Please pass this to anyone you know:

If you are in the LA area, we are seeking interns. You can get school credit. We need interns who can work their way through technology systems such as mailing list managers, content management, uploading graphics, updating social networking sites.

Basic HTML or PHP is a huge plus.

We have a cool work environment that is super casual and fun.

E-mail wbrtech (@) gmail.com with a resume.

Since I took some heat for my weekend post as people confused me asking a genuine question about the value of art to talking about a policy I have no opinion about, I thought I’d write a bit on my philosophy for artist websites.

Up above is about 1/4 of the total sites WBR has done on the Drupal platform. The aim in using Drupal as the backbone to our sites was motivated primarily by its ability to be amorphous to the final functionality requirement for any given website. Meaning: when entering into the development of an artist site, we can design the site from the get-go to the demands of the artist, not to the demands of technology.

Our central approach for artist websites is that each site should be as individual as each artist. No artist is similar, in the same way that nothing they produce is similar. So why should their site be similar to anyone elses? Everything an artist does, from a CD to their concert to even a poster should reflect the art, not the concept of product. In the same way, the site that we develop for an artist should be a reflection on the artist rather than a fetishizing of technology or the debasement of artistry under the guise of “easy” and “quick.”

This approach to sites is how I worked in the newspaper business when I was there. However it didn’t scale that well. However with music, since there is a semi-regimented process regarding the translation of idea into an actualized entity, its easier to insert web architecting into that and make it work in a unique fashion.

So in the spirit of Top 10 lists, here’s my Top 10 guidelines I try to adhere to for artist websites.

1. An artist site is not a social network, but it should be social: I’m a firm believer in the power of users in terms of a website. The Internet was not made for single direction communication, and when possible, any website should provide a high degree of control, communication, community and social ability for a user, to the degree they are comfortable with. However, it makes no sense to make a “social networking site” in the generic capacity for an artist. There are better sites for that, they provide nice API’s and the criticality of mass that enables “social network” as a concept rarely can be solidified around only one common theme.
2. Along the same lines: a community doesn’t have to be a social network: You can have a community on your website that is rich and vibrant and thriving without having to fall into the traps of the common social networking paradigms. In fact, to focus on communication rather than the “collecting” notion of social networking is better in the long run for fan relationships with the artist.
3. The artist should be a user, not the site itself: we treat the site as extension of the artifact and artistry produced by the artist, not as the artist’s entity themselves. That means the voice, tone, messaging and imaging needs to be treating the artist as a user, like the site was their home rather than the site is the “artist” as an entity. Its a tough distinction to make. Think of it this way: in order to carry through the notion that the Internet breaks the hegemony that is used to differentiate the “star” from the rest, you need to carry that through in the tone, messaging and design of the website. This isn’t necessarily universal however, but it should be a good starting point. Site = home for the artist, not the artist themselves.
4. People want only a few things from a site, but will stick around if there is more there: the most common things people come to artists websites for is tour dates and music. The second most common is news, and the parts that keep users around are any form of media. The reason fan sites (such as, ahem, murmurs.com) took a lot of traffic from artist sites in the past is that they used these as the gateway drug into a larger experience that celebrated the notion of fandom instead of keeping it at a distance. To keep people in the site, you need to celebrate those people.
5. Which carries to this, an artist site should celebrate fans and create a home for them. Fansites did this very well. The notion of fanaticism is actually quite a beautiful thing and deserves to be celebrated in the context of the object of fandom itself. The tone of a site should therefore welcome fans like it was their long lost home rather than a place to just extract time and attention and money.
6. Fans want a safe place. Running Murmurs.com, this was and is always the key to how I wanted it to feel. I remember being a hard core R.E.M. fan growing up and being constantly made fun of for it. The whole reason I created Murmurs.com is that I wanted a safe place to enjoy being a fan with other fans.
7. Make commerce easy, fun and social. This is a difficult one, but people do enjoy talking about, wearing and socializing around the objects they purchase. Malls are designed to take advantage of flocking behavior, and to a degree, Amazon is too using computer algorithms. The whole process of being a fan is also a process of objectification, which can and should be a fun process.
8. No Flash! This is simple. Flash belongs for certain things: media players and video. Nothing else. If a site isn’t easy for me to navigate, how will it be for someone on a small screen on dial up? I have four monitors and four processors for fucks sake and my processor gets pegged on any site with Flash. Say no to gratuitous SWF’s!
9. Its called the web for a reason: a web doesn’t survive without strong enough links to support it. In the same way, sites need to be one with their own community in order to function as full entities. Leverage what other people do better and don’t reinvent. Embrace and integrate on an API level. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, Upcoming, Jambase, etc. Anything and everything that can be attached can and should. In the same way, the site should (and we’re working on) provide an API for others to extend it.
10. 365 days, 7 days, 24 hours… the web doesn’t stop because an album is dropped from rotation. Keep things fresh, updated and working. Its hard to keep 100 entirely differently functioning sites functioning, but its essential and we spend tons of time doing so.

