Justin Kemp, Pseudoevent, 2008, Screengrab AFC

The Best of the Web 2008 Contributor’s Choice continues today.  The series features the year’s best links as defined by contributors, Part One posted yesterday.  Two invitees are included in each post (unless listed otherwise), and the feature includes the following people:

Liam McEneaney - comedian, citizen

Camille Paloque-Bergès, PHD candidate and Teaching Assistant in Information Science and Communication at the Laboratoire Paragraphe

Kevin Bewersdorf, artist

John Michael Boling, internet user / artist / jmb

Magda Sawon, Owner of Postmasters Gallery New York

Kari Altmann, artist

Ceci Moss, Editor and Blogger

Tom Moody, artist

Javier Morales, artist

Marcin Ramocki, Artist/filmmaker

Jon Williams, Free software developer

Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Video, MoMA
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Meet Kevin Bewersdorf and John Michael Boling!

Kevin Bewersdorf, artist

• http://www.manbabies.com
  It is remarkable how one simple concept can be extended into a gushing supply of content.

• http://pilgrimsprogrock.tumblr.com
  I particularly enjoy Joel Holmberg’s work with answers.com. Making a kind of open forum poetry, Joel poses rhetorical questions to a site where everyone has an opinion but nobody has any answers. The wound of the question is opened without any possibility of its healing, and must therefore be accepted as unanswered as we helplessly watch the question bleed into the web.

• http://www.mikes-world.org
  Michael Smith has never had a website before this year, but with the touring of his first museum retrospective there is finally this online catalog of his video, performance, and installation work of the past 30 years.

• http://www.askgodanything.org
  Who made this site? Is there an author or is the error the author? Is there something there or nothing there? That’s why I like it.

• http://www.clubinternet.org/archive/tag_team
  Club Internet revolutionized the way I saw surf clubs this year, and this edition organized by Guthrie Lonergan caught my eye as a “special teams” operation. Even the clubs have no borders — previously known increments can be grabbed from other clubs and sites, and framed as a new cohesive statement, a non-verbal web essay.

• http://www.guthrielonergan.com
  A great piece. Not to be a Guthrie hog, but nobody else can touch this guy in 08.

• http://www.spiritsurfers.net/monastery/?p=591#comments
  I hope it is seen as honest and not vain for me to mention a surf club that I am a member of, but I just can’t leave it out from this list — I had so many great exchanges this year with my fellow INFOmonks. This post by Deeper had me excited for a couple days.

• http://www.tvchannel.tv/dullaartresponses.html
  Ben Coonley’s responses to Constant Dullaart’s “youtube as subject” herald an new era of default minimalism: http://www.constantdullaart.com/site/html/new/youtubeasasubject.html

• GOOD NEWS FOLKS pdf newsletter
  http://ethanhc.com/newsletter/GOOD-NEWS-FOLKS_sampler.pdf
  This weekly email newsletter made my day every Thursday of 2008 — I was often found rolling on the floor with laughter at Ethan Hayes-Chute’s personal to-do lists, rustic bitmaps, recipes, phony advice columns, and three sentence short stories. All 52 issues are set to come out as a printed book from One Star Press this spring.

• VVORK Twitter
  http://theageofmammals.com/2008/vvorktwitter.html
  I was never a close follower of vvork.com [editors note: vvork is a website that posts artwork, usually without any explanatory text] but ever since vvork twitter began I was hooked and have not even once returned to the regular vvork. One step higher than vvork’s incomplete summaries is this complete summary. After vvork twitter, why would we need vvork? I have thought about this work extensively, both at and away from my computer, and found its existence to starkly shed light upon the frailties and misdirections of this limited marketplace we live in. I thank Tom Moody for continuing Guthrie Lonergan’s simple and poignant work.

John Michael Boling, internet user / artist / jmb

• Clubinternet.org - This was fun and exciting to watch all year.

• Rhizome.org Interview with Kevin Bewersdorf - If I taught a net art class this would be required reading.

• google street view van - Joe McKay This Google “steet view” van image is created entirely from reflections of the van in store windows in San Francisco. Utterly sublime.

• Touch My Body (Green Screen Version) - Oliver Laric - Doin’ it and doin’ it and doin’ it well.

• http://thedisagreeinginternet.com/ - Constant Dullaart - Yes.

• Untitled (Mona Lisa) - Charles Broskoski .JPG documentation of sculpture is the new sculpture.

