Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

-Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994

For some, Carl Sagan’s studied beseechment that the definitive eventual choice for humanity boils down to spaceflight or extinction, might stand as an existential mode of living; *the meteor*, whether it comes in ten thousand years or barrels in out of nowhere and kills us all tomorrow (extremely unlikely as that may be), is a metaphysical device which can, if we are willing, frame and color everything for us … including art.

When viewed through a pale-blue-dot-ist lens, many questions and perspectives could arise with regard to the art historical canon, contemporary art practice, and even art’s role in society, or, perhaps better said, in the cosmos.  I sometimes am convinced of the severe notion that all art practice should be judged to some degree by whether it, in whatever way, acknowledges the vulnerability of our situation which Sagan describes so lyrically, yet so frankly.  Should art serve as propaganda for organizations like SpaceX, Lifeboat, and The Space Renaissance Initiative?  The idea sounds absurd, but doesn’t the level of absurdity depend on how centrally we put Sagan’s ideas on our mantle of feelings and politics that influence our criticism of art?

Please reply with examples of artwork or art related discourse that in some way respond (knowingly or unknowingly, directly or abstractly) to the excerpt from Pale Blue Dot as if it were a prompt.  I’m thinking of things like pieces from the After Nature show at the New Museum, which was, appropriately, informed by the films of Werner Herzog.

Here is a screencap from spaext.com, which to me is an interesting case study of something I feel intuitively should be classified as an art project, though it isn’t.  It involves a call to action through visual multimedia propaganda with a specific political agenda.  It is backed by the potential for a strong aesthetic impression to say the least.

Update Aug 19:

via e-flux –

Michael Baers
Concerning Matters to be Left for a Later Date, Part 4 of 4 (Guest-Starring Annika Eriksson)

This Monday, everybody’s favorite downtown New York post-Marxist reading group, 16 Beaver, is holding a post-Marxist seminar on the post-Marxist causes of the economic crisis.  I will attend this, and then I will self-flagellate. No, seriously, 16 Beaver’s Monday Night series is excellent, and they’re doing work most of us are too complacent and/or fearful to do.

Here is the info, from the 16 Beaver mailing list:

What: Lecture / Discussion
When: Monday 08.10.09
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
When: 7:15 pm
Who: Free and open to all

This summer Loren Goldner and Howie Seligman have been running a weekly
reading seminar on the origins of the financial crisis, its relations to
Marx’s critique of political economy as well as some of the frequently
blackboxed aspects of contemporary global finance. Some of you may recall
our event in the spring with Loren and we are happy to have him back with
Howie.

For this upcoming Monday, we transfer their self-organized seminar into
our space and ask them each to give short presentations on the causes of
the economic crisis. Howie will deal with the financial meltdown from a
‘wall street/investment’ point of view and develop some of what was
contained in a recent talk he gave at Bluestockings.  Loren will speak on
the classical Marxist theory of the causes of the crisis.

We will use the discussion period to open to questions that are raised by
their presentations and to consider the current “status” of the crisis in
light of all recent attempts to convince the public that the worst has
been averted.

I’m not criticizing OMA outright for sending this takedown notice, which I screen-capped from aaaarg.org, where it was publicly posted. I’m simply wondering whether anyone would contribute any thoughts to help me understand how this fits into current trends among intellectually oriented organizations and authors as far as perhaps allowing their copyrighted content to exist on certain websites, such as greylodge.org, aaaarg.org, etc.  Is Rem being totally justified, or a bit Dick Chenney-esque, as one commenter put it?  Koolhaas is definitely a ‘gimme-the-loot’ type of architect, although in my understanding his designs often subvert capitalistic icons.

