Recently in Media Category

For a bit, you could see my name on Google News in the Sci/Tech section with a link to the article.

New Yorker Barry Hoggard draws a line in the sand when it comes to online privacy. In May he said farewell to 1251 Facebook friends by deleting his account of four years to protest what he calls the social network's eroding privacy policies.

"I'm sick of keeping track of my Facebook privacy settings and what boxes I have to check to protect myself," says Hoggard, a computer programmer. "I don't have a lot of illusions about online privacy, but Facebook has gone too far," he says of Facebook's recent privacy policy changes.

I wanted to be described as programmer/entrepreneur. I need a PR team. I'm hoping more articles appear, as I was also interviewed by a Washington Post reporter after writing about canceling my Facebook account on May 7. It has now been two weeks, so I assume my profile is safely gone.

Delete Billboard for the 2009 New York Street Advertising Takeover by Ji Lee, image via his website

I don't have a lot of illusions about privacy when using social media such as Flickr or Twitter, but there is a difference when a company like Facebook behaves in a really sleazy fashion.

I work on websites every day, including my own such as the art calendar ArtCat. I did not start out with one privacy policy for the calendar, and then gradually claim the right to use more and more information submitted to us. For example, I could offer a list of contemporary art galleries for sale to advertisers or artists looking for representation, but that would be wrong because it's not what the galleries expected when they gave information to us. However, given the changes in Facebook's privacy policy since 2005, they would consider this perfectly reasonable behavior.

In addition, with recent changes to their development platform, Facebook applications have more and more access to your private data, including applications you have not chosen to install, but your friends have. Want to share information only with friends? You're sharing it with applications that your friends use.

And how about those neat new sharing tools introduced by Facebook? Until they corrected a bug, visiting sites that are using Open Graph allowed them to install an application to your profile without asking you. Given their privacy track record, including the recent exposure of private chats, I wouldn't trust them to fix those holes quickly. "Instant personalization" indeed.

Related:

• The Rumpus: Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee
• rocket.ly: Why You Should Still Quit Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb: How to Delete Facebook Applications
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
• groovyPost: How to Permanently Delete your Facebook Account

I, along with a few other people you have probably already heard of, will be participating in a panel on blogs and contemporary art organized and moderated by Robin White for ArtTable. Full details below. I recommend RSVP-ing right away, as seating is limited.

WHEN

Friday, January 15, 6:30 pm

Please note that the Gallery is open 12 - 6 pm so arrive early if you want to view the final phase of exhibitions at X.

WHERE

X Initiative
548 West 22nd Street
New York NY 10011

Moderator: Robin White

Panelists:

Barry Hoggard, Bloggy, ArtCat, Culture Pundits: blogger, collector, entrepreneur

Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City: news and opinion blogger, writer

William Powhida: artist, blogger

Kelly Shindler, Art21: educational blogger

Edward Winkleman: gallery owner, blogger

Blogs about contemporary arts and the art world play an increasingly important role by providing multiple viewpoints, information and commentaries about the art market, the gallery scene, artists and their work on a daily basis. As the number of printed newspaper and culture journals decreases, some blogs are becoming a source for substantial art journalism and art criticism. By pairing the 5-most read, and hotly debated, bloggers of New York City, we want to touch on a topic that is timely and relevant, and offer a dynamic and lively conversation at the X-Initiative.

We have curated the panel to incorporate a wide spectrum of practicing bloggers: from art news to art education, from the perspective of the art market including both the point of view of an artist and a gallerist, and those who are taking the online art world to a whole new-networked level.

About the Panelists:

Barry Hoggard writes about art and politics on bloggy.com. He is the editor, along with James Wagner, of the arts calendar ArtCat, and proprietor of CulturePundits.com, a curated network of today�s leading cultural websites and blogs. He recently began publishing Idiom, an online publication of urban artistic practice. He is also a software developer.

http://bloggy.com/

http://www.culturepundits.com/

http://www.artcat.com/

http://idiommag.com/

Paddy Johnson aka ArtFagCity blogger, has been published in artreview.com, Art in America, FlashArt, Print Magazine, Time Out NY, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post and many others. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet and in 2008, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowships and became the first blogger to earn a Creative Capital Arts Writers grant from the Creative Capital Foundation.

http://www.artfagcity.com/

William Powhida�s blog has covered controversial topics including creating an "enemies" list as well as letters addressed to famous contemporary curators, collectors and critics, requesting recognition. According to Wikipedia as an artist he constructs work deliberately about growing his own fame, addressing the major obstacles facing emerging contemporary artists.

http://williampowhida.blogspot.com/

Kelly Shindler, Art 21 Blog Founder and Editor, has worked at Art21 since 2003, where she is presently Director of Special Projects. She is also a curator and writer, as well as a dual Master�s candidate in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism/Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

http://blog.art21.org/

Edward Winkleman is an art dealer and a blogger. He started his eponymous blog about the art world and politics in 2005 and is a contributing editor to the international blog Art World Salon. He began his career in the art world with a series of guerilla-style exhibitions organized in New York and London under the name 'hit & run'. In 2001 he co-founded the Plus Ultra Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Moving into Manhattan's art district Chelsea in 2006, he changed the name of the gallery to Winkleman Gallery.

http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com/

About the organizers:

Robin White Owen is a principal at MediaCombo, an award winning multimedia production company that specializes in working with culture, science and environmental organizations. As a blogger, she writes about culture, social media and multimedia in and out of the gallery and museum. Robin has worked on productions for the The Jewish Museum, and the British Museum, in addition to working with VIART, View Magazine, and ArtForum.

www.mediacombo.net

http://mediacomb.net/blog

twitter.com/rocombo

Heather Darcy Bhandari is the director of artist relations at Mixed Greens. Since joining the gallery in 2000, she has curated over forty-five exhibitions while managing and advising a roster of nearly two-dozen artists. She curates independent shows, sits on the board of NURTUREart, and co-authored the professional development guide for artists, ART/WORK, published by Simon and Schuster in 2009. Heather majored in visual arts and anthropology at Brown University and received an MFA in painting from Pennsylvania State University. Before joining Mixed Greens, she worked at contemporary galleries Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin in New York City.

Lauren Pearson is a contemporary art historian and is currently Assistant Director at ArtCycle, a contemporary art consignment gallery. She recently received her Master's degree in contemporary art and cultural theory from the University College London, UK. Her thesis was titled, "The Spectacular is the Obvious: Negotiating Place in Postcolonial, War-torn and Embodied Geographies" and explored notions of contemporary art and geography. She received her undergraduate degree in art history from New York University in 2001, and has worked for the Smithsonian Institute's Archives of American Art, Milton Glaser Inc., Peter Halley Studio, and FRED [London/Leipzig], LLC. A native of San Francisco, she currently lives in New York City.

About X Initiative

X is a not-for-profit initiative of the global contemporary art community founded to exist for one year at 548 West 22nd Street to present exhibitions and programming. Advised by a 50+ advisory board comprised of artists, curators, museum professionals, gallerists, collectors, art historians and critics, X reaches across traditional boundaries to form a consortium interested in responding quickly to the major philosophical and economic shifts impacting culture. Questions posed in the form of programming address relevant and pressing issues pertaining to the changing landscape of contemporary art.

James says it better than I can, as usual. Today marks the launch of our new publishing venture, Idiom.

Its mission statement:

Idiom is an online publication of urban artistic practice. By allowing emerging artists, writers and arts professionals to report on, review, and otherwise cover overlooked or under-thought aspects of the larger creative community, Idiom offers a local, engaged counterpoint to the prevailing discourse of contemporary art.

CBS Outdoor decides billboards such as this one by Suzanne Opton as part of her billboard project cannot be run during the Republican National Convention.

[Click here if you don't see the video]

Minneapolis police confiscate equipment, notes, and computers from the Glass Bead Collective without their consent. The collective are the people who released the video of an NYPD officer assaulting a bicyclist. The Minneapolis police officer told them they were confiscating their belongings for "Homeland Security" reasons.

Check out the photo from Newsday of a weapon recovered in a drug bust on Long Island.

Suffolk County District Attorney, Thomas Spota, shows one of weapons that was confiscated during a cocaine drug bust in Riverhead, at his office at Riverhead Criminal Court (Photo by James Carbone, Newsday / July 29, 2008)

"He loves you, and he needs money!"

"Results like this do not belong on the resumé of a supreme being."

[click here if you don't see the video above]

I was reading this otherwise pretty good article on a young activist in today's City Section of the New York Times today when one thing leapt out at me.

To the Ramparts (Gently)
By BEN GIBBERD
Published: March 23, 2008

...

“I actually think violent action isn’t radical at all,” he said firmly. “Radicals go to the root of the problem, and they want to change society. Violence doesn’t change society, and if it doesn’t go to the root of the problem, it’s not radical.” Mr. Kelly paused. “I don’t know what it is,” he added, “but it has nothing to do with what I want to do.”

Drama, Yes. Violence, No.

Despite his attitude toward violent protest, Mr. Kelly has not shied away from dramatic tactics. He has been arrested twice, once two years ago during a protest on Pace’s Manhattan campus, and once a year ago when he and about 20 other S.D.S. members were detained for occupying an Army-Navy recruiting center in Lower Manhattan. Neither arrest led to any charges.

...

Is this writer implying that getting arrested in non-violent protests is somehow a moral equivalent of using a bomb or other violence to make the same point? I find that a rather dangerous position.

Related: James's post titled Times Square bomblet outperforms march of a million

[screengrab from my profile]

Via C-Monster, I learned that the Brooklyn Museum is sharing images of works in their collection via a Facebook application called Artshare. They set it up so that other institutions can join in too, and so far the list includes

• Metropolitan Museum
• Victoria & Albert
• Indianapolis Museum of Art
• Picture Australia (which combines images from multiple collections)
• Powerhouse Museum
• Walters Art Museum

I particularly liked this, from the Museum's blog announcement:

For the past week, we’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploading…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.

If you're already on Facebook, go here to add it.

Related:

• The Brooklyn Museum group on Flickr
• the ArtCal Facebook page
• the Culture Pundits Facebook page

James and I, along with the critic Brian Sholis, will be conversing at CUE Art Foundation on Tuesday as part of their career development program for artists called "Meeting Artists' Needs."

The details:

In the Public Eye: The Role of Today’s Critic: Brian Sholis, writer and Editor of Artforum.com in conversation with bloggers Barry Hoggard (bloggy.com) and James Wagner (jameswagner.com). This event is free for CUE members and $5 for non-members.

Go here to reserve a ticket.