Painting

1.

Painting is a meme.

What is a meme?

Meme is a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to refer to units of cultural data which act like genes–replicating, spreading, and mutating in response to the selective demands of the culture in which they develop.  Many things count as memes–political slogans, film dialogue, emergent philosophical perspectives, technological breakthroughs, advertising brands, economic principals, fashion trends, viral YouTube videos, the very idea of a meme itself,  the list could go on.  What matters is that it is an idea which has the power to replicate itself from one mind to another to another and sustain itself through a stretch of cultural time.

So, if one is to take the history of painting as a meme spreading from mind to mind through its history—from cave paintings to Piero della Francesca to Thomas Gainsborough to Nancy Spero and beyond—each iteration in the history of the meme mutating itself in response to its own context—then what would it mean to extend the painting meme into the context of digital computer networks?  That is, assuming that painting did not, in fact, die sometime in the early 1980s, what would it mean to respond to the continually evolving painting meme in the context of ubiquitous computing in 2010?  How would the painting meme be translated when a painting is still an object, but an object dispersed through the network as a mutable digital photograph, as well?  This is not to say that all relevant painting must take this question of the network into consideration, but that it could be a pressing and fruitful intellectual question for at least some painters.

One way to think through an answer to this question is provided in the art historian David Joselit’s recent October essay “Painting Beside Itself.”  In this essay, Joselit suggests that recent painters such as Julia Koether, Stephen Prina, and Wade Guyton have developed practices which allegorize their objects’ own “transitivity” or continuous in-between-ness as they shuttle from one node of the network to another—from object, to photograph of object, to source material for another artist’s appropriation and re-circulation, and back again, in an ongoing circulation.  Works of art—here—are never situated in a static context; rather they are situated in continuous state of passage between contexts in a broader network of multiple contexts.

An alternative response to the question of the painting meme’s life in the network is being developed by young artists working on or around the Internet.  For these artists:

1. The computer screen is the primary surface on which painting will be viewed and, because of this, a new suite of phenomenological effects occuring between painting and viewer are opened for exploration.

2.  The rate of speed at which paintings travel is atrophied when uploaded directly to computer networks and this increase in speed allows one to, then, view the flow of painting in time.

In what follows, I’ll say a few more words about the relationship between painting and the computer, describe a recent trajectory of the painting meme amongst a group of Internet artists, and, then, focus, in particular, on the work of the PAINT FX collective.

2.

It’s possible that an “actual” Abstract Expressionist painting produced in the 1940s and a “fake” Abstract Expressionist painting created through the application of digital effects in a piece of software could be effectively indistinguishable when viewed through the light of the computer screen.  With this in mind, some painters have shifted their concerns from those native to the paradigm of the white cube to, instead, those native to the paradigm of the computer screen.  This shift has repercussions, though.  For example, the phenomenological effects of painting shift from the materiality of paint on canvas to the light spilling from a computer screen.  This bias towards the surface of the screen, then, nudges artists towards exploring different types of bodily shock effects.  The relationship of the body to the computer screen after all is different than that of the body to the physical painting in space–computers are open circuits in which cybernetic feedback relationships between computer databases and users allow users to actively shape the mediascape they inhabit.  These cybernetic relationships create a desire for clicking, scrolling, and following—dynamic motion premised on sifting through an accumulation of data rather than gazing for very long at a single pattern of light.  The Internet painter, then, begins to think in terms of multiplicity, the aesthetics of the surfeit, and, crucially, a strong temporal element which transforms painting into a variation on performance art.  Furthermore, jpegs, as digital files, are mutable, meaning that they can be radically transformed instantaneously at the level of code.  If one wants to merely touch up a single brush stroke or slap a picture of a sea shell on the top layer of the painting, the technology is agnostic in regard to the amount of variation each of these types of alterations suggests.  This mutability means that once it is part of the network, other artists and non-artists, as well, are given free reign to appropriate the image and alter it themselves, re-disseminating the mutated image through alleyways of the network which the painting’s original creator could not anticipate.  In other words, paintings here are a network of versions; a stream of evolving memes.