They’re not performance artists!  I write this in response to Richard Lacayo’s Time.com entry “Sacha Baron Cohen: Performance Artist”, in which he compares Michael Jackson’s life, and Baron Cohen’s work (of which I’m a big fan), with Anthony Gormley’s One & Other piece for which Brits can apply to stand atop a fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square and do stuff.  Sure these things are commensurable, but one of the practical realities of the art economy (as opposed to the philosophical notion that anything can mean anything so long as one person experiences it that way) — an economy of display, circulation, and discourse — is that in order for anything to be art, two conditions are required: self-proclamation, and assimilation.  Self-proclamation means that the author must view, understand, and proclaim the work as art.  Assimilation means that the work must be assimilable, which is to say visible and legible as art, to the arbiters of the art economy.  Without this legibility, there can be no discourse, and so no collective recognition or acceptance of the work as art can emerge.  The social Web complicates this notion of assimilation a bit because anyone can produce a node of discourse, and claim that, say, Roger Federer is an artist (like I do ALL the time), or that Barack Obama is an artist, and technically it is accessible to art world arbiters (as in not entirely isolated as a diary locked in a drawer in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico would be), but these nodes are generally ineffectual and do not enter the stream of contemporary art discourse.  I am reminded of the an essay by Bill Arning in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, in which he reflects on Joseph Beuys’ proclamation “Jeder Mensch ist ein Kunstler” (roughly: every man is an artist), adding: yeah, but only one guy gets to be the person that says that…

The context of art is a privileged context, where one is situated in a historical lineage of art.  It’s also a privileged context in that one receives a certain respect along with people’s time and intellectual energy.  To annex ‘Michael Jackson’s life’ into the history of performance art simply because it was theatrical, witnessed by a wide public, and spectacular (in the Debordian sense), is only wordplay because his life did not have artistic intent inline with that which is understood as performance art.  Furthermore, it did not have a planned durational bracket, as even the work of Tehching Hsieh, who shrunk his own life into his art, always did.  The difficulty of assimilating Hsieh’s life-as-work into the 1980′s art discourse meant he wouldn’t be widely recognized until the surge of interest in performance and Asian art in the mid-nineties, and demonstrates in order for something to ‘be art’ it must first be socially reified by a few thousand art-people worldwide.  Unless a good number of those people care, it ain’t art in the sense Lacayo is talking about.  The general non-contemporary-art-following public doesn’t know about this system, and it’s irresponsible to tell them with short-shrift in 200 words that Michael Jackson’s life is performance art when there are ten thousand self-acknowledging performance artists dying, figuratively, to be accepted into that system.

Got the idea to write this post from Art Fag City.

http://gawker.com/5314284/dash-snow-downtown-artist-said-to-be-dead-of-overdose?skyline=true&s=x

My feelings on Dash Snow’s death are a perfect average of the most recent three commenters on the article from Gawker.  Here’s the screengrab:

http://www.cashforyourwarhol.com/

I read about this *project* this morning over at dealer Edward Winkleman’s blog (posted at 7:49 AM!!!) and was surprised to see that Rhizome had not already covered this eons ago (that’s a complement to Rhizome).

Here’s what the website promises:

No one can help you sell your Warhol fast like Cash For Your Warhol™! Sell your print or painting for cash regardless of the size, price, or condition. Cash For Your Warhol™ has been in business for several months so you can concentrate on moving on with your life.

We can help you sell your art fast. Our nationwide network of investors has helped lots of art collectors in situations like yours. They can often make you a written offer within hours of contacting us, regardless of economic conditions, and have your problems solved within days.

The next step is yours. And confidentiality is assured! Get in touch with us… and <snap!> you could be in contact with the buyer of your Warhol today!

Contact info: cashforyourwarhol@gmail.com (24-hour service).

The site is a very clever bit of commentary, akin to some of the net art in the book At The Edge Of Art (2006, Thames & Hudson).

In the past I have found the pretend-functionality of net art projects like these to be a weakness.  The artist Dan Graham said, “All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.” The connection for me has been that many non-artists are using technology to actually make a difference, in a committed sense and in earnest, without the pretense of artistic context, and without the acknowledgment that they’re going to walk away from it. In this way the “real world” often times outmodes the practices of artists engaged with the web.  This criticism could be misdirected; nonetheless Cash For Your Warhol is a cool idea.