We pointed out that since the 1970s, colleges and universities have produced far more Ph.Ds than the academy could possibly absorb and that because of the greater reliance on adjunct faculty, this trend has continued. In the days since the conference, and quite independently, a discussion thread has developed on the listserv, Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians (CAAH) titled, “On the joys and desperation of art history.” It has been heartrending to hear the struggles of young academics and older, now wiser adjuncts that never did land a tenure-track job. One issue that both the listserv thread and our conference paper have in common are the implications of “Plan B;” the alternate career paths taken out of necessity.

These highly trained professionals have taken jobs in libraries, museums, and other centers of learning beyond the university. At the same time, Web 2.0 technology has created the opportunity for publishing, learning and collaboration anywhere and has empowered these wayward academics. The demographic force of these Ph.D.s coupled with technology, and other pressures is enough to ensure change. Perhaps academia has assured its own creative destruction. Here is my contribution to CAAH:

As nearly everyone has acknowledged, the implications of the trends we are discussing in “On the joys and desperation of art history” are extremely important to the future of our discipline and the humanities as a whole. I want to ask these questions in a slightly different way. What are the implications of a generation of Ph.D.s that find alternate careers in libraries, museums, and other, non-traditional research and teaching environments? Many of the highly trained art historians who work outside of the university will find ways to join together their training and their new careers and they will “teach” and “research” in ways that may not have developed within the academy. We see the education departments of museums now hiring Ph.D.s and being quickly transformed and we see libraries taking on increasingly public roles in research and education (all of this aided by advances in technology). Maybe we should not mourn the loss of the academy of the 20th century but rather focus our collective attention on embracing and supporting this broader universe of scholars.

Perhaps this is too optimistic, but we worry that simply chasing the jobs of the last century will not allow our discipline to survive the next.

Here is the slide show from the conference:

This week, the Brooklyn is Watching podcast focused on a number of works, including Selavy Oh’s conceptual “Attractive Art.” smARThistory’s video podcast (see below) took up that work (literally a tractor beam pulling us to an underwater corner of the sim), and expanded the discussion a bit more, tying it to issues Jay raised about attention at Brooklyn is Watching — an un-curated space where all the art left there by its creators vies for our attention both in Second Life, and in an art gallery (Jack the Pelican Presents) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Selavy Oh’s work also seems to comment on the “attention economy.” New questions arise like, what, if any, differences arise in the “attention economy” inside virtual worlds?

Oh, and of course Selavy Oh’s name recalls Duchamp’s female alter-ego, Rose Selavy.

From “The Economy of Attention” by Georg Franck:

The economy of attention not only looks back on an ancient pre-history, it also has a long industrial history. It was pre-industrial as long as publication technologies were either of the handicraft type or, respectively, had not yet permeated the entire economy. Attention economy reached its early industrial phase when the first, relatively simple information and communication technologies developed. The technology of printing, radio broadcasting and sound film for the first time assembled critical amounts of anonymously donated attention, turning the star cult into a mass phenomenon. It was then that the business of attraction became professionalised, that deliberate eye-catching became industrial in advertising. We may speak of a phase of full industrialisation since the advent of television. There, the secondary, i.e. the viewers’ aspect of reality specially created to attract attention, is beginning to compete with the primary aspect, directly perceived reality. During this last phase, most of the freely disposable, i.e. consuming attention passes through the various media; popularisation, i.e. mass production of prominence, arises. And during this phase there are also first indications that attention income is beginning to have greater weight than money income.

For attentive beings like us, only that which retains our attention is real. This in turn does not mean that everything we imagine or think of is real for us. We are very well able to distinguish between perception, recollection and imagination. But we are not as easily able to stop some recollection acting like a real event, or to prevent an idea from exerting real power.

There is nothing more real than images which stick to the mind. Nothing exerts greater power over us than that which forces us to take attentive note. Everything to which we inadvertently pay attention, inadvertently exerts some effect on us. And everything that captures our attention is real to a higher degree than the background. To be sure, there is little in the media which sticks to the mind. Luckily, there is no obligation to pay attention, either. But there is enough which attracts, which caters to laziness, which may be taken in on the side. And everything in which attention gets entangled becomes, first of all, real in a subjective sense.

From Wikipedia:

Herbert Simon was perhaps the first person to articulate the concept of attention economics when he wrote:

…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

Is there also some homage here (in Selavy Oh’s small cube at the end of the tractor beam which says “Look at This”) to the famous imperative “Drink Me” in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? And should we be worried, as Alice was?:

There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (`which certainly was not here before,’ said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words `DRINK ME’ beautifully printed on it in large letters.

It was all very well to say `Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. `No, I’ll look first,’ she said, `and see whether it’s marked “poison” or not’; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if your hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked `poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.

Salons have historically been most successful when culture is at a point of radical disjunction when traditional modes of meaning formation are strained. Salons provide an ongoing discussion where new and radical ideas can be viewed, assessed, and eventually understood. Is it possible that Jay has undertaken just such a effort? While we have only spent a short time with Jay and his group, it was clear to us that the underlying impulse the other night was not one of familiar ideas being comfortably rehashed, rather there was a subtle sense of urgency, that we were all seeking each others assistance as we, together, sought to understand what art in Second Life could be and what makes it important.

