For The Fame of Fifteen, Bleeding Heartless and CPA

In her Mica Galllery exhibition address, Saba Khan said that her involvement with the painting ends with the last brush stroke and that her work now belongs to the viewer. The 'death of the artist' elephant trap i'faith, where the art-piece takes on a life of its own independent of its creator.
Stephen the Academic disagreed: in part in seeing a painting as a window into the past, in part from the notion of 'artist as celebrity', and modern life classifies all of us as either celebrities or drones.
'In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people', Momus quipped in 1991.
I'm suffering from CPA, continuous partial attention, and I've been busy Linking-In and not blogging because 'On the web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people'.

The free facility of the Ning social network platform is being phased out next month and 'half my friends' may go with it. From August, it will be 'premium' service or nothing on Ning.
Some of the dot.nings I've swept into will pay-up to continue. ArtsReview (24,500+ members), b-uncut (1800), and The Brooklyn Art Project (8600) are the big ones I'm in, the ones where you can get completely lost in the membership and be anonymous in a sliver of the online throng.
The small folksy 'nings' are where the real action is. This is where you find sweetly hopeful aims and objectives, small communities of online folk wanting to free the world, or art, or marketing, or making a stand against the big corporation, and these mini.nings will now cost a network administrator $20 per annum.
Would you pay $20 to run a 'social network' of no more than 150 members, and what would that say about you if you did?
A successful Blog claims more attention than that, and still is for free.
Gina Bianchini, co-founder and until March of this year the CEO of Ning, is, of course, a corporate person and she looks good on it. Her successor at Ning is Jason Rosenthal.
After 30 days in post ('til them still looking good), Rosenthal wrote to the Ning employees thus:

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business. This process has brought real clarity to what's working, what's not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business. Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity. We will phase out our free service. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning. We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale. And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people. As hard as this is to do, I . . . etc. bleeding heartless etc.

We have got used to glorying in the freedom of the web, and for too long it seems, glorying in it for free. Facebook was motivated by sex and money, it wasn't dreamt up through altruism, nor were the others and nor was LinkedIn. Social network platforms are run by serious corporate people who have very serious corporate pressures and lifestyles to maintain. Emulating the mail, they're intent on making us pay to talk to one-another.
Facing being 'unfriended' by Ning, I've been busy Linking-In, and hardly to my surprise, and presumably to no-one-else's, to get the best from LinkedIn you better pay for the Premium Account Service.
I'm not exactly sure who LinkedIn is for: apparently for business and corporate people like Gina, who, I suspect doesn't need to be LinkedIn, but is.

Gina's (LinkedIn) Summary is:

Ning is a social platform for interests and passions. I started it.

Her Current Settings are:

Advising, consulting on, or participating in innovative projects and new companies in my areas of interest (digital content, e-commerce, viral marketing, and disruptive technologies).

Prefer board and advisory roles working with smart, passionate entrepreneurs.

I registered with LinkedIn three years ago; saw the corporate ambience and uselessness of it for a painter and forgot it until just recently when I got a first hint, online of course, that someone like me was LinkedIn too. It took ages trying and re-trying password and username combinations to log in to LinkedIn again and 'There I am'; my profile 95% incomplete or uncomplete . . . short of recommendations, short of cv, in short, short of friends.
Successful Blogs can be 'social networks' in themselves . . . look at Scarlet's!

Scarlet Blue!

(Hey Scarls, why have you blanked me on LinkedIn? That's remiss naughty MsBleu! I expect no less than a LinkedIn 'recommendation' as penance.)

