting buttons, but I'm pretty sure the down votes usually make the object trend toward less visible, and ups make the object more visible, which isn't at all what I propose here.
Showing posts with label revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revolution. Show all posts
Friday, November 22, 2013
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Curation
This is my blog, so I ask you to indulge me a little here and permit me to make the following bald assertion: the proper purpose of art, and of curating art, is to make available to the public work that will connect with members of the public, that will challenge us, that will teach us, that will open us to larger ideas and feelings, that will expand us, that will entertain us, that will move us. Art is, or should be, ultimately, for The People, for their greater enrichment.
Modern art curators, gallerists, and so on would, most likely, sign on to some or all of this. They would be quite unlikely to admit that the actual (as opposed to proper) purpose of modern Art Curation is to create an artificially limited supply of what is basically a wildly available product, in order to create the impression of a closed and exclusive club, with the aim of creating and maintaining a largely artificial and extremely lucrative market.
I beg your indulgence a little further, and baldly claim that, claims to the contrary, that is precisely what modern art is about. Like all human institutions, the goals and desires of the people in it are largely irrelevant. The institution itself behaves in such a way as to entrench its position and to expand itself and its influence. So, while individual curators and gallerists and artists may earnestly desire to serve some greater good, the institution as a whole does not. Among other things, it has devised its own language which seems to exist primarily to exclude the unwashed.
Whether or not you believe my assertion that the institution of Art operates largely to protect a lucrative market, perhaps we can agree that one would have a hard row to hoe should one choose to argue that the modern institution of Art effectively serves some greater public good.
There have been some motions toward democratizing access to art. Various web sites are springing up to offer art at various price points to various larger markets. These, I think, are really just an attempt to expand the exclusive club, and to thereby cash in. The aim is not to actually revolutionize the institution, but merely to join it and make a bunch of money. Making the same old art available to people who merely have a few thousand to spend isn't really the same thing as democratizing art itself.
On the opposite side, we have a sort of mass curation process which occurs in public, on web sites like flickr and so on. Rather than a cadre of credentialed gatekeepers trimming down the flood of available art into a small and manageable set of reliable workers and a right-sized flow of Certified Important Art, we have everyone on the planet empowered to Like or +1 anything, and to thereby to collectively elevate certain work over other work. By skimming the very top of this totem pole, we get a set of.. something.
The trouble on this end is that when the tools are a Like button and a 100,000,000 people, what you get is a homogenized collection of pictures that people generally tend to like. Add in some social norming, and the result is pretty uninspiring.
The Fine Art side has at least a chance of selecting work that is challenging, educational, expanding, interesting. The people in the system do, after all, perceive it as their job to do just that.
The democratic side doesn't. It is incapable of generating anything except some lowest common denominator of likable work. This is not because people are awful, it's simply that there are too many of them. Average up enough disparate opinions, and all the interesting stuff gets cancelled out. Every single person on 500px could have excellent taste in some sort of crazy avante garde form, but when you average up what the all like, that stuff gets eliminated because not enough people like any individual branch of the crazy.
So on the one side we have a Fine Art System which is devoted mainly toward maintaining a small and lucrative market, and on the other side we have homogenized and uninteresting pablum. The currently available systems are: Oligarchy, and Mob Rule. Neither one seems to be serving The People all that well, but at least nobody seems to be getting shot. Which is nice.
What is needed is some sort of middle ground. Simply replacing the gallerists and curators with a new set of Approved Gatekeepers won't help, they'll just descend into their own little world of madness. We don't need different oligarchs, and we certainly don't need more Mob Rule.
We need some way to generate small, interested, opinionated, and passionate groups of people who will make and curate art. We need some way to organize these groups, to rate and rank that output, and to make their output available. We surely do not lack for small, interested, opinionated, and passionate groups of people. The trouble is that these groups are of two kinds: the kind nobody has every heard of or ever will; and the kind that are already in charge, have been sucked into the Fine Art World, and are now serving the lucrative market. Perhaps we want something like a representative democracy, the traditional middle ground between oligarchy and the mob.
There are two problems:
I'm tempted to propose the phrase "continuous revolution" at this point, except that history has provided this phrase with the connotation "most obnoxious gang of oligarchs ever" so it's probably a bad choice. In any case, my notion of a cellular social network is clearly an attempt to provide precisely this sort of thing.
