Focusing primarily on art education both in museums and galleries, as well as in a classroom setting, I’ll suggest any curious readers to first visit Americans for the Arts webpage as a source for information and news.

In 2009, Haeryun Choi and Joseph M. Piro wrote “Expanding Arts Education in a Digital Age” (Heldref Publications) which calls upon past theories in art education and updates them “within new contexts of technology and globalization.” Choi and Piro comment “technology is fast becoming the new alpha competency – an indispensable skill for the business of twenty-first-century learning.” The authors give current research justifying the need for art education, for educational initiatives that support students learning web skills that will be imposed upon them in the cyber marketplace, and for policies already advocating a shifts in the paradigms of curriculum standards to include “digital literacy,” “media literacy,” and the like. The article reviews The Rembrandt Program, a prototype of an interdisciplinary curriculum, which “blends the potential of technologies with the humanities.” Simply: technology + humanities + social studies + art. In line with the growing development of interdisciplinary lessons and courses, the Rembrandt Program is innovative and can be seen as an ardent attempt to reconsider art education in the digital age.

As for art museums, education is part of their mission and thus integrated into the design of the museum. Truly, art curators, museum designers, museum educators and artists all impact the use of web-based media as a didactic complement to the museum experience. While Choi and Piro focused on curriculums, their research can be applied to museology. Nicola Lisus and Richard V. Ericson wrote an article in 1999 that discusses how museums and galleries use special media formats to give authorization to the display. The article mentions a couple points pertinent to how web-based interaction within the institutions and as mediated by the viewer, effects the appreciation of the content. Lisus and Ericson came to the conclusions that “content must always fit the format and is therefore always secondary to the format,” and “whatever defines a particular medium…will essentially define and shape how the event’s temporal and spatial features will be translated into those of the listener or viewer.” The history of museums and galleries will attest to how viewers received the art, impacted how they appreciated it. From a collection of wonders to specializing & classifying, from crowded puzzle-piece walls to white walls… and now from visiting to participating, museums and galleries are poignantly aware of the importance of engaging the audience. People, it seems, like to interact; take Facebook as a prime example. People like to customize, use their voice and be heard, and they like to be in the know. Visitors, as much as the establishments they visit, want participation. How? Well, the audience also seems to like the immediacy the internet provides and the connectivity that social networking provides. We are used to depending on media to mediate our experience, an idea – which Nicholas Carr warns the dangers of – but an idea, that is at the root of postmodern thoughts. Everything we encounter is mediated, isn’t it? So let us find ways to illuminate the positives of experience through media.

The institutions that involve art education offer structure, exposure and guidance to engaging with creative practices and learning of artists. Unfortunately, museums are not required by all curriculums and often, the arts are the first to be cut when funding issues arise. Now with the accessibility of the internet, students without art education readily available, can go to home computer or the local library, sign on and find ways to interact with art and learn while doing so. Below, is a list of examples of how arts education is being utilized in the digital age…  you might recognize a few from an earlier post. Keep in mind, there are many, many more out there.

EXAMPLES: Add on, gain ideas, enjoy…!

Instead of a museum simply asking you to join a mailing list, the Rubin Museum of Art encourages you to pick a favorite piece, write a couple sentences about why, then give your email and submit the card to the museum. This results in a digital image of your favorite work sent to you one morning, with the historical information about the specific piece in the email (“Heart Connection”).

Renè St-Pierre’s research is posted on this site which, while mostly in French, is an awesome collection of interactive sites promoting art education. Simply click on the links and have fun! Mostly geared towards youths, but I’ll admit, they are addicting.

Every so often I would allow my students to create a Mr. Picasso Head after an exam or on special snowy Fridays… and the Frank Lloyd Wright design studio incorporates the concept of having to work with a specific client. I also took my students on a virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. Now they understand the grandeur and where the Creation of Adam fits into the entire composition. Our school did not offer much in the way of printmaking supplies, so I turned to MoMA interactive projects for help in giving visuals to an otherwise abstractly mimed lesson.

Gaming is another great way to involve students both in school settings and museums. Specifically in art education, gaming is currently being studied at Carnegie Mellon, Savannah College of Art and Design, and many others. Take a look at the Game Education Summit list of programs for brief synopses of each talk.

In San Francisco? Take a look at and register for Arts Open Change on March 6th.

Mark-Philip Venema asked for feedback on a teaching philosophy via twitter (@Art_News) and opened a discussion that spanned multiple countries and hopefully will encourage other artists and art teachers to reevaluate what they value and how they teach.