• YouTube user crystalsculpture, crystalsculpture2, crystalsculpture3, crystalsculpture4 , A.K.A. Javier Morales - If you watched every single one of Javier Morales’s videos and favorites on youtube 10 times, you would be 10 times cooler than you currently are.

• Harm Van Den Dorpels introductory post on spiritsurfers.net. For the canon.

• Hottest to Coldest - Aleksandra Domanovic - If you are a collector, Aleksandra Domanovic is a sure bet. Her work is wonderful. Read more about Hottest to Coldest here.
• http://fuckyousidewaysyoufuckyouduckcrazyshitmanyeah.com/ - Nikola Tosic - Psychiatry.

• Eye White - James Whipple - This made me realize that even though humanity’s future will likely be bleak, it might simultaneously be beautiful.

• Secondary Market - Hanne Mugaas, - Gaussian blurring boundaries.

• The Age of Mammals - Guthrie Lonergan - The collective 2008 creative output of Guthrie Lonergan is nothing short of inspirational.

Justin Kemp, Pseudoevent, 2008, Screengrab AFC

Feeling that last year’s edition of The Best of the Web suffered from the discontinuation The Year in the Internet, a collection of web links I regularly drew from put together by a group savvy Internet users, I decided to host my own Contributor’s Choice version here.  I’ll likely be stealing a few links from them later on in the week for my own list — a point my contributors will undoubtedly love given that I requested they not duplicate each other’s links — but I guess that’s just tough luck.   The following series will feature the links of two contributors per post (unless indicated otherwise), and include the following invites:

Liam McEneaney - comedian, citizen

Camille Paloque-Bergès, PHD candidate and Teaching Assistant in Information Science and Communication at the Laboratoire Paragraphe

Kevin Bewersdorf, artist

John Michael Boling, internet user / artist / jmb

Magda Sawon, Owner of Postmasters Gallery New York

Kari Altmann, artist

Ceci Moss, Editor and Blogger

Tom Moody, artist

Javier Morales, artist

Marcin Ramocki, Artist/filmmaker

Jon Williams, Free software developer

Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Video, MoMA

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First up: Liam McEneaney and Camille Paloque-Bergès!

Liam McEneaney - comedian, citizen

• http://james.nerdiphythesoul.com/bennyhillifier/ - This site will allow you to enter any YouTube video code, and it will strip the soundtrack and replace it with the song “Yakety Sax” - the Benny Hill closing chase theme. Almost everything goes better with Yakety Sax.

• http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=37 - All Songs Considered, the musical podcast companion to the NPR show All Things Considered. They offer for download full-length, CD-quality concerts by artists like Tom Waits, Radiohead, The Ting Tings, The Raconteurs, and many more favorites

• http://www.wonderglen.com - a fully realized parody website (from former Colbert/Daily Show head writer Ben Karlin), that takes you into the Intranet of a terrible small-time production company. Its spin-off websites are just as inspired and detailed.

• http://www.dipity.com/user/tatercakes/timeline/Internet_Memes - A time line of all the popular Internet memes. I highly recommend going back to 1982 and reading a small article by a man who claims to have invented the “smiley”.

• http://www.neave.com/television/ - “telly without context”

• thecomicscomic.com- a blogger/journalist who decided that standup comedy deserves the kind of in-depth coverage that other artforms receive. While it has its limitations, I find it one of the best blogs of its kind out there.

Camille Paloque-Bergès, PHD candidate and Teaching Assistant in Information Science and Communication at the Laboratoire Paragraphe

• Nerd Love Haikus on Pastoral Backgrounds: what teh titel says !

• Abdandoned But Not Forgotten: Sun Microsystems: this website documents the exploration of abandoned places. This one is particularly interesting because the building already has an aura of ruins while its materiality is so trivial except for the amateur of technology (80s Sun Microsystems premises in Los Altos, CA).

• Macrochan.org: this emerged in 2008 as an open repository for macro-related pictures usually originating on the *chan forums. You can find here all the variations on macro themes that circulate through the nasty web. Among my favorite are One Free Internet (if your post is a big win you get one) and Picture Not Related.

• The Modern Mechanix’s blog: apart from collecting great technology-related articles from the past, this blog has a computer category with some memorable vintage ascii and visionary magazine covers among other things.

• Hotprisonpals.com: “We all love to drool over our keyboards, while looking at the hot and sexy prisoners, fantasizing about how hot these lovely guys are ” What more can I say ? Oh yes, Joel Holmberg reminded of this. The texts written by the prisoners are really worth reading too. On a French note, I am also really touched by the photos and texts on perdudevue-org.net that has people looking for old acquaintances.

