Sunday, September 02, 2012

Update: The Unofficial Catalog for the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics

The opening section to the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics catalog is written in a Wikipedia-like style and is not attributed to any particular author. The catalog opens:
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page.
  • * This biography of a living fiction role-playing itself as a digital flux persona needs additional citations for verification.

  • * It needs attention from an expert on the subject.

  • * Its mythological use of narrative techniques camouflaged as art history may not follow standard policies or guidelines.
The entry-as-narrative then begins:
The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics features the life and work of The Artist 2.0. The Artist 2.0 is the eponymous figure whose early 21st century oeuvre is featured online in the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA). Presented as an "open persona" whose practice is a composite of hundreds of artists and hactivists all over the world, the story of The Artist 2.0 is playfully documented via the experimental transmedia narrative created by the artist Mark Amerika as a new commission for the Abandon Normal Devices festival in the Northwest of England and in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics and Cultural Olympiad. For reasons that remain unknown, "The Artist 2.0" persona was created to indicate how an emerging form of art making associated with social media practices and an emerging New Aesthetic are simultaneously challenging conventional art world exhibition contexts as well as embedding themselves in the art historical canon. In this regard, The Artist 2.0 is perhaps the first fictional figure whose body of work grows out of the emerging networked and mobile media culture and whose career trajectory is now part of a continuum of academically sanctioned, avant-garde art history dating back to the late 19th century. In a curatorial essay about the artist written by online curator Francesca Nilsson, she was quoted as saying that "[t]he contradictory and complex readings of the work created by The Artist 2.0 reinforces its ongoing relevance to multiple audiences. More than ever, identity is malleable and fluid, and his role as a postproduction or remix artist, especially as he plays with issues of performance, presence, and persona, confirm this." [citation needed] In this same essay, Nilsson doubles down and suggests that "perhaps what is most interesting about 2.0's body of work is that it doesn't tell you what to think. Rather, the work is so rich in meaning that everyone can develop their own ideas in relationship to both the work and the artist. Everyone reads something different into it." [citation needed]
The e-book version of the entire catalog is available for free at the MOGA website. For a limited time, there is a limited edition, full color print version of the catalog here.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, catalog, e-book, limited edition print version, The Artist 2.0, glitchmuseum.com