Anyone else have any to add?

[Relating to: blackrimglasses.com » Blog Archive » Reducing Back to Art]

Back to the point I was trying to make:

Where do you all see the import of art and music education within the public school system?

And along those lines: what are everyone’s opinions regarding the diminishing importance of the Humanities in general in education?

I ask this having first hand experience with the elimination of art in education, having a wife who’s a children’s art educator, and having her job systematically eliminated from everywhere she has ever worked.

The point I was trying to make, or trying to get to was:

How do we value cultural artifacts when there is little to no value of culture itself in the educational systems, public sector and society at large?

That, more than anything is the root of the problem I think.

I’m asking this not as a music industry person, but as someone who taught, practiced and supports art my entire life. And who is married to an artist and art educator.

[From Issues : Public Arts (www.newsaic.com)]

This is what I was talking about, for those that don’t bother to read the actual post (and just other’s reactions to it). The treatment of art (music, film, painting, fine arts, et al) in this country has been abysmal and I find that sad. I find it sad as someone that worked as an artist, sought funding, got funding through Canada for a project I was on, or even the government of Slovenia for another. But never from the US.

What my post was about, and what I actual told Mahalo as well, is that I don’t think the debate around HOW to monetize cultural artifacts is the answer, that to find an answer we have to look back to how we value art itself.

That means how we value paintings, digital art, conceptual, installation, photography and film. And yes, Music. And yes, both good and bad music. The worst of a medium is sometimes the fuel for the best of art in another medium (witness Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Marcel Duchamp, Rauchenberg)

My point is: how can we really debate the value of music or movies or photography, how compensation works, etc when we can’t, since 1989 when the NEA fell apart, figure out how to make art viable as a commercial practice and how to value and support it as a part of the fabric of a functioning society?

Both high and low art.

Commercial and non-commercial.

Art and art.

Here’s some more stuff to actually read (and not just react to):

The Artists and the Artocrats

About the NEA debate

An Artist to Plead for Art (from Time)

Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation“

My artist bio from school.

I’ve been in the music business for about two years now, nearly two and a quarter. So long as I’ve been in this business, there has been discussion about the issues of piracy, value and monetary exchange in a world rapidly converting to digital distribution.

These discussions have been rooted primarily in the protection of a cluster of data here known as an “album” and the mechanism by which one can assure that the value proposition of an album as it existed in the physical realm translates to the digital.

Various ways were attempted to ensure this, such as imposing an analog to physical limitations (proximal, temporal) using rights management (in various forms, both physical and digital). ie: restricting movement of a file was analogous to geographic distance limitations of a physical product. It could only exist in one place at once. These mechanisms attempted to translate the physical and linear into the non-linear and metaphysical. It did not work.

The focus though has always been on a very small situation: how to ascribe value to music, and how to prevent that value from being diminished by the notion of Free.

I think this is the wrong focus. I want to broaden out a bit and go back to a fundamental problem of representation and art:

How do you value art?

How do you ensure that the value of art can translate into the notion of making a living on art?

What role does a government body play in the propagation of the meme of art creation? Support? Education? Distribution?