There's plenty of excellent photography out there, plenty of excellent Art. What is needed is a mechanism by which more of it can be found, anointed with the magical oil of Good Art and brought forward to the people, a mechanism which does not reward the ability to chatter about playing with the dialectics of reality, but rather rewards actually challenging, entertaining, and enriching. We need enough mob rule to keep the oligarchs down, and enough oligarchy to force some challenge, some variety, some difficulty onto us, The People.
Got any ideas?
Modern art curators, gallerists, and so on would, most likely, sign on to some or all of this. They would be quite unlikely to admit that the actual (as opposed to proper) purpose of modern Art Curation is to create an artificially limited supply of what is basically a wildly available product, in order to create the impression of a closed and exclusive club, with the aim of creating and maintaining a largely artificial and extremely lucrative market.
I beg your indulgence a little further, and baldly claim that, claims to the contrary, that is precisely what modern art is about. Like all human institutions, the goals and desires of the people in it are largely irrelevant. The institution itself behaves in such a way as to entrench its position and to expand itself and its influence. So, while individual curators and gallerists and artists may earnestly desire to serve some greater good, the institution as a whole does not. Among other things, it has devised its own language which seems to exist primarily to exclude the unwashed.
Whether or not you believe my assertion that the institution of Art operates largely to protect a lucrative market, perhaps we can agree that one would have a hard row to hoe should one choose to argue that the modern institution of Art effectively serves some greater public good.
There have been some motions toward democratizing access to art. Various web sites are springing up to offer art at various price points to various larger markets. These, I think, are really just an attempt to expand the exclusive club, and to thereby cash in. The aim is not to actually revolutionize the institution, but merely to join it and make a bunch of money. Making the same old art available to people who merely have a few thousand to spend isn't really the same thing as democratizing art itself.
On the opposite side, we have a sort of mass curation process which occurs in public, on web sites like flickr and so on. Rather than a cadre of credentialed gatekeepers trimming down the flood of available art into a small and manageable set of reliable workers and a right-sized flow of Certified Important Art, we have everyone on the planet empowered to Like or +1 anything, and to thereby to collectively elevate certain work over other work. By skimming the very top of this totem pole, we get a set of.. something.
The trouble on this end is that when the tools are a Like button and a 100,000,000 people, what you get is a homogenized collection of pictures that people generally tend to like. Add in some social norming, and the result is pretty uninspiring.
The Fine Art side has at least a chance of selecting work that is challenging, educational, expanding, interesting. The people in the system do, after all, perceive it as their job to do just that.
The democratic side doesn't. It is incapable of generating anything except some lowest common denominator of likable work. This is not because people are awful, it's simply that there are too many of them. Average up enough disparate opinions, and all the interesting stuff gets cancelled out. Every single person on 500px could have excellent taste in some sort of crazy avante garde form, but when you average up what the all like, that stuff gets eliminated because not enough people like any individual branch of the crazy.
So on the one side we have a Fine Art System which is devoted mainly toward maintaining a small and lucrative market, and on the other side we have homogenized and uninteresting pablum. The currently available systems are: Oligarchy, and Mob Rule. Neither one seems to be serving The People all that well, but at least nobody seems to be getting shot. Which is nice.
What is needed is some sort of middle ground. Simply replacing the gallerists and curators with a new set of Approved Gatekeepers won't help, they'll just descend into their own little world of madness. We don't need different oligarchs, and we certainly don't need more Mob Rule.
We need some way to generate small, interested, opinionated, and passionate groups of people who will make and curate art. We need some way to organize these groups, to rate and rank that output, and to make their output available. We surely do not lack for small, interested, opinionated, and passionate groups of people. The trouble is that these groups are of two kinds: the kind nobody has every heard of or ever will; and the kind that are already in charge, have been sucked into the Fine Art World, and are now serving the lucrative market. Perhaps we want something like a representative democracy, the traditional middle ground between oligarchy and the mob.
There are two problems:
- surfacing the work of little groups of weirdos so we, the general public, and jerks on the internet, can find it.
- preventing little groups of weirdos from cementing themselves into place as permanent gatekeepers of taste.
