"The joy of the Postmodern, and as we go into the next period at the moment (name TBA), is that immaterial culture's association with the material (expand at will) is that the antagonism between the art market and the avant is diffused by allowing for localized discourse. Since the "ism" was destroyed, art atomized into very local threads of genre, into small groups, and even imploded to the individual.

Here's a little --> photo story of what happened literally one block away from the "artist meeting" during the dumbo festival last month (of which I just learned thru this blog!)

If anyone is in Cornwall, UK on Saturday 1st September, you might like to drop into Tate St.Ives (www.tate.org.uk/stives)for a talk I'm giving on free software and open source as an area of contemporary art. The talk will provide a context for SUPERFLEX's FREE BEER project, which is currently being exhibited at Tate St Ives and within the Public Realm.

For those of you who couldn't make it across to Tate Modern in London for the Disrupting Narratives symposium on July 13th, the video archive is now live and can be accessed (with flash 8 or higher) at:

http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/disrupting_narratives/defau...

Oppenheim Sunburn Remix -1993
I’m looking at the works I did fourteen years ago to understand what I was trying to get at. The works were done as I was beginning to work with the internet. One of the web sites I created was called Faux Conceptual Art. I was thinking about the burgeoning business of counterfeit products such as watches and designer label products coming from China. Since I live a few blocks from Canal Street in New York, I am aware of all the counterfeit products being sold on the street. I thought that the fakes were a very interesting by product of globalism. They also functioned as a linguistic game. The game is about a shift in the idea of creativity. It also extends the 1980’s discussion of appropriation into the 1990’s debate about intellectual property. The shift in creativity is subtle. This also has it’s basis in the famous essay by Walter Benjamin, Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. What Benjamin says is that art loses its’ “aura” when it is reproduced. The discussion is about the qualities of an artwork. This presupposes that art is about a unique object, a masterwork. The copy supposedly has no “aura.” What conveys uniqueness or the quality of art to an artwork? This becomes a central question for every generation of artists.

Many are aware that the creative activities and conceptual shifts of todays contemporary artists, are not easy to define as art in the traditional sense. Especially when much of the cross-cultural, relational contexts, canons and definitions of art are re-shaped by these two individuals, Kate Rich & Kayle Brandon. Who seem to effortlessly break through paradigms like there is no tomorrow.