• Speaking of: jlhmbrg’s Yahoo Questions (I guess you can check his Answers too) are a good dive into the opinionated web and vernacular wisdom of the Internet. Great for any0ne interested in self-reference and informal metadiscourses.

• Olia Lialina’s and Dragan Espenschied’s twin blogs at Contemporary Home Computing explore the semantic fields of computer metaphors. Olia critiques excessive analogies between computers and other technologies, while Dragan explores images taken from the computer world and applied to “real-life” situation. This website almost died in 2008 but Olia’s recent comeback on her blog makes me think that they still have that “Under Construction” vibe going on.

• French mad scientists represent: A Virtual Space Time Travel Machine, “A Gateway between art and science with more than 2680 still pictures and animations”. Quite old ; this should be archived before we lose it.

• Testing print material with a digital print-on-demand online service, a graphic design workshop project: Dear Lulu.

• Question: Energy use of the Internet (on uclue.com) : a lot of people settled down to resolve this important question between late 2007 and mid-2008.

• Last minute 11th link: the Dawson Crying photobombing (probably by the Digg community ?) is a very good example to why searchability as artifact as well as a strategic or tactical act has become so interesting in the past few years, and also to how everyday users inventiveness is an endless influence for making the net playful and critical (this is obviously a playful example that also has a critical side to it as it teaches about information manipulation techniques) and to be reminded that these resources are “out there” before all.

Kari Altmann was gracious enough to make Art Fag City a masthead every day for the month of December, so I’m posting the summation of the work collectively titled Blackmouth Cyber Monday Sale below.  I’m probably biased but I think the piece is remarkable.  Truly capturing the consumer spirit of the holidays, Altmann’s fun yet near schizophrenic presentation of music, movies, fastfood, beauty, electronics and familiar web logos and graphics, are a bargin bin of consumable products and media.   Together, these images are  less about highlighting desirable products than showcasing what we have already consumed.   December’s mastheads after the jump. MORE »

General Idea, Test Pattern: TV Dinner Plates, 1988, Image via: General Idea

Those concerned that posting might be suspended shortly due to should worry no longer. I’ll be announcing the full amount contributors donated to the Art Fag City fundraiser once the net numbers have been fully calculated but it seems only appropriate to let readers know the blog will continue.

Not to turn into a total sap, but it’s to hard to communicate just how touched am by the generosity of my readers. I invest a lot in this blog, but until forced, it never occurred to me to ask anyone else to do the same. The number of people who contributed even though it was hard to do so, all the while explaining how they wished it could be more, leaves me without words.  At least for this post.  An animated Damien Hirst diamond skull gif will follow when the total amount raised is official (hopefully tomorrow).

Image via: Artnet

What better way to usher in 2009 than to address the profoundly stupid mistakes I’ve made in 2008?  I removed a post today about the friction between some Marfa locals and the arts community over a hotel development project because it contained a slanderous hate email directed at the Thunderbird Hotel and independent arts space the Ballroom’s founder Virginia Lebermann, and my own post included an array of inaccuracies.  Not the least of these was erroneously describing the Thunderbird Hotel as home to the independent arts space the Ballroom when they are located in two entirely different buildings within Marfa, a point that should have been obvious from the picture I posted then and have reposted above.

The email in question had been forwarded to me by a reader who was interested in discussing the idea that art could be used as a cover to transform the town without the consent of the locals, a subject I failed to engage because I did not include some of the story’s basic facts:  Namely, that the commercial rezoning needed for a new hotel development — a project the hate emailer supported and feared threatened — was ultimately approved.

While the core economic disparities driving the discontent merit discussion, posting that email was hasty and decidedly ineffective way of doing it.  In a perfect world, I would not have made those decisions, and if I had, the post you’re reading right now would have been self prompted.  Instead two well thought out comments I received this morning pointed out the severity of these mistakes.   I can’t undo what’s already been published, but I’ve removed the post and offer a sincere apology to all those named in the letter.

Full coverage of zoning in the Big Bend Sentinel here.

An illustration by Nancy Stahl published in the New York Times

If you don’t mind poor organization in a book Jerelle Kraus’ All the Art That’s Fit to Print (and some that wasn’t) Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page (released this Fall) isn’t bad. I’m not offering a ringing endorsement – the fact that none of the chapters about specific illustrators name the artist in the header is too confusing not make an issue of it – but there’s a fair number of good illustrations compiled in the book, and the stories are at least implicitly interesting even if they aren’t told particularly well.