3.

The meeting of painting and the computer is not new.  MS Paint, for example, has long been mined for painting effects.  In the context of the Internet, the artist Tom Moody (a former “actual” painter) has built an important practice at the interface of painting and the computer screen which has evolved into making animated gifs and placing them on his own blog and sites like dump.fm.  This is not meant to be an authoritative history, though, so I’ll focus on the life of one strain of the painting meme as I’ve witnessed it over the past two or three years.

I first began to notice artists working on painting at the tail end of the surf club phenomenon.  Artists like Will Simpson, Thomas Galloway, and Travess Smalley on the surf club Loshadka, for example, were moving away from appropriated content derived from Internet surfing and towards original content created in painting software programs.

Around this time, the artist Charles Broskoski began increasingly focusing his work away from conceptual art pieces to a painting practice premised on volume, performativity, and innovations in presentation which were native to the computer screen.  The artist Harm van den Dorpel was working on a similar project, in which he straddled the borders between a computer model of a work and a work in physical space and allowed that very tension to become illuminated as the work.  Along the way, he raised an interesting set of questions regarding artistic deskilling and the borders between hand-made effects and automated effects.  In short, the “hand of the artist” was, on the Internet of all places, becoming an interesting area to explore.  Soon enough, there seemed to be an internal logic and momentum to this digital painting meme and the Supercentral II surf club and  Poster Company by Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff, pushed it further, actualizing what was in the air.  A slightly younger generation of artists working on the tumblr platform and the emergence of a body of critical reflection by artists such as Ry David Bradley on his PAINTED, ETC blog continued to sustain the evolution of the meme, polishing certain presentational elements and building a community of people interested in these ideas.  Painting in the network was about fast-paced collective dialogue and mind-bending abstractions.  It was also about painting.  The imagery of these works are often collisions between digital gestures and painterly gestures, but, generally speaking, the concern is with the tradition of painting–pre-Internet–as opposed to the animated gif scene whose roughly concurrent rise (in the net art context) posed as a nice counterpoint to the painting meme.

If one was watching, one could view the evolution of the meme as it started in a sort of experimental phase, gained some steam, developed a community, and achieved some sort of level of self-consciousness about itself.  The meme here takes on its own form of life which one can watch live on the Internet.

4.

Recently, the PAINT FX collective composed of Parker Ito, Jon Rafman, Micah Schippa, Tabor Robak, and John Transue, have developed a new mutation of the painting meme.  Looking closely at what had been accomplished in the work mentioned above and also ideas at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and performance which the Jogging collective (Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen) was working on, PAINT FX designed an environment to both experiment with performative voices as painters and develop micro-versions of the painting meme in one ongoing stream of paintings.

Although the paintings are not explicitly associated with particular artists (there’s no supplementary text on the site, at all), one can view unique voices develop as each painter builds a vocabulary of specific paint effects he’s working with.  One views both the development of these effects and the exploration of their usage through these unique voices.  Additionally, one views both the artists engaged dialogue with the other members of Paint FX collective and the flows of specific memes threading in and out of the broader image stream.

There are, to date, just under three hundred paintings posted on the collective’s very lengthy single web page–paintfx.biz.  One can experience this body of work in multiple ways.  There is this performative element—a fast paced call and response game in which the members of PAINT FX evolve memes.  There is also the trace of this performance which exists as a totally different type of effect.  The artists chose to not divide their archive up into multiple pages which one would have to click through, but instead as one very long scroll.  What this choice nudges the viewer to do is consider the flow of images as an ongoing development—a long poem, say.  This effect, though, is open to further versioning in relation to the type of device one uses.  So, for instance, scrolling through Paint FX on an iPhone is going to be a different type of effect than scrolling through it on a flat screen computer monitor in the comfort of one’s living room.  PAINT FX, though, has created a platform robust enough to be dynamically experienced in a multitude of viewing contexts.