As previously mentioned, Museum With No Frontiers has updated and grown… great for museums, teachers, parents, and students alike! The Frick Art Reference Library: free of charge!

Network with international art teachers and create a single assignment that students participate in. Consider how culture plays a role in creating and understanding art.

A few other sites:

http://www.artsconnected.org/toolkit/create_space_positive.cfm

http://www.imaginationcubed.com/index.php

http://www.moma.org/interactives/destination/#

Is the contemporary art world necessarily elitist or slowly catering to the masses with the help of social media?  I want to begin the conversation by looking at recent examples in the news of how certain aspects of the art world are finding press-worthy deviations from the traditional elitist structure.

Only a handful of people in this world can afford to pay $104.3m on a Giacometti and only a slightly greater crowd will be able to justify the purchase in terms of its social and historical implications. Fine Arts has long been tied to an elitist structure and in the past decade, the art market has erupted in front-page sales due to astronomical sums. Like any luxury item, art is intoxicating, enticing and posh. Collecting it gives a burst of narcissistic pleasure that can only be achieved through ownership and possession. Then enter artists such as Patrick Skoff (Chicago) and Nic Rad (New York), both of who The Daily Beast pinpoint on page two for their generosity and creativity. Yes, other artists in the past have given out free art but those are commonly reserved for attendees at gallery openings. These free artworks, on the other hand, have a specific eAudience and required participation. It’s not Adam Lindemann running to the next location, it’s you. Skoff and Rad altered tradition by giving gifts instead of participating in the collection of commodities and initiated new thoughts on the practice of collecting art and the collectors themselves. The concept of art as a gift is discussed further in Edward Winkleman’s February 9th blog post. Before leaving this paragraph on the art market, please visit the blog of well-informed and well-known artist, William Powhida. He shares his personal thoughts of working within the system but not always agreeing with it, in his insightful, honest and entertaining blog.

Artists like Rebecca Armstrong also bring new thought to an old regime when she presents “Working Artist,” a contract-based performance art piece where an agreement is drawn up stating the artist is to be paid for labor rather than product. Armstrong challenges us each to reconsider how we value art and succeeds in separating the product from the market, at least for a moment. Another work that considers how we value work is Jennifer Dalton’s and Phillip Buehler’s Art Survey.

Early in the new year, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art hired a new Director: Jeffrey Deitch, the art dealer. Roberta Smith quells anxious art lovers by submitting his strengths and a brief overview of his relevant credentials. It seems as though the job descriptions of both positions have more overlapping responsibilities than first thought. Naturally, Deitch’s relationship with certain artists may effect MOCA’s collection, but this is certainly not anything new. Without completely digressing into the history of museum directors with ulterior motives, let’s simply summarize this art world shock as a blurring between roles within the art world and, again, a divergence from the conventional.

An interview by Marion Maneker with David Lester one of the founders of International Fine Art Expositions (IFAE) unveils the effects of social media on art fairs. Lester, after crediting his younger staff for having a different “kind of thinking… that think in Twitter, Facebook…” explains that “the whole mechanisms of promotion have changed [sic].” This has ultimately led to small, independent fairs dying off as the strong and large art fair corporations have exponentially grown. Social media aims for accessibility and inclusivity… yet, has troubling effects on the art fairs of the same beliefs. The elitist structure, in this case, is reaffirmed.

These are just a few brief previews of current events and thought that are provoking a reconsideration of what is and isn’t necessary in the contemporary art world. The individuals involved have challenged the art world by introducing the idea of the gift to the market, asking for value to be placed on the artist’s labor, cross-overing and overlapping in traditional art roles. The issues and deviations are not limited to these. I highly suggest reading the brilliant: #class blog which covers many more topics, ideas, and artists (this is how I first came upon Armstrong’s work!).

In Part II, I chose to relate personal experiences to open the discussion on the ramifications of visual arts misappropriation, which were aided by technology and online sharing. Calling attention to the fact that research is being done to examine the value and effects of copies, replications and the like, I claim that this research is transferable to copies accessed through the internet. (If you need an example more directly related to online collective sourcing, consider the Shepard Fairey controversy).

Now in Part III, I want to compile a few choice examples of how online sharing has combined with social networking and art to create phenomenal new ideas and opportunities. Rather than immediate analyze how these are each innovative and collaborative, art-minded and online community inspired, I’ll suggest simply enjoying the list. Perhaps these ideas will inspire you to approach things differently…

• QS World Arts
• Masterpiece 2.0
• Seven on Seven (New Museum)
• 1stFans (Brooklyn Museum)
• Museum With No Frontiers: Islamic & Baroque Art
• Open P2P Design: Reconstructs previous conceptions on successful marketing by acknowledging and using the power of social media and social networking, as well as fresh design. I suggest reviewing Massimo Menichinelli‘s slideshow for an explanation of his formula, found on the previous link.