Probably the most relevant image to the interwebs and therefore of mild interest to the blog appears fairly early on: Nancy Stahl’s light bulb with a copyright symbol on the front. The piece illustrated a text arguing against many Internet intellectual property claims, but was nearly rejected because an editor thought the image too closely resembled a breast. It’s an amusing anecdote particularly now that the illustration is iconic, though Cathy Hull’s rejected image illustrating a piece on historical meteorology holds far more interest, (yet receives an unfortunately small illustration space). Referencing the writer’s observation that the mildest winter in 16 years preceded the fierce blizzard of 1886, Hull created an anthroporphized thermometer remarkably resembling an ejaculation. In this particular case the editors really did have a good point. We’re republishing it below as a noted highlight from All The Art That’s Fit to Print.

Image by Cathy Hull.

Happy Holidays everyone! Art Fag City will resume posting on the second.

Damien Hirst, For The Love of God, 2007. Animation courtesy of AFC

Those suckers forced to work today also have the priviledge of reading everyone’s favorite category of blog writing: Fundraiser Posts! I’m doing the best I can to keep these entries interesting, but ultimately the message is the (rather canned sounding) message:  As an independent blogger, I need your help to maintain the blog properly.  But here’s the good news:  With only two days left in the campaign, I’m only $500 dollars away from reaching my goal of $6,000!   I urge readers who find the blog valuable in any way to consider donating so I can meet this target.   Your contributions will not only provide the  financial support I need to maintain the blog but make the second Damien hirst skull blink! (Paypal embed found on this post).

Meanwhile I’d like to take a moment to highlight some of press I’ve received during the fundraiser.   Here’s a few places the blog’s shown up recently:

• ArtReview.com has listed my fundraiser on their homepage.
• Young Manhattanite won’t donate to just any blog.
• We Make Money Not Art includes Art Fag City in their end of the year fundraiser campaign lists.
• Tom Moody writes an incredibly generous post on the merits of Art Fag City.
• Felix Salmon notes the microdonations model of blogonomics has a macro option.
• Dealer Edward Winkleman says it’s good to give.
• James Wagner and Bloggy both weigh in the fundraiser.
• Regina Hackett at the Seattle PI describes Art Fag City as “one of the most intellectually bracing websites on the web”
• Two Coats of Paint included the Art Fag City campaign in “The Year in Art Blogging”, and ArtCal Zine describes the blog as a service to the entire city!
• Canadians like Art Fag City: Leah Sandals throws support my way.
• Conscientious notes the importance of independent blogs, C-Monster updated her digest  to include the fundraiser and Ron Hogan over at GalleyCat twittered the cause.
• Newsgrist included me on her give to the arts post, MTAA threw some love my way, and Nathaniel Stern reblogged my fundraiser email.

Keith Tyson, December, Broadway, Westminster, London, 2008

Are Keith Tyson’s Internet prints consisting of randomly generated, roulette wheel paletted, vertical stripes as interesting as his History Paintings?  The latter works were also done in stripes of red, black and green, with the arrangement of colors dictated by spins of the roulette wheel.  Then they were given titles relating to years of political upheaval and places famous for their casinos.  Comparatively, the prints were also given titles, this time based on the recipient’s geographic location, (5,000 were given away online in early December through the Guardian).

I’ve seen neither the prints nor the paintings in person, but the methods determining the paintings seem a lot more engaging.  I rather like that the human hand has to be employed in the use of the roulette wheel, and that a connection is drawn between the gambles made during war, and those in gaming.  It all suggests an uniquely human role in the making of chance.   The Internet version removes a lot of that interest:  A computer program using the roulette wheel numbers as its basis randomly determines the arrangement the casino stripes, and the geographic location of the user may offer a small amount of interest to the print recipient, but certainly won’t offer any surprises.  But for the fact that this work was conceived by a Turner Prize winner there’s not enough in this series to warrant too much discussion.

Not that that’s stopped the Guardian.  Charlotte Higgins sees this work as highlighting the how little mainstream artists have attempted to harness the Internet, though no explanation is given as to what aspect of this piece past its existence, does the highlighting.  The standard young artists have never known a time without the Internet statement is then issued without any attempt to discuss how this effects artistic production and the democratizing nature of the web is noted as though it were more than the half truth the statement actually represents.

Though the second half of the article is written as though it were 2005, Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media issues the following meaty quote on the web, worth remark, “It’s not just about sticking something up. You actually have to understand the vernacular of the web, you have to build a following. Doing that actually takes a certain amount of dedication.”  Indeed.  So, has Keith Tyson’s investment lead to a deep understanding of web vernacular?   It’s too soon to tell, but I’m not yet impressed.