I'm tempted to propose the phrase "continuous revolution" at this point, except that history has provided this phrase with the connotation "most obnoxious gang of oligarchs ever" so it's probably a bad choice. In any case, my notion of a cellular social network is clearly an attempt to provide precisely this sort of thing.
There's plenty of excellent photography out there, plenty of excellent Art. What is needed is a mechanism by which more of it can be found, anointed with the magical oil of Good Art and brought forward to the people, a mechanism which does not reward the ability to chatter about playing with the dialectics of reality, but rather rewards actually challenging, entertaining, and enriching. We need enough mob rule to keep the oligarchs down, and enough oligarchy to force some challenge, some variety, some difficulty onto us, The People.
Got any ideas?
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Statistical Pop Art?
One of the problems I think about far more than I ought to is the great river of images being created today. Suppose that one wanted to get a sense of what kinds of photographs are being made today by the masses?
You could look at flickr's Explore to get a sampling, and there are no doubt many many other ways to get a sampling of images being created on a day to day basis. However, as of this writing, flickr gets something over 1,000,000 photographs uploaded every day, and it's not the biggest. How many photographs does one need to look at to be sure that one is getting even a vague notion of what people are actually doing? If I looked at 1000 images a day, how likely is it that I could miss a smallish community of people doing something really interesting? A productive group of artists could easily produce 1000 images a year, and nonetheless be utterly lost in the noise.
It's certainly not necessary to be plugged in to any current zeitgeist, to produce art. However, if you do want to be so plugged in, and you do want your art to be informed by what the mass of imagery is doing, you have a definite problem on your hands. To grasp the current zeitgeist isn't an unreasonable desire, but it does seem to be an intractable problem.
You can simply dip into the river and see what you can pull out. I think it might be interesting to apply technology, however. There are ways to approximately classify images as similar, either by algorithmic examination of the picture itself, or through metadata like tags and surrounding text, or by applying social connectivity graphs (making the assumption that groups of friends are probably taking similar photographs). I think it would be interesting to use tools of this sort to classify and collect, roughly and approximately, large groupings of images.
By creating groupings of, in some sense, similar or related images, you could divide the river of imagery into stuff that has been so grouped, and stuff that has not been so grouped. Sampling a grouping containing a few million images might well provide a more artistically complete grasp of the group than sampling purely at random. Understanding the groups might give you a more thorough grasp of the snapshot zeitgeist than simply digging through flickr's Explore.
Then you've got the unclassifiable stuff, the stuff that you haven't been able to lump in with other stuff. This might be richer ore, in a way. This will surely be where the odd communities that are friends with nobody are experimenting in new ways. This might be where the unusual subjects and methods that nobody likes are in play. This might be where the really interesting stuff is to be found. There's probably still an utterly intractable number of images in here, but random dipping in here might dredge up more interesting work, on average.
You could look at flickr's Explore to get a sampling, and there are no doubt many many other ways to get a sampling of images being created on a day to day basis. However, as of this writing, flickr gets something over 1,000,000 photographs uploaded every day, and it's not the biggest. How many photographs does one need to look at to be sure that one is getting even a vague notion of what people are actually doing? If I looked at 1000 images a day, how likely is it that I could miss a smallish community of people doing something really interesting? A productive group of artists could easily produce 1000 images a year, and nonetheless be utterly lost in the noise.
It's certainly not necessary to be plugged in to any current zeitgeist, to produce art. However, if you do want to be so plugged in, and you do want your art to be informed by what the mass of imagery is doing, you have a definite problem on your hands. To grasp the current zeitgeist isn't an unreasonable desire, but it does seem to be an intractable problem.
You can simply dip into the river and see what you can pull out. I think it might be interesting to apply technology, however. There are ways to approximately classify images as similar, either by algorithmic examination of the picture itself, or through metadata like tags and surrounding text, or by applying social connectivity graphs (making the assumption that groups of friends are probably taking similar photographs). I think it would be interesting to use tools of this sort to classify and collect, roughly and approximately, large groupings of images.
By creating groupings of, in some sense, similar or related images, you could divide the river of imagery into stuff that has been so grouped, and stuff that has not been so grouped. Sampling a grouping containing a few million images might well provide a more artistically complete grasp of the group than sampling purely at random. Understanding the groups might give you a more thorough grasp of the snapshot zeitgeist than simply digging through flickr's Explore.