What we have done here is to create another podcast–with video–using snippets of our podcast with the BiW folks. It seems to us that BiW is approaching the art of Second Life very much the way we have looked at art here on smARThistory, by exploring it through conversation.

To listen to Jay’s entire unedited hour-long podcast, go to Brooklyn is Watching.

To listen to our podcast, click below:

Thanks to Steve Taylor (aka Stan Frangible) and Vassar College.

Part 2 on Michelangelo’s Last Judgment on the altar wall coming soon…

And while there are several valuable blogs, and online journals looking at art in Second Life (perhaps the best known being SLART Magazine, edited by the tireless Richard Minsky – aka Artworld Market), it seemed to us that bringing the eye of the art historian to what’s being created there could have real value.

One major source of inspiration over the last few months has certainly been Bettina Tizzy’s NPIRL (Not Possible in Real Life). After the Technology Day conference at FIT in late April, W. James Au (our keynote speaker), Raymond Yee, and other friends and colleagues were out having a drink, when the conversation turned to how silly it is how we walk around Second Life building and wearing very much the same things we do in real life. I had recently discovered Bettina’s blog — and James graciously introduced us. It was just at the time that Bettina’s project (together with Rezzable Productions), the Garden of NPIRL (inspired by Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights), was happening.

Here’s the bottom line: the art that we saw there really moved us.

This one is by Sabine Stonebender (whose work we have also long admired). Click the thumbnail to see. Amazing, no?

Last month, Bettina announced on a Metanomics show, that NPIRL and the Fashion Institute of Technology were hoping to plan a project where RL and SL fashion designers collaborated.

So, this summer, we’d like to begin a new podast/blog series — on art and artists in Second Life, beginning with an artist whose work I discovered just last April, Alizarin Goldflake.

But before we begin to talk about her work in more detail (in our next post), a few comments about what we’ve discovered about the power of the virtual world, specifically Second Life, is in order.

As I have written elsewhere, and as many have noted before me, it is remarkably easy to feel very real and powerful emotions in Second Life. I am deeply fond of my avatar, Max Newbold, who, it seems represents the best of me and also some deep truths about me. She has, to my mind, the best clothes. She is brave. She is beautiful. I created her. She is, and is not, me — both, simultaneously. When Max is slighted, I am slighted. When Max looks at art, I am looking at art. How does this happen? In his book, I, Avatar, Mark Stephen Meadows, explains this in terms of our biology, the way we are hard-wired with “mirror neurons,”

It’s the actions and appearances of avatars that allow us to identify with them and gets the mirror neurons hot. They may be just pixels, but your brain responds as if they were human. Our wiring quickly bridges the gap between the real and fictional. (90)

Even as I write this, I am aware that this is patently obvious to anyone who has spent any time in Second Life (or any other virtual world). But there are all those others, who are skeptical…

When Max is transported into and through works of art in Second Life, I am too. Is it strange that I have been as deeply moved while looking at art in Second Life as I have been looking at some of my favorite things in the “real” world, Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses for example — sculptures that very directly engage the body? It seems that art in Second Life can have the visceral, bodily power of Baroque art (think: Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa). But there’s more. Even when I am in Second Life looking at art that IS possible in real life, I am looking at it in the context of an entire virtual — unreal — environment, that enhances it, just as it enhances and transforms everything inside it. So perhaps one of the big questions we will tackle in our new series is the question of precisely how the context of the virtual environment changes our experience of looking at art.

The great power of art in Second Life derives precisely, it seems to me, from its Not-Possible-In-Real-Life aspects, from the way it can — quite literally — move your body for you, lift you, drop you, move around you, move you around, immerse you (literally) — and as I am writing this, I realize that what it often does is PUSH you into unexpected positions and movements that can, in turn, have an affect of your body — your REAL body. And more — in Second Life your “camera” is not fixed. You can look at yourself inside a work of art. I find myself doing this all the time (as in the photo above — that’s Max there on the right edge). Somehow looking at myself while immersed in a work of art, or inside an installation of sorts, becomes very important. Clearly, I am not the only one who snaps pics like this (witness the NPIRL Garden photo pool in Flickr). And this is certainly NPIRL (Not Possible in Real Life).

And perhaps that explains why I feel so moved by Alizarin Goldflake’s work in Second Life. She creates completely immersive environments that one can inhabit and that move around you, stimulating the eyes, the ears — creating, as Steven Zucker (aka Sez Zabelin) noted, a true gesamtkustwerk.

But more on Alizarin and our time with her in her studio in our next post.

Here’s a taste of her work — this is a new piece called Night Light (TP from here).

Oh! And in the pic on the front of the video I am wearing gorgeous dress by 3Star Tyne (more on 3Star soon) and in the video itself I am wearing a dress by Raven Pennyfeather, inspired by Minoan Snake Goddess figures.

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod