G-E-N-I-U-S
Artist William Powhida's Tumblr. Mostly Art. Infinite Scroll. @powhida
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Lecture notes
This isn’t a formal essay, but the thoughts might be worth sharing. Today, I think the art world, all of them, feels a little bit like MoCA. The situation there is an interesting intersection of everything that is going on in both the market and the museum world in relation to broader…
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CNN seElection Special in Zoom.it. Now legible.
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Not a video, but a zoom.it of an large painting from 2009, or how to fuck with the dashboard. Play to Zoom.
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Tumblr dashboard sucks.
Just a Fuck You Informational, the old FYI, tumblr dashboard is terrible for looking at images. That aren’t of cats. or GIFS of videos with subtitles about the horror of your life. See sad, pathetic front end of tumblr occasionally. #dashboard
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Meanings*, graphite and colored pencil on panel, 15” x 19”, 2012. Courtesy of somebody. *people say all kinds of shit they because they won’t say anything.
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Artmageddon for Christian Viveros-Faune’s article “How Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art” in the Village Voice.
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Why You Shouldn’t Buy Art. Graphite, colored pencil, watercolor, sincerity, and irony on paper. 14” x 19”, 2012. private collection. Archival Inkjet editions available on 20x200
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A Song. 9” x 12”. Graphite, colored pencil and watercolor on paper. 2012.
20x200.com OccupySandy benefit edition available. All of my proceeds will be donated directly to OccupySandy. -
Pro Test (As in Pro Golfer)
This is the song that my friend Chris Evjy used to sing to us in his apartment in Greenpoint and at shows with his former band Ex-Planets. This is a more recent version Chris recorded in Colorado after me moved there a few years ago. The lyrics from the song are the basis for my OccupySandy benefit print with 20x200.com. All portions of my proceeds will be donated directly to OccupySandy.
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A War of All Against All, William Powhida and Jade Townsend, Graphite on vellum, 9’ x 5’, 2012. Courtesy of Poulsen Gallery, DE. Click through for a high-resolution image.
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Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes, William Powhida and Jade Townsend, Graphite on paper, 9’ x 5’, 2012. Private Collection. Exhibited at Poulsen Gallery, DE. Print edition will be available through the artists’ galleries. Click through for high-resolution image.
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Cynical Advice, 15” x 20”, Graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor on paper,2012. For the 2012 BRIC benefit gala.
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“Where Does
PoliticalPower Come From, Anyway?” Graphite, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper, 30” x 22”, 2012. Commissioned by CNN.com. Click to Enlarge. -
Bruce Sterling’s New Aesthetic Essay Truncated
The New Aesthetic is image-processing
The New Aesthetic concerns itself with “an eruption of the digital into the physical.”
The New Aesthetic is moving out of its original discovery phase, and into a evangelical, podium-pounding phase.
The New Aesthetic has the “scenius” of London’s Silicon Roundabout to support it.
I must try to explain the New Aesthetic to a wondering mankind
The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture.
The New Aesthetic is a “theory object” and a “shareable concept.”
The New Aesthetic is “collectively intelligent.”
It is rhizomatic,
It’s open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs.
Above all, the New Aesthetic is telling the truth.
It’s the news, and it’s the truth.
the New Aesthetic is culturally agnostic.
The New Aesthetic is comprehensible.
The New Aesthetic carries a severe, involved air of Pynchonian erudition.
It’s contemporary.
It’s temporal rather than atemporal.
The New Aesthetic is very hands-on, immediate, grainy and evidence-based.
Its core is a catalogue of visible glitches in the here-and-now, for the here and for the now.
It requires close attention.
The New Aesthetic is inherently modish
The New Aesthetic is constructive.
It’s built by and for working creatives.
It is generational.
It is a fresh and different thing.
It’s an avant-garde,
the New Aesthetic is a gaudy, network-assembled heap.
It assails critics like Walter Benjamin, rather than Walter Benjamin’s hapless artists.
The New Aesthetic is a rather old, and hearteningly traditional, story about a regional, generational cluster of creative people who are perceiving important stuff that other, older, and dumber people don’t get quite yet.
It’s a typical avant-garde art movement that has arisen within a modern network society
It’s a lure and a snare.
The true problem with the New Aesthetic is that it truly is a new aesthetic.
It has to become one, even if it doesn’t much want to be one.
The New Aesthetic is gooey all over with noosphere sauce.
The New Aesthetic is a genuine aesthetic movement with a weak aesthetic metaphysics.
It’s not their fault.
It’s our fault for pretending otherwise, for fooling ourselves, for projecting our own qualities onto phenomena that we built, that are very interesting to us, but not at all like us.
The New Aesthetic dusts off the Turing Test in a new Super Mario robot-vision guise, but it can’t get away with that attention-compelling metaphysical maneuver.
So the New Aesthetic is really a design-fiction, it’s a postulated creative position.
it’s a hoax, a put-on.
CERN built it, we live it now.
It was exciting because it touched something new, true and real.
the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one.
That is my thesis; that’s why I think this matters.
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“Why Are (Most) Artists (So Fucking) Poor?” Graphite on paper, 2012.
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