There are also other variations in how the work will be experienced which are dependent on the user’s context.  Let’s say that one chooses to let the entire page download and start at the earliest painting, scrolling up to the most recent.  One could, on the one hand, just hold the scroll button down and watch the paintings zoom by like objects outside the windows of a moving car.  The style of the paintings and their sequencing on the page are instantaneously visible enough to provide an ongoing series of shock effects which increase as one continues to ride out the scroll (which lasts for several minutes bottom to top).  By rapidly scrolling through this way, one gets a broad overview of the way the voices of the artists, the various vocabularies of painting effects, and various bursts of smaller memes each develop.  On the other hand, though, one could also go through and carefully consider each painting.  This, too, can be effective as the paintings are not merely eye candy.  They are generally each labored over and carefully considered from multiple points of view before they are uploaded.  Also, oftentimes, the phenomenological effect of looking at a static image on the site for a more extended point of time can be powerful.  Through the practical experience of simply looking carefully and observing their own reaction to consuming images on computers, these artists have become discriminating in relation to the types of effects possible through the light of the screen.  In turn, they have developed unique skills for crafting particularly optically-charged images.

Finally, the project is also a robust space  for painting memes to accelerate and disseminate in the most efficient possible modes.  On PAINT FX, the viewer watches the lifeform of memes develop in a sort of real time.  On the one hand, this is frustrating because one can’t hold out much hope for an individual painting to maintain a level of qualitative power after a few days and weeks as it becomes swallowed up in the flow of the entire project.  On the other hand, if one refocuses the way they view the project in terms of following this flow, new categories of aesthetic experience are opened up.

5.

On the Internet, the meme of painting has developed ways in which to increase the efficiency and acceleration of the dispersal of its own versions.  Keywords here are “speed” and “immediacy.”  A question which the Internet hasn’t effectively explored as of yet, though, is related to the ethics of this acceleration.  Now that one can view painting in motion, a question and a way to perhaps further evolve the meme may revolve around where this acceleration is headed and why.

Feedback

In Feedback: Television Against Democracy, the art historian David Joselit explores the idea that all commodities, including works of art, are figured as commodities against the ground of networks, including media networks such as television and the Internet. In relation to works of art, that would be to say that the ground against which works of art are to be evaluated as units in a broader economy is no longer just the physical space of the art institution; e.g., the white cube art museum; but, instead the networks of interrelated flow through which both actual commodities and the capital surrounding those commodities now exist and disperse. For Joselit, art can no longer be thought of as a static object which one gazes upon, but instead as a “transjective” object, continuously networking between multiple fields of objects and subjects, which one follows. He brings up the fact that Wall Street quants have conceived of incomprehensibly complicated models for dematerializing and dispersing bundles of capital and, as such, it is incumbent upon anyone interested in the relationship between a work of art and the broader economy to appreciate the fact that works of art – as commodities – are also dematerialized and dispersed.

When viewed against this networked ground, Joselit discusses artworks which create viral paths, leaving trails of “feedback” between themselves and this networked ground. This feedback functions as noise, disrupting its own flow as a commodity and illuminating the ground upon which it circulates.

In what follows, I’ll discuss the television series Mad Men, suggesting that, on the one hand, the actual episodes of the series create a disruptive feedback loop between themselves and the television network; but, on the other hand, that the series’ branded image avatar, which is perhaps more widely culturally dispersed than the actual episodes of the show, lacks this disruptive feedback loop between itself and the Internet network.

Mad Men’s protagonist Don Draper is known to be ruthlessly effective at selling things to people. Time after time, the campaigns he engineers for a host of invariably silly products are able to exploit an emotion or a desire lurking beyond the product’s practical usage. And while these products may themselves be silly, the desires Draper creates around their advertising are often complex and psychologically astute. For example, an automated slide photo projector developed by Kodak is not the “Wheel” – Kodak’s name for the device – but rather – in Draper’s pitch – the “Carousel”; that is, it’s not an efficient way to display a loop of slide photographs, but a way to go around and around “and back home again” to something fondly remembered from the past.