Art is a complicated notion in the sense that it is the translation of the internal dialog within the creators core being into something that can be consumed in either representational or non-representational form by others. It can be music, manifestos, films or pictures. It can be photography, painting or sculpture. It can be the raw physical being in the act of being a person.

The concept of art is fundamental to our identity as humans, and our place in the world at large. The hegemony of our role on the planet is maintained both by the means at which we can destroy it, as well as the ways in which we can express what makes us unique and hence beautiful. Its a complicated dichotomy, a species granted with the simultaneous tendencies to create and destroy in equal measure.

Art typically has value reflective of various dimensions encompassing influence, effort, perceived impact and the the recombining of all these dimensions back on each other. Its a recursive system in which the implication of value translates to the extraction of value in a continual cycle. Its value is deemed based on experience, prestige and impact rather than anything typically quantifiable. Indeed when one tries to quantify the value of art, that act of quantification is seen as art itself.

Music in the end is a form of art. It is polemic, but I stand by the fact that the worst to the best music is art without any regard to its inherent quality. Bad music is art in the way that we deem the music bad. The act of ascribing quality in and of itself is a form of art. Good music is likewise art sometimes more in situ, but also because of the act of imposing the metric of “good” vs. “bad.”

The value exchange of music was rooted on the rights of the writer, the compensation for the mechanical reproducer and the acknowledgment of ownership by others who present the music. These things, 80 years later, still apply, but have had additional complication by digital vs. analog representation.

These mechanisms are in place to ascribe value to all modes of experience for a music product: reception, transmission and physical purchase. And as we know, this modal of monetary value is not necessarily working anymore. With the lack of artifact and the onus of representation moving from the producer to the consumer in consort with hardware/software manufacturers, we find ourselves back to square one: what is the value of the piece of art? Now its a digital artifact, but the same question applies.

The issues around the value and the authenticity of art is not new. Walter Benjamin wrote a nice essay about it, proposing that the work of art was devalued and removed from itself through mechanical reproduction. Through history, art has been in a constant struggle against the very mutability and duplicability of its formal representation.

Andy Warhol made art that poked fun and called attention to the of art, and the role of formal representation in the delineation of duplicability a hierarchy of art/non-art. Rauchenberg, Duchamp, Picabia, etc did likewise.

Art is always in a constant struggle against its own value, and thereby the value of the artist. How does an artist make art a living, and likewise, how does an artist value their own art to the point where it is a mechanism by which they can make a living? To what degree must a government support art and artists? And why the fear around the latter point?

The role of art within societies is likewise a point of question. Within Europe, it is actually pretty easy (relatively) to make a living as an artist, depending on the country. I have friends in certain countries who are Artists by trade, supported through government programs. Canada supports art through liberal granting. In those areas, the value of the artifact of art is less of a concern than the value of the process of creating. And the same does and should apply to music as a form of art.

It’s my opinion that before we start down the path of “how do you value digital artifacts” and “how do you value music,” we also need to evaluate how we as a society value art. How do we as a government, a democratic society support artists to the point where the value of experience is enough to support the act of creation? How do remove the fear-politics and the pro-ignorance in the US society to the point where art gains intrinsic value as a societal force?

In all the debate about the monetary models around digital music and cultural artifacts, we miss the root of the problem: the value of the process of creation and the support of the creator.

I propose, and I hope, that as we go through 2008 into this fundamental shift of digital media, we also step back to the root and evaluate as a society the place of Art within it.

Until we take care of Artists, until we value art as an intrinsic part of humanity and until we remove the pro-ignoramus politics that have invaded the US in the past 20 years, we have no chance of making a viable ecosystem around the commercialization of the artifacts created.

Post script: This applies to painters, photographers, film makers, performance and installation artists. Conceptual artists and more. How does the value of art translate to a new system when the value of the artist has lost is sanctity within certain sections of our society?

NinetyNights.com came about partially through a series of brain storms with this conceit:

What would Stan Brakhage do with YouTube?

Flickr video seems to echo this and directly create a system for someone like Stan Brakhage.

However, Flickr Video has nothing in it to support Michael Snow.

And for that reason it fails.

I got more out of SXSW interactive than any other tech conference I’ve been to. I really did enjoy it. Thoroughly.