[iDC] "Wikipedia Art"

[John Hopkins]

>To address the comments by both John Hopkins and Saul, I apologize if my initial post read as a press release. I've been doing a lot of this lately, in more appropriate venues, and could have gotten carried away.

it's nothing to apologize for, as though an apology for ideological approach actually excuses or nulllifies the approach.  why make an apology for how you did the 'piece?'

it's actually a critical appraisal of the work in it's entirety -- not a consideration of it as you (as intentional gatekeeper of the expected sphere of critique: a hermetic space "about wikipedia") desired to frame the 'issues' you wanted to raise.  Your entire 'deployment' of the 'work' cannot be conveniently ignored if we are discussing relations of voice and power and so on.  You chose a very conventional and conservative way to 'exhibit' your 'conceptual' art.  And as I said, the label reactionary may be applied.

>My hope with IDC was to engage this specific community with some of the issues this project brought up.

IMHO engagement is not fostered when the 'concept' is thus packaged and executed.  Maybe this approach comes from a romantic mis-reading of Fluxus performance documentations (not experiencing those as actions within a lived praxis/context) or something, I'm not sure, as I don't know your background.

Pragmatically, I do realize that packaging, in the sense of strategic 'deployments' of an 'artwork,' is really everything in the contemporary academic/art world, but I find it extremely cynical to be treating something framed as a conceptual/critical/creative endeavor as a vehicle for attention-gathering.

yeah, my opinion.  your apology seems to reinforce my point that your critical awareness stopped at the formally applied border of the subject of inquiry.

jh