However, Draper knows that these desires which people seek to satisfy through products like the Carousel are not ever going to be satisfied; desire is endlessly deferred – always trying to re-capture something which one thinks used to be there, but never really was and certainly never will be again. This principal is, through one lens, how capitalism operates: it depends on the endless impossibility of satisfying desire to keep selling ways to satisfy desire. In the finale to the series’ third season and in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (“the day America lost its innocence”), Draper explains this to his protégé, Peggy Olson. Here’s the exchange of dialogue between the two:

Don: Do you know why I don’t want to go to McCann?

Peggy: Because you can’t work for anyone else.

Don: No. Because there are people out there – people who buy things – people like you and me – and something happened; something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that’s very valuable.

Peggy: Is it?

What he’s getting at is that there was a picture of what it meant to be a consumer in America, but the assassination of the President made even the pretense towards living that image even more absurd than it ever was. That absurdity, though, will not stop people from endlessly trying to be this image (if anything, the grisly reality of the event and the trauma it inspired severs the emotional possibility of ever getting back to “reality”) and this is what good advertising creatives understand. Olson’s “Is it?” at the end of this exchange, though, reveals the tension at the heart of these characters: their insight into the emptiness of consumer desire is “very valuable,” but it’s also their own tragedy. What Draper sees in Olson is the same emptiness he sees in himself. Indeed, “Don Draper” is not even the character’s real name. Through an accident in the Korean War, the actual Don Draper was killed and a fellow soldier named Dick Whitman took Draper’s dog tags and commenced pretending to be him. “Don Draper” is, thus, nothing – an outer sheen through which someone who used to be “Dick Whitman” haunts the world. This awareness of his own nothingness makes Draper/Whitman a great “Ad Man,” but makes it difficult for him to participate in the very rituals of capitalism he sells, including monogamous suburban love and the nuclear family. The same could be said for Peggy Olson. Her through line is premised on the fact that she’s a lapsed Catholic who underwent an abortion in-between the first and second seasons of the series. This abortion (in extremely crude terms, an “emptying out”) traumatized Olson and, since then, she hasn’t been able to participate in the flow of sexuality and day-to-day, mindless chit-chat demanded by corporate-sanctioned urban existence. And, so, instead of living it, Draper and Olson sell it.

What is particularly powerful about the series’ explorations into advertising, though, is the fact that they are occurring on commercial television. The entire ground upon which this content rests is mass media advertising. When one watches the show and follows its explorations into the emptiness of desire, the mechanisms of advertising, and, in particular, the mechanics of television advertising, these thematic explorations collide with the actual television advertisements which allow for the show to exist in the first place. Some viewers, then, may view Mad Men and – armed with concepts provided by the series – reflect critically upon the advertisements which surround a given episode.

The result is a variation on “culture jamming” or the sort of “feedback” which Joselit discusses. As mentioned above, feedback, for Joselit, is an effect accrued through an artwork’s dispersion in which the artwork creates a disruption in the trajectory of itself as a commodity. He writes, “If a commodity’s meaning results from its circulation, it is possible to develop a politics whose goal is not to abolish or “critique” commodification (objectives that are utopian and inefficacious by turn) but rather to reroute the trajectories of things.” Joselit gives the example of African Americans feeding back images produced by their own community into television in the 1960s and 1970s as a way to develop a more accurate representative presence in the mediascape. He also discusses a television commercial created by Andy Warhol for Schrafft’s restaurant chain, the content of which is, in the artist’ words, “all the mistakes they do in commercials.” What one views in Warhol’s commercial is the image of a Sunday with a cherry on top which is drowning in video noise, thus selling the technological ground of the video image as opposed to the actual Sunday: it’s feedback, designed to reroute the trajectory of the commodity. The same could be said for Mad Men: by picturing the ground of advertisement and capital which it circulates in and out of on television, the series tangles up the clean circulatory flow of the series as a commodity in the television network.