Tatsuo Miyajima, Pile Up Life (2008), Installation view, Charles J. Colton School
Prospect.1 New Orleans

I wasn’t able to take pictures in the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center which limits my reporting but then so do holiday obligations.  The second part of my Prospect 1 New Orleans Biennial photo essay to follow with brief commentary.

Srdjan Loncar, Value, Installation view, Old U.S. Mint

I’m not a fan of money art, particularly in the form of piles, but I suppose if it’s got to go somewhere, the U.S. Mint isn’t a bad place for it.

More photos after the jump.

MORE »

 
Xiaoze Xie, May 2000, Shanghai #3, 2001, oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 60 inches

Well known blogger and art world writer Lisa anonymously expressed a very common misunderstanding about web publishing on this blog recently:

I think highly of your site and wish you all the best with your fundraiser, but there’s still an underlying problem:

Newspapers have cut back on their coverage precisely because bloggers (many of them former newspaper writers or top freelancers) have been giving away the same kind of coverage for free. Now readers expect this content to be free. The idea that writers ought to be paid for their expertise seems to have vanished.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but blogs are not responsible for the financial troubles of newspapers, and the logic used to come to that conclusion makes no sense.   Wildly successful free publications such as the Village Voice existed long before the Internet came along and didn’t topple the industry.  What’s more, the Voice wasn’t an anomaly; hundreds of thousands of freely distributed newspapers and magazines circulate the country and continue to do so.  The real challenge the Internet poses to traditional forms of publishing comes from the loss of revenue generated by classifieds — Real estate, job listings, furniture sales, personals — which at one point provided a huge source of income for publications.  Those funds are now collected by sites like craigslist, ebay, and NYFA. (See Clay Shirky for more on this subject.)

But for Lisa, I doubt too many would be Art Fag City Fundraiser contributors have been swayed by the blog’s larger effect on writers wages, but I hope this post will clear up a few misunderstandings.  Independent critics need to be paid a living wage, and like everyone else in the industry I’m just trying to figure out how to make that happen.

Readers wishing to contribute to the Art Fag City Fundraiser can do so either through check or paypal.  Momenta Art is processing all payment so readers can write off their donations, and to ensure all proceeds are not used for profit.

Olafur Eliasson at MoMA

Art Fag City breaks with tradition at the L Magazine and provides a Top Five to all those other Top Ten lists.  I wanted to say something reasonably significant about a lot of these picks, and I didn’t have the space to do that for ten.  As a result, I bring you quality over quantity.

It was a volatile year for art: a number of strong new galleries opened on the Lower East Side while others around the city closed down; more than ever, art work responded to market excess (and the opposite of excess, as we’ll see in 2009); on top of that, museums performed well, launching a slew of high-quality exhibitions. As always, there isn’t enough space to mention all of the year’s highlights, but here are a few of my top picks.

Prospect. 1 New Orleans Biennial
The cure for art fair overdose on Botox Island (South Beach Miami), Prospect. 1 in New Orleans offers a similarly sizable portion of art, but serves it up in a down-to-earth city where the food and lodging is actually affordable. The largest biennial to launch in the United States, the project serves to create economic stimulus for people still suffering from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, while re-establishing New Orleans as an art center. If the quality of art exhibited is any measure of the Biennial’s success, curator Dan Cameron has to be happy; visitors will see more great work per square foot here than they will in New York. Prospect. 1 remains open until January 18, and is a must see for anyone interested in art.

New Silent Series at the New Museum
Taking its name from the theories of Neil Howe and William Strauss, who suggest new technologies will have a deep influence on the generation born after 1996, Lauren Cornell’s multidisciplinary series included a number of screenings, performances and panel discussions by cultural workers invested in New Media. My favorite evenings included a talk by artist, writer and experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, who discussed challenges of creating objects to represent a world of secret government operations, when the goal of those organizations is to work without them. I also liked the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel moderated by critic Ed Halter, which marked seemingly countless changes since the discussion’s first incarnation only two years ago, most notably the emergence of surf blogs (group bloggers searching the web for images, essays and whatever else happens to spark their interest).

To read the full piece click here.

Damien Hirst, For The Love of God, 2007.  Animation courtesy of AFC

Great news!  Art Fag City readers generously donated half of the blog’s $6,000 fundraising target yesterday, now represented by the Damien Hirst skull glinting above.   Reaching the $6,000 dollar mark will make both heads will glint, but  exceeding it will make the skulls rotate!  May the thrills never stop on this blog.

