User:Eleanorg/1.2/RWR/Annotation: Club Kids
Club Kids: The Social Life of Artists on Facebook by Brad Trummel et al.
Annotation
Brad Trummel's essay explores young internet artists' professional use of Facebook. He contends that, in a reversal of the traditional artist's career trajectory, "today’s artist on the internet needs an audience to create art, as opposed to the traditional recipe that you need to create art to have an audience." Group shows, in this model, grow out of this networking rather than vice versa: "individuals promote one another until those very promotions materialize into their names being shown side by side one another [in an exhibition]". Trummel asks, "Is this to say that interactions on Facebook are now artists’ work?". Without definitively answering this question, he notes that most artists don't consider it to be; rather, their perpetual networking is "a kind of live-action role playing artist statement". He also notes that, if exchanges on Facebook were art, then their authorship would lie more with Facebook's curating algorithms than with the Facebook users involved.
The essay closes with a familiar critique of the power that Facebook's curation thus has both to determine young artists' career paths (using Eli Pariser’s idea of the filter bubble), and to make it hard to leave the platform. "It is Facebook’s implicit populist algorithms that form the foundations for an outcome on the... [artist's career] trajectory", he says, while noting that "leaving the walled garden involves just too many risk factors". The conclusion is a pessimistic certainty that because of this lock-in, "Facebook will play a primary role in the the dissemination of culture for at least this generation to come".
Notes & questions
- How is this cultural shift from a focus on "art" to "artists' personas" really caused by social media? This has been underway over the last century (at least); the question should be: in what way exactly has social media altered the course of this shift? Or has it merely intensified it?
http://dismagazine.com/discussion/29786/club-kids-the-social-life-of-artists-on-facebook/