However, the network Mad Men circulates through is not just television. In the 21^st century, it lives and circulates on the Internet and myriad other forms of media, as well. For example, I’ve never viewed an episode on television, but, as a follower of the show, I’ve viewed every single episode released so far through a combination of DVD’s, iTunes, Limewire, and “Freemium” sites like megavideo.com. Additionally, the way in which the show is largely dispersed through culture is not even through these episodes, but rather through images of the show’s sex icons on blogs, magazines, online versions of magazines, Facebook chatter, banner advertisements on blogs, bus ads, gossip mills, and, in general, the branding of a full-blown retro-chic style which celebrates dapper young metrosexuals with slicked-back hairdos. That is to say that even though the episodes of the show create an interesting level of feedback distortion in relation to television, the way they circulate as a brand through the broader networks of interconnected digital ephemera is actually fairly harmless – it’s just another thing to sell.

As mentioned above, one of Joselit’s intuition’s is that commodities are not static, physical objects; rather, they are, in the wake of networked communication such as television, animated and in-motion media viruses, traveling through all avenues of life from the living room to the water cooler to the bedroom. Effective counter-culture, then, does not stand outside out of these animated commodities, but rather reroutes their trajectories through feedback.

With this in mind, the trajectory of Mad Men doesn’t stop on Sunday nights at eleven o’clock EST on the AMC cable network. In fact, that one hour a week is a small piece of the pie surrounding the show’s “social life” as a commodity circulating through the broader networks of digital communication. The episodes of the series could be Shakespeare or Thomas Mann, but it wouldn’t matter when the meme of Mad Men – the way it travels virally – has very little to do with a critique of advertising and a lot to do with developing a brand.

A final note: On the one hand, Joselit’s book, which is about television and sticks largely to examples of 1960s and 1970s art history and visual culture, would seem oddly out of place for an audience interested in understanding the relationship between works of art and digital networks connected through computers. However, the virus he’s trying to spread is relevant and challenging. Artworks and the evaluation of artworks in the wake of media networks, be they television or Internet networks, require one to refocus the entire framework through which one usually thinks of an artwork. Mad Men is not about the themes of the show, but the trajectories in which the themes of the show circulate.

In this widespread reading of Benjamin’s theory of media, though, there is no clear-cut understanding of what it is exactly that Benjamin means by “aura.” As commentators such as Miriam Hansen have pointed out, Benjamin’s writings seem, at times, to celebrate the demise of aura, and, at other times, to demonstrate a certain nostalgia for it, if not suggesting that aura still, in fact, exists – albeit through very different means – in reproducible media such as photographs of people who are now dead. Likewise, there is a certain murkiness surrounding the ways in which Benjamin defines aura, both in the “Work of Art” essay and beyond it.

One way to understand his use of the term is that it denotes a quality which does not emerge from within the work and emanate out, but is rather accrued in time through both the work’s testimony to history and the trajectory of its social transactions through this history. That is, the aura around a work is not beauty or a magic which originates from the inside of the object, but a conceptual field around the work accrued through time as it reflects back upon its own history as a material object. In what follows, I’ll discuss Benjamin’s use of the term aura in these terms and, then, briefly consider its relevance to digital media reproduction.

Benjamin’s earliest usage of the term “aura” occurred during one of his writing experiments while under the influence of hashish. He describes it here as an “ornamental halo, in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case.” What one can gather from this description is that it is something external – “ornamental” – to the object; there is nothing magical inside the case of aura; the aura is generated by the case itself.

Later, in his essay “A Short History of Photography,” Benjamin considers the influence of time on this “ornamental halo.” He describes aura here as “a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.” There is a suggestion in this description that aura involves not just the space of the physical object, but an invocation of linear time. This interest in the effect of time in the experience of a work puts Benjamin outside of many other theorists of the phenomenology of the art experience. For example, it contrasts with what Michael Fried, in his essay “Art and Objecthood,” terms “presentness” or a sort of atemporality in the work of art. Whereas, for Fried, the most powerful art objects exist outside of time (and, thus, outside of theater) – continuously re-creating themselves anew every moment – the auratic work of art, for Benjamin, creates a sense of distance around itself by actively invoking a continuum of time (a continuum which would be eliminated by mechanical reproduction).