And this brings me to to Rise Art, a newly up-and-running virtual platform for the visual arts.
Oh yeh . . . Another virtual art-site . . . Yawn . . . Oh, one of many, and with each launching of a new one, you can feel the pain.
Online art sites are rubbish. They deal in categories: cheap and cheaper, pretty and prettier, cute and floral; cottage, coastal and forest; ethnic; abstract sleek and slicker - and we browse: choose framing, select canvas or paper version, match wall colour and draperies, order any size to suit, view the piece in a virtual-walk-through, and, clackerty-click, it's paid for and on its way. But every new site is going to be different, to be better.
Rise Art have curators and awards. They'll Peep,Tweet, Buzz and the rest. There's a forum, and voting and selection - this is going to be better: here is where 'real art', cool stuff, or 'cutting edge' and 'affordable' or 'new' art is going to be shown and seen and featured. Just register, and it's free (to register).
Yes, sure it is, but who else other than artists who stick our stuff up on it will be looking?

see my Rise Art page :

riseart.com/gallery/kevinjackson

Vote for Me & Mine.

on the left, just past Christies from South Ken Tube

contact: selen@micagallery.com

Dean’s Bar, Tangier.

I went first in 90 or 91.

I was told to by La Directrice of the gallery hosting my exhibition.
‘You’ve got to go and have a look’ she said, and La Directrice liked bars.
‘I’m not coming I don’t like’ she’d concluded shortly.
She didn’t tell me why I should and when I went, I was none the wiser. Then, there were other bars in Tangier, wilder, rougher, funkier, classier, some Moroccan and La Directrice and I liked those better, drinking with dangerous people drinking. I didn’t understand the fading echos of Tangier’s edge of law haven heyday time; wild, exotic, cheap, corrupting, corruptible, accessible and easy to escape to and from. I saw the old guard around town, a trifle distressed I’d thought, elegant in their outmoded suits. I saw a few that evening at Dean’s Bar and more at my opening.
I’d imagined never to come back to Tangier. The world is huge, there are places else I haven’t been and I’d liked it here so why overlay the good memories by returning?
It wasn’t Dean’s Bar that brought me and it isn’t painting, but paintings I have painted of this city beckon anew with the self-same allure. It is the accident of a vacant available apartment, poor planning and so to Tangier, winter 2010, humid, cold and ready with rain.
The Medina smells of wet wool the night I go to Dean’s Bar again.
Two small rooms knocked into one. The bar still occupies one side of the first, to the right as you enter through a bead curtain. Tiles clad the walls to shoulder height, white and blue in the main, rather public lavatorial in a way and cool against a hot summer night.
Tables range down the left and all around the back space. The side tables are taken by Tangaoue, all men of course and my friends are ensconced at the back far left corner. There’s no choice but to take a seat facing them so there is less chance to observe. They are drinking, they have tapas and what bliss, they are smoking cigarettes. I order a bottle of Guerrouane which is brought to the table. Being Brit, any service in a bar catches me unawares. By my glass by the ashtray, more tapas arrives including delicious piping hot whitebait. Young Spanish fill up the remaining tables, one woman very drunk very loud, and my American friend sucks in her cheeks saying ‘Oh dear.’ She disparages the day-tripping Spanish from Algeciras and Tarifa, calling them ‘The Boat People.’ There are other boat people in Tangier all traveling one-way, strapped into blacked out high-speed inflatables and paying desperate fee for a one in x chance of gaining entry to Europe. Captured craft line the police jetty in the port.
Dean’s has, I am told, the cleanest facilities this side of the Minzah, ‘spotless’, but I had no call. The Moroccans look coolly interested and mildly unimpressed, but coming to a joint like this at all, and in a city like this, they know the score. I sense they would like more action, better entertainment and more to have to talk about and that’s pretty much how I feel about it. This is the trouble with pubs where famous people drank and famous times were had, they aren’t there now and we bring our ghosts and eke them out of the bottle.
We’re happening now and it we make it in Dean’s Bar, Tangier.

duologue

the gallery of asemic writing.
'Document' a duologue by Aude Hérail Jäger and Kevin Jackson....


AHJ

v GOSSIP (AWAY)

I am being walked and talked around this strange town I used to know. The gossip is a morass of names without faces. I lag, wading in clods of incomprehension. Different people share the same name and I sink over my boots.
It is so simple - she lives here, he did, they do, he’s, she’s - understand?

No. I’d hazard a yes in hope, but … no.
Not yet, I need more time on the gossip treadmill, incline-talking to fit me for social purpose.
No room for me to interject me, my I is unnecessary, I’m easily identifiable as the one who’s new and knows nothing and no-ones names.

Let the Magic Box eat Lobsters

Buzz off I'm busy. 
I'm drinking my soup. 
I'm in the middle of something. 
Go away! 

.  .  .  I'm eating soup and from wanting to understand 'everything', to wanting to explain 'everything' I see the impossibility of either and want to slough away this social responsibility and explain nothing at all. 
It is never quite enough to play footie, to only act, or be an anything, there is the expectation to be able to talk about it and have ready the 'What's it feel like to be a (racing driver)?' answer. 
My ineffectual explanations are misinterpreted at best.  I acknowledge that the fault is mine, that the confusion between idea and expression is my confusion and I see that there is nothing I can do about it. 
And I've tried, so 'Let the magic box eat lobsters'.  I'm doing my bad bit and make of it what you can, what you may, what you care to.  Make what you will of this blog, this song, that picy hanging there, here it is and that's that, you'll get no further help from me. 
I know, I know, publicity can never be a bad thing but I'm not doing the post-match interview.  Forget it, I've no more to say and I'm out of here! 
Out, away into the night and scooting back to this screen. 

I've ventured away from the virtual world and been out in public. 
Perhaps you can tell? 
FB and social networks went by the board and there was no time to tweet or for virtual musing and blog browsing.  My emails and SMS became terse and cursory and the inbox and junk files brimmed. 
It's dangerous out and about in real time.  It's unexpectedly fast.  I got into trouble very quickly. 
I got lost looking for the Jerwood Gallery.  A kind bookseller went online to point me from his screen in the right direction, and out of his life.  On from the Jerwood Drawing Prize show to 100 PLUS in Webber Street aided by a chap with map-on-iphone and another in a pub taking recourse to his laptop. 
'I'm getting to know this area,' I thought as we made our way to the London Group Opening although admittedly I was now in the capable company of a French person. 
There, I greeted a familiar face by name of a dead man.  Live-not-dead man turned out to be judging the exhibition.  I had a piece in the show and was shortlisted for a prize so, that went well. 
Fleeing from my gaffe, cursing silently, I rounded off the evening in the cellar of an occult bookshop so dark that denim glowed bright.  Surrounded by the litter of departed witches, empty glasses and a series of paintings set on black velvet depicting scenes from the Book of Revelations, I vowed never to leave the safety of my laptop screen ever again. 

I did win a prize.  www.kevinjackson.net/bwCONDITIONS.html
'What's it feel like to be a loser?  . . /. .  to win?'

'Let the magic box eat lobsters' (Sir Terry Pratchett), is one of my all time favourite 'I'm out of here' lines.  I'm in public again this Thursday evening at the ING Discerning Eye exhibition opening at the Mall Galleries where I have a piece on show. 

Thursday 12 November     6:30 - 8:30 p.m.

The Mall Galleries, The Mall, LONDON SW1

This state of affairs

I've been pondering a blog post for ten days or so. 
I haven't posted for ages and 'the pressure' is getting to me. 
Blog Blank.  No Blog.  Blog guilt! 
Can this be true?  Can I really be stressing out on this? 

Yes. 

'This state of affairs' I think, 'is not good.' 
Reviewing my jottings over the last weeks they reveal lists of 'to do'-s, and moans. 

Moans about avatar and atavar. 
What are they?  Which to use?  When and Why? 
Am I the only one who's confused? 

'The lure of digital.'
There's a lot of inconclusive moaning about that - is digi the revolution that the mass production of paper was?  That sort of thing. 

What happens when the power cuts off, if it will, if we let it, if we . . . but I don't want to blog moans, I'm not in a moany mood. 

I like Scarlet's refusal to raise the white flag, and N, O Bestbelovéd, the white flag .gif is the one I want.