Trebor Scholz and Judith Rodenbeck bring up an interesting topic in their dialogue on Collaborative Mapping (the bittorent video will be available here shortly). It's a topic that needs much more exploration and their's is a start: When will new media be accepted by the art establishment?

Rodenbeck gave a solid, if academic, rundown of historical "participatory" art forms while Scholz gave examples of current practices. Unfortunately not much was resolved, but it's a start towards a much needed discourse, something we hope to nurture here.

Not just one but two "art ladies" and their art loving crews were encamped at the Gregory Crewdson show at Luring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea while I was there. The word "alienation" cropped up once or twice but I thought Twin Peaks meets Desperate Houswives. Several of the art lovers could have stepped out of the pictures, something Crewdson probably has in mind when he casts them.

Pictures from the after-party sponsored by The Thing at Postmasters Gallery in NYC for the New Media Art Education Conference last night. At right, new media hooligan John Klima after he was ticketed for drinking a beer on the sidewalk.

Fuzzy pictures are courtesy Motorola camera phone.

Jasper Johns opened at Matthew Marks in Chelsea with his Catenary series.

"After completing the installation of his 1996 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Jasper Johns retreated to his studio in Connecticut to wipe the slate clean, beginning a body of work that was a dramatic departure from anything he had made before. The first painting in this new series included a string hanging from upper right to lower left, generating a curve called a “catenary,” and this curve became the compositional backbone of the entire series."

It's a bad sign when the head of a conference admits freely from the audience that he made up the name of the conference at the last minute. The title, Hyperpolis, is catchy and connotates "a polis distributed over the entire surface of the world." Too bad more wasn't done with the theme. The subtitle, "Age of Reason 2.0" is also interesting but nothing much was done with it. This has more to do with the structure of the conference and the fact there weren't many people in the audience. Though I don't have a great deal of experience with these kinds of presentations I do think this was better suited to a smaller, more intimate setting than the auditorium at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn.

The Friends of the High Line presented the preliminary design proposal tonight at the Bohen Foundation on 13th Street. I'd seen the web site but it was nice to hear the architect and landscape architect explain the designs and answer questions. Also to see the Bohen Foundation, which I've never heard of and have since learned has a major art collection. In the basement was a recreation of a NY subway station with some slight alterations.

If you've found your way here then you've undoubtedly noticed the post.thing.net site has changed a bit. Yes, we finally got the drupal site sort of together, enough to make it live. It's better than the fake blog I've been doing for the past four months but now the real work begins.

We see this as a soft launch, a beta version that will be ready for prime time come Fall. During that time we'll work on implementing the drupal modules, writing our own and, most importantly, cultivating a "community" (Wolfgang hates that word so what do we call it, a gang?) to use the site in ways that both adds meaningful content but also provides the incentive to write that content.

The ghost of Jack Goldstein is haunting New York right now with films, records and paintings at Mitchell-Innes & Nash uptown and paintings from the early '80s at Metro Pictures in Chelsea. His suicide two years ago went practically unnoticed by a contemporary art world deep in debt to him (details: here).

Richard Prince opened at Barbara Gladstone Gallery tonight with some old but mostly new work. Unlike the past few shows, which were consistant groups of similar work, this was almost a mini-retrospective not only of the work but of his themes and his obsessions through the years.

The result is creepy, made especially so by one work that has an audio loop of a whistled tune/toon that permeates everything else. He's managed to out creep the master Bruce Nauman.

Jordan Crandall talks to Joy Garnett during the book signing for Under Fire : The Organization and Representation of Violence. Vols. 1 & 2 at Printed Matter.

Art Dirt Redux interview: mp3