Those readers who missed yesterday’s post may wonder why I’m running a fundraiser, the short answer being because I need your support to maintain the amount of time and attention I put into it.  To summarize an email I sent out on the subject Monday:

• My goal is to raise $6,000 by January 1, 2009.

• Momenta Art has generously offered to umbrella Art Fag City under their 501-C3 status so readers can write off their donations. They process all on and offline contributions, and ensure the funds are not used for profit purposes.

• By contributing to this fundraiser, donors are not only supporting the efforts of one blogger, but staking a claim for the value of independent blogs in a climate of mainstream media arts cutbacks.

I hate to sound like a fundraising machine but unfortunately there’s no avoiding this phrase: I still need your help to raise the remaining funds.  For those sitting on the fence, some readers may be comforted to know that plans to grow the blog have been slated for the coming year.  Primarily this means the launch of an often requested newsletter with post summations and exhibition recommendations, though, but as I mentioned on Facebook yesterday, readers can also look forward to increased twitter coverage of art events, and of course, puppy farts.

Where to donate:

Paypal donation buttons here.

A Facebook Art Fag City cause now exists so users can contribute there as well.

Mark Bradford, Mithra (2008), Caffin Avenue at N. Miro Street, Lower 9th Ward, All photographs AFC

Here’s a nice surprise:  My photographs tell me the art work at the New Orleans Prospect 1 Biennial is even better than I remembered.  I hadn’t recalled being overly excited about Mark Bradford’s Arc for example, but the image above reminded me how much I enjoyed the gritty look of these recycled boards, even if the piece is a rather straight forward response to Katrina.  Over the next two days I’ll be posting images I took at Prospect 1 with commentary.  Be forwarned: There’s a lot of images to follow.

Mark Bradford, Mithra (2008), Caffin Avenue at N. Miro Street, Lower 9th Ward

Leandro Ehrlich, Too Late For Help (2008), Installation view, Lower 9th Ward

I wasn’t overly taken with this piece as I saw it in reproductions — it seemed a little too theatre-y for my tastes — but in person I was very taken with how emotive the sky was in this piece.  The gray cast of the New Orleans sky that day made the landscape feel even more barren and desolate than it already was.  More photographs after the jump

MORE »

General Idea, Test Pattern: TV Dinner Plates, 1988, Image via: General Idea

Time to dispel a flattering but ultimately untrue rumor:  Art Fag City offices are not plush with employees, but consist of one dedicated blogger working from her desk in Brooklyn.  I produce a lot of content for this site because I believe in the value of independent web art criticism and consider it my job, but  I can’t do it alone.  In light of this, I’m asking regular readers who find the site valuable in any way to become micro-donors [paypal button at the bottom of this page].  I want to keep doing this, and your support will not only help maintain the amount of attention and time I dedicate to the site, but increase it over the next year.

To be honest, launching this fundraiser is inducing quite a few nerves. I don’t know if it will work and I’m one person not an organization taking on that full risk.  I’m also not following the pre-established fundraising format people use who do valuable things; No formal letters and fun gifts appear on this site.  My goal is simply to raise $6,000 by January 1, 2009, and I am doing this with the help of Momenta Art, an organization that has umbrella-ed Art Fag City under their 501-C3 status so readers can write off their donations.  This also means they provide the oversight that ensures these funds are used for not-profit purposes and process all on and offline contributions (which is why the paypal page says Momenta on it.)

Momenta generously agreed to work with me because they see value in the criticism blogs provide, specifically that of Art Fag City.   While I publish regularly in traditional media, print is increasingly irrelevant, and Art Fag City represents a strong presence in an otherwise thin field of art world professionals working on the web.  Considering how traditional media is currently gutting arts coverage, sites such as my own are not only important, but essential to the field of art criticism.   If you read this site, and have found it useful I hope you will consider donating.

A special thanks to AA Bronson for granting the use of General Idea’s Test Pattern: TV Dinner Plates for the fundraising campaign.

Donation Levels

The Micro-Donor $25.00 The Micro-Famous $50.00 The Micro-VIP $100.00 The Micro-Platinum-VIP $250.00 The Macro-Donor $500.00 The Macro-Bronze $1,000.00 The Macro-Silver $2,500.00 The Macro-Gold $5,000.00

Contributions by check should be made out to Momenta Art, with Art Fag City written in the memo section.  Please mail to:

Momenta Art
359 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn NY, 11211