Then you've got the unclassifiable stuff, the stuff that you haven't been able to lump in with other stuff. This might be richer ore, in a way. This will surely be where the odd communities that are friends with nobody are experimenting in new ways. This might be where the unusual subjects and methods that nobody likes are in play. This might be where the really interesting stuff is to be found. There's probably still an utterly intractable number of images in here, but random dipping in here might dredge up more interesting work, on average.
Sunday, November 4, 2012
REVOLUTION!
Art, like everything else, proceeds by processes of evolution and revolution. That which is change, but not revolutionary, is pretty much covered by the evolutionary part. We see art made with clear antecedents, synthesized with some modest new ideas to create a new thing. This is essentially evolutionary. We also see art made with radical new ideas, art which is unrecognizable as art, or barely so. We see art without clear antecedents, or with clear antecedents which are not themselves art, or with clear antecedents from other media.
Photography, perhaps more than other media, leaves room for ideas and techniques from its history. The past is not swept away by the new, it continues, albeit with less vigor and practiced by fewer. We see wet plate technology applied to thoroughly modern erotica and social commentary. We will probably never cease to see new Ansel Adams styled mountainscapes, shot with ever newer technology and presumably with ever higher contrast, and eventually skies so black that neither light, nor matter, nor information can escape from them.
The evolutionary paths for photography's future appear to be well-manned. We see, however, little that is truly transgressive, now that the competition to find out who can make the most banal photograph of nothing appears to have died down.
What is trangressive, though? What form would a revolution in photographic art take? We have seen in the last century a great deal of confusion of social transgression with artistic transgression. This, of course, quite on purpose and intended to assert that the social and the artistic are the same. This is balderdash. Making paintings with your own shit is socially transgressive, but artistically not even interesting. Using a new kind of paint with a limited color palette isn't even new. The fact that it smells bad is even less new. Ultimately, paintings made with shit and similar works are evolutionary art liberally smeared with a dose of social taboo to create interest.
Artistic revolution occurs when artistic boundaries are transgressed.
What do we know to be true about the photographic arts? Invert those truths. Ravish those truths and leave them for dead. Dig past the truth to the problem it claims to solve, and then either solve that problem by other means, or render the problem irrelevant in your work.
Destroy the light. Make art of the drunk-chick-facebook-snapshot. Obliterate the full range of tonal values. Focus on the wrong thing - but make it the right choice; throw white balance to the wolves - but make the image true; Cut off the subject's head - and thereby make me understand the subject.
Photography, perhaps more than other media, leaves room for ideas and techniques from its history. The past is not swept away by the new, it continues, albeit with less vigor and practiced by fewer. We see wet plate technology applied to thoroughly modern erotica and social commentary. We will probably never cease to see new Ansel Adams styled mountainscapes, shot with ever newer technology and presumably with ever higher contrast, and eventually skies so black that neither light, nor matter, nor information can escape from them.
The evolutionary paths for photography's future appear to be well-manned. We see, however, little that is truly transgressive, now that the competition to find out who can make the most banal photograph of nothing appears to have died down.
What is trangressive, though? What form would a revolution in photographic art take? We have seen in the last century a great deal of confusion of social transgression with artistic transgression. This, of course, quite on purpose and intended to assert that the social and the artistic are the same. This is balderdash. Making paintings with your own shit is socially transgressive, but artistically not even interesting. Using a new kind of paint with a limited color palette isn't even new. The fact that it smells bad is even less new. Ultimately, paintings made with shit and similar works are evolutionary art liberally smeared with a dose of social taboo to create interest.
Artistic revolution occurs when artistic boundaries are transgressed.
What do we know to be true about the photographic arts? Invert those truths. Ravish those truths and leave them for dead. Dig past the truth to the problem it claims to solve, and then either solve that problem by other means, or render the problem irrelevant in your work.
Destroy the light. Make art of the drunk-chick-facebook-snapshot. Obliterate the full range of tonal values. Focus on the wrong thing - but make it the right choice; throw white balance to the wolves - but make the image true; Cut off the subject's head - and thereby make me understand the subject.
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