In one line of thought in Benjamin’s writing on the subject, he discusses the experience of time in the aura of a work of art in relation to the materialist history through which the object has existed.

He points to this in “The Work of Art” essay, writing:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

*****

The auratic authority around an object, then, is – again – not generated by something inside the object as if it were magic, but rather through an “ornamental halo” accrued through the object’s testimony to a period of history. The fact that the object was there in a certain corner of historical time is what affords it any more authority than an identical object which did not experience that history, much less a reproducible photograph of the object.

Related to this is the idea of provenance or the history of ownership of a work of art. If a particular painting has been passed through the hands of famous collectors for centuries, what one would find auratic about the painting is not the alchemical effect of the artist’s application of paint to canvas, but rather the series of transactions from one historical figure or collecting institution to another over time. For example, if one can say that the Mona Lisa possesses any sort of aura for its viewers at the Louvre, it is not necessarily because they find it to be a particularly beautiful painting, but rather because of its history and prominence in the museum’s collection. Art historians and aficionados may be entranced by its formal qualities, but the aura of the work for the public is, in Benjamin’s terms, accrued through the painting’s testimony to its history.

Benjamin also relates this to collections of objects other than works of art. For example, in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin discusses the value of the books in his collection in relation to their historical testimony and provenance. He writes, “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership – for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to the magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.” This relates to the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of commodities as having a “social life” in which value around the object is accrued and lost depending on how it is socially transacted. For example, one of my favorite t-shirts belonged to my father when he was roughly the age I am now. When I see that t-shirt, it possesses, for me, a ritualistic value – an “ornamental halo” related to the transaction which led from my father’s wardrobe to my own. If I had purchased an identical t-shirt at a retail store or even a thrift shop, my entire relationship to it would be different; it’s provenance would be a mystery to me and, thus, diminish the t-shirt’s aura.

In the 20^th century modernity which Benjamin experienced, he saw this sort of aura to be withering away as the mechanical reproduction of images diminishes the relationship of the mass public to unique works of art bearing traces of historical time. On the one hand, there is something bittersweet about this rupture, but, on the other hand, it presents a window – not on an artistic level per se, but on political one. All authority in the object which could be potentially utilized by the forces of fascist politics is challenged, opening the door to a new relationship of art and politics, one based on dispersion and the communication of communist political ideas.

In the age of digital reproduction, which would seem to even more radically destroy the possibility of aura, though, there is, paradoxically, a form of aura which persists not in relation to objects, but to information.

On social bookmarking sites like delicious.com, for example, works of net art become valuable based on the way in which the link to the work is transacted. If an artist produces a work and shares it through the Internet, the work can either stop there and be ostensibly forgotten or it can be bookmarked by another user, re-blogged elsewhere on the Web, or generally digitally dispersed. Additionally, the work can be re-versioned – meaning that it is appropriated, changed, and further re-circulated through the Internet as a mutation of the original. As all of this dispersion occurs, the “original” information on the Internet gains a certain aura – an “ornamental halo” or “a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.” Additionally, this aura is enhanced by the particular provenance of its trajectory through the Internet. If the information is collected and re-circulated by Internet users who have been bookmarking and re-blogging for long enough to have developed a proven “track record” as opposed to a user lacking a proven track record, then the aura of the information is further increased.