The examples of online sharing success stories are numerous. I chose to limit myself to these six because I feel they are a sample of the range of art-minded companies and people looking to engage in social media and online sharing within visual culture. Admittedly, I see strengths and (some) weaknesses in each, but am mostly enthralled with the developing ideas.  Also, I’ll refer back to these projects (and supply others) in upcoming posts on art education: museums and schools, the buzz of the “social media artist” and sustainability in contemporary arts… to list a few vague intentions.

As a former art teacher, I would use Google images to access digital photographs of works and use them in my lectures. I also have a mass collection of museum and gallery postcards, and yes, even a Venus of Willendorf keychain. Using these variations of copies, reproductions, and various simulacra as examples in class was, in fact, risky.

For example, take my keychain. My students saw Ms. Willendorf in a certain size, color, and medium that was replicating another medium altogether. How did the weight of the plastic compare to the weight of her original Oolitic limestone? Would this not effect the impact on the human holding it? Was it even meant to be held? Do my students devalue Ms. Willendorf because they first encounter her as a device in which to carry my keys? What about those buyers who read the write up on the keychain website? They are unfortunately now grossly misinformed.

I felt it necessary to introduce her to them as “Venus,” but then change her name. I concluded that “Ms. Willendorf” was more suitable. Ms. translates as any female I regard in respect and Willendorf is the name of the location in Austria she was found, when she was found. “Ms. Willendorf” supposes a locale and a sex that speaks to the current English-speaking population, although I’ll agree that Woman of Willendorf is even more sensitive to keeping preconceived notions at bay (an overview).

“Venus,” you see, is extremely misleading. Think of the other “Venus’s” in art we can call upon (the many “Venus” women in art). How can an archaic object that we have no certain meaning of, be categorized with mythology and modernist sex symbols that were created thousands of years later? It is an absurd misappropriation that still permeates university survey courses and texts as fact rather than theory. This prepares the students with an assumption that current western constructs apply to every culture, at any time in history.

Similarly, I would hold a poster of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night and have my students look at and discuss the art using an altered Panofsky-esque guide. They would speak about the use of an earthy, pale neutral that took away from the vibrancy of the famous Van Gogh yellows. What was this pale neutral? (Without digressing into the effects of CYMK/RGB…) It was the canvas that the flat, color copy poster could not convey. Still, technology did allow for a large-scale Van Gogh poster in the room; is this not better than being devoid of a visual example?

The business of copies, reproductions, souvenirs, mementos, and various other forms of simulacra and the resulting messages, appreciation, and understanding extends in many different directions. As Thomas Dowson states in a 1999 article on reproduced rock art, “although the technical nature of re-producing the image is an important issue, it is, secondary to the kinds of messages these re-produced images give their viewers” (from “Off the Rocks, Onto T-Shirts, Canvasses, etc…” in: Rock Art and Ethics: A Dialogue). I realize I am grouping many terms of simulacra with copy-cut-paste due to the similarities in how the secondary work is encountered, often resulting in a misunderstanding of the original content. I will end with these two thoughts:

• When Copying & Cutting, aim to be aware of the effects on how a reader/ viewer will interpret the work when Pasted.
• Always give credit.

With the advances in technology and the focus on social media today, these are two considerations that are vital to sharing the original intent of the message/ client/ artist. The effects can be grave. One last online mishap, to give an example using media more applicable to this blog.

PART I:  CCP: Technology and Theory… To drag-and-drop.

Digital technology and its involvement with the web has opened the floodgates to reassessing access, ownership, and reproducibility of images on a global level (for more read this).  Briefly reviewing some online vernacular:

Sharing, File-sharing - As sharing media online evolved, the call to define the legal delineation between “stealing” and “sharing” became more urgent.  A 2003 article on the impact of online music sharing gives insight to the history and controversy.

Appropriation – the idea of taking found objects or works of art from the past, altering them to change their meaning or message, and then presenting them as an original work (read more here).  Many agree that Appropriation Art began in the US with Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.  Not long after US Dadaism, Pop explodes onto the scene and brillo boxes are given new stature.  It is important to remember that the alterations recontextualize the original work or works.

The imponderable frontier of cyberspace is dominated with graphics and images, many of which are a simple drag-and-drop away from becoming someone else’s property, albeit illegally.  MLA and other citation styles do offer a proper and legal way to cite the source and blog developers have made pingback and trackback capability superbly easy.  Even with these solutions at hand, I question the psychological effects of accepting of and adapting to a Copy-Cut-Paste (CCP) mentality.

Andrew Keen creates the term ”kleptocracy” to explain this concept which is inclusive, of course, of digital visual media.  Keen acknowledges the internet as generously convenient in accessing information.  Similarly, Nicholas Carr is not blind to the benefits, but both Keen and Carr are wary that the ease of technology has actually prompted many to use CCP without regard to the ramifications.  Why not?  A few clicks and I can reference an author, imbed a link, and so on.  Both Keen and Carr look at younger generations (students) that are accustomed to sharing through CCP and question whether their reliance on CCP has resulted in skewed ethics involving cyber-sharing.

Looking at the situation from the students’ point of view, how could the definition of sharing not be blurred?  The ambiguous and omnipresent internet has no discernable boundaries – except for parental blocks and firewalls, which are frequently overridden.  It is the Web, a rhizomatic field with endless ways to enter, share and collect.  With the lacking of boundaries, it’s a free-for-all in terms of ownership.  People are creating websites daily, sticking in their flags and voicing their ideas.  For a lack of better terms, we partake in the practice of digital imperialism.  Maybe Keen was not far off when suggesting that Google Books was a step towards “intellectual communism.”  Then again, Keen was writing about this in 2006, certainly some things have changed… Although, Michiko Kakutani’s review of Jaron Lanier’s Manifesto was pulished just a few weeks ago and appears to warn of the same worry of “online collectivism.” While Lanier’s scholarship on “digital Maoism” is far beyond the musings of CCP, it is a vital read to understanding current theory and thought on the future of the web.

The Positive Effects of the CCP Phenomenon on Artists

There are a number of online curators and collectors: amateurs, enthusiasts and individuals well-integrated into social networking. Their websites are completely reliant on CCP and utilize hosts that practically cater to it (tumblr is a great example). Account holders deem their specific conglomeration of posts to be unique. As Susan Buck-Morss states, “To drag-and-drop an image is to appropriate it, not as someone else’s product, but as an object of one’s own sensory experience… the image is frozen in perception.” With sites such as this one, which gives due credit to the originals, it seems that these online collections are legitimate; personal interpretations of how things connect and relate. In fact, these sites aid in promotion and mimic the social media standards of conversing, engaging, and sharing. There are also contemporary artists completely dedicated to Appropriation Art, acknowledging its ties with social networking and categorizing it at a type of “collage.” In my undergraduate art history survey courses, being able to log-in on the campus wifi, call up images on the internet while taking notes from the lecture created some rather substantial study guides. Later on, as an art teacher, I relied on the internet to collect images that I then used in slideshows and lectures. While I aimed to consistently cite the sources, the idea of using a digital copy to introduce a work to a student has its own implications.

Questions to consider before proceeding into Part II and III:

• Does the artist lose his or her power to the online curator? What are the pros and cons?
• Do we now place more value in the copy because we can “own” it?
• Does a copy misrepresent the original intent of the work? Do we fault social networking or commerce if misrepresentation occurs?

Hodge and D’Souza state, “mass communication… is likely to be prone to miscommunication.”

• Is social media a form of artistic expression?
• How are artists using social media?
• What is a social media artist?

In his blog articles on the intersection of art and social media, Cohen has pinpointed my current interests in art theory.

Briefly, social media can be defined as an interactive dissemination of information (for more, read this). Specifically on the web, social media (SM) manifests itself in various forms and aims to engage the prodigious internet audience at a nearly personal level. With the necessity of immediacy and the demand for information, SM gurus responded by developing blogs, and then micro-blogs, social networking sites for friends and for the professional, etc etc etc… and then promptly enabled ways to link them all together.

SM unveils how the rhizomatic internet can work for both the large corporation and the struggling artist. The technology being introduced to utilize SM as a PR tool, aims to anticipate the various linking capabilities of the Web and the User. A prime and hot example, the iPad.

In an article from December 8 2009, Tom Dyckhoff writes, “design today is less about producing objects and more about the “interface”, designing the virtual spot where the human meets the artificial.”  These ideas of intersections, of links between developing media and virtual platforms, has led me to concentrate on the effects of social media on art, design, and aesthetic trends. I want to compile and discuss what comprises Art2.0… acknowledging parallels to the debated Fluxus movement of the ’60s (Fluxus2.0, anyone?). Finally, I plan to explore and hypothesize on how virtual networking re-constructs design.

More or less…

I want to investigate how the combination of social media and art create new art, redefine virtual frontiers, and theorize as to what is next in Art2.0.