I recently viewed the original YouTube video which inspired the widespread “Double Rainbow!!” meme. In the video, an apparently stoned man – YouTube user Hungrybear9562 – is looking out onto a beautiful mountain landscape in which two rainbows are in the sky. He’s so profoundly moved by the site of the “double rainbow” that he begins an emotionally overwhelmed ramble in which he shouts “Double Rainbow!! Oh my God!!” and generally expresses his stoned enthusiasm for the vividness of the rainbows. Prior to my viewing of the original video, I had only come across versions of the video created by other YouTube users. When I did view this original video, the information it contained possessed an aura based on how widely the meme it inspired had been virally spread through the Internet. If the video had not been so widely dispersed, then it would have lacked that “ornamental halo” around the information it contained. For works of net art, this principal applies, as well, but with a slightly different emphasis. The aura of a work of net art is not necessarily based on its dispersion through mass culture, but through the a combination of both mass dispersion and dispersion through the smaller community of net artists and fans of net art.

*****

For Benjamin, aura is a complicated term. One way to understand it is that it is, first, not synonymous with beauty. Aura is something placed onto the object by history as it is travels through social transactions. He believed, or at least advocated for, the idea that when objects with this aura around them are photographed and re-distributed, the aura is necessarily lost and that, furthermore, this loss of aura around the way works of art are received in culture creates an opportunity for an art based not on ritual, but rather politics. However, in the contemporary moment in which culture is radically more technologically reproduced than it was even in Benjamin’s time, a sense of aura in terms of the social transactions around the work persists, for better or for worse, in the form of memes.

The pace of posting on, for example, the clubs Double Happiness, Loshadka, Nasty Nets, Spirit Surfers, and Supercentral was, several years ago, much more active than it is now, but, generally speaking, the pace currently ranges from several times a day to several times a month (in some cases less than that or simply not at all).

In the heyday of the Internet surfing club phenomenon, one of the contested theoretical topics hashed out on the message boards of new media art sites like rhizome.org, was the question of what separates material found on an Internet surfing club from very similar material found on a vernacular imageboard site like 4chan.

People seem to generally agree that something is different, but that something is difficult to account for (if it’s not itself an illusion).

For example, if one is to view two images whose iconography is exactly the same – one of which appears on 4chan and one of which appears on Nasty Nets – in one sense, each would look identical to the other and, yet, in another sense, each would look very different from the other.

One account for this difference is premised on the distinction between the world of the vernacular web in which material on 4chan is arguably framed and the world of art in which material on Nasty Nets is arguably framed.

A given image – let’s say that it’s a funny picture of a cat – would, on 4chan, be viewed against its relationship to other funny cat memes and judged as such, while, on Nasty Nets, it would be viewed against its relationship to an alternative category – the artworld discourse of, for example, the Readymade or Appropriation art (or some such) – and judged as such.

These modes of viewing are, of course, not dogmatically valid – obviously viewers of 4chan say “this is art” and viewers of Nasty Nets say “this is funny” in regard to the material on each respective site – but, nevertheless, one would seem to nudge one in the direction of the vernacular Web world and one would seem to nudge one in the direction of the artworld.

(Some works, such as Cory Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, are intriguing because they straddle both worlds.)

This discrepancy is related to what Arthur Danto refers to as art’s “transfiguration of the commonplace” in which the simple re-contextualization of a commonplace object into art transforms the way one views it.

For Danto, viewing contemporary art doesn’t involve what the eye sees, but rather what the eye sees plus the theory and history of art surrounding what the eye sees.

His famous example is Warhol’s Brillo Box which, he claims, “ended” the history of art by shifting the burden of the work’s working from the visible (a Brillo Box) to the invisible (a Brillo Box plus the theory and history of the readymade and pop art which together allow the Brillo Box to be legitimately viewed as art).

Danto writes in his essay, “The Artworld”:

To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.

*****

As such, the difference between material on an imageboard and an Internet surfing club is – through this lens, anyway – a question of what is made formally visible to the eye – yes – but what is made conceptually visible to the mind, as well.

The fact that there is art theory and the positing of art historical connections in relation to Internet surfing clubs is itself the mechanism which makes a funny cat picture function as a work of art on an Internet surfing club and not on an imageboard site in which different theories and histories are in play.