Technology

  • Be careful when buying a domain on Dotster

    Yesterday, I used Dotster to buy a domain name for a new art gallery client. Their name is an Polynesian name shared with a certain beach in the Pacific, and has no hint of a porn connection, as far as I know. This is a screen grab of what Dotster put up as a placeholder page. I recommend pairNIC in the future.

    dotster-porn-placeholder.jpg

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  • My apologies to the bloggy email subscribers

    I see that a huge email of posts from the last week or so went out tonight to those who subscribe to my email list. As you can see, I’ve relaunched this blog and James’s with a new layout and the latest version of Movable Type, and apparently this confused our email service.

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  • 303 Gallery – protecting its artists from the internet

    maureen gallace at 303 gallery - armory 2006

    Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006)


    maureen gallace at 303 gallery - armory 2006

    Maureen Gallace at 303 Gallery (The Armory Show 2006)

    Due to our previous coverage of “photography not allowed” policies, blogger and artist Mark Barry forwarded an email he just received from 303 Gallery regarding 2 images on Flickr from his set from the 2006 Armory Show. The photos were taken during the press preview.

    From: Simon Greenberg
    Date: May 7, 2008 10:06:33 AM EDT
    To: mark@markbarryportfolio.com
    Subject: Maureen Gallace image – flickr

    hello mark –

    this is simon at 303 gallery. i noticed you had an image of Maureen
    Gallace’s work up on your flickr page – please be aware that 303 Gallery
    owns the copyright to the work and all public display of images, including
    web content. if you could kindly remove this image from your page, it would
    be most appreciated.

    best
    simon

    This is one of the more infuriating things I have seen from an art gallery lately. Do the gallery’s artists know that they’re spending this kind of time trolling the web and harassing bloggers? It hardly seems like a good use of resources.

    Related:

    • A quote from Lisa Spellman, the owner of 303, on her apprecation of appropriationist art
    • Mark’s blog post on the 2006 Armory (but the images are only on flickr)
    • Edward Winkleman post on galleries and photography — don’t miss the comments

    [The two photos above are the ones referred to in the email.]

    Updated: more blogs on the subject

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  • road runner is evil

    No blogging from me until at least Monday. Road Runner knocked us off the internet Friday night, and they hope to give us a connection again by end of day Monday.

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  • ArtCat’s first bilingual site

    artcat-logo.gif

    My college French got a bit of a workout with ArtCat’s latest client: the New Galerie de France. It’s our first client in Paris, and the first one with a bilingual site. We now have clients in New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Berlin. Los Angeles should happen soon, but nothing is live yet.

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  • Brooklyn Museum – sharing images of the collection on Facebook

    artshare-on-facebook.jpg

    [screengrab from my profile]

    Via C-Monster, I learned that the Brooklyn Museum is sharing images of works in their collection via a Facebook application called Artshare. They set it up so that other institutions can join in too, and so far the list includes

    • Metropolitan Museum
    • Victoria & Albert
    • Indianapolis Museum of Art
    • Picture Australia (which combines images from multiple collections)
    • Powerhouse Museum
    • Walters Art Museum

    I particularly liked this, from the Museum’s blog announcement:

    For the past week, weÂ’ve been uploading (OK, well, Francesca Ford has been uploadingÂ…thanks, Francesca) our collection highlights into the application, but then we hit a snag when we got to our Contemporary collection. Since artists often retain the copyright on contemporary works, we stopped uploading and started making phone calls and sending emails to artists and galleries seeking permission to include their work in the first phase of this project. I have to extend my thanks to the artists (Jules de Balincourt, Barron Claiborne, Anthony Goicolea, Rashid Johnson, Lady Pink, Kambui Olujimi, Suzanne Opton, Andres Serrano, Swoon, Yoram Wolberger) who saw the worth in this kind of endeavor and said go for it. We will continue to contact more of the contemporary artists in our collection and add to these initial works, but we wanted to pause now and launch ArtShare for beta testing.

    If you’re already on Facebook, go here to add it.

    Related:

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  • Art Wikimarathon

    A group of people from the art / technology / web nexus have put together the Art Wikimarathon to get Wikipedia more useful for art research. Here is my suggestion: Someone needs to write an entry for Nayland Blake.

    There’s a lack of art/artist info on Wikipedia, and we’re often too busy to find the time to contribute. So, we’re setting aside one day where a crew of people collectively drop serious knowledge into wikipedia about art. From your favorite notable artwork, artist or exhibition, to our soon-to-be-famous peers. We’ll also add structural links to alumni schools and categories like collective art groups, non profit orgs, etc.

    The day is Saturday January 26th: an afternoon on the internet quietly enriching the public domain. We imagine groups of 2-4 people around tables across the country, bottomless coffee cups fueling the discussions, fact checking, and troubleshooting. Ideally lots of “oh, that person worked with X, I’ll make a page for them, link me up.” There will also be a lot of online chatting across coasts. Video chats if bandwidth permits.

    Roughly 12-8pm EST (9am-5pm PST) Saturday January 26th

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  • ArtCal now using Amazon S3 for image hosting

    Here’s a post for my geek readers. ArtCal now uses Amazon S3 for all of the exhibition images. That means we don’t have to worry about storage space as we continue to add shows, and that images should load more quickly.

    Quite of the few of the ads are served that way too. We just DNS magic to make it appear that they’re coming from hosts with names like adimages.tristanmedia.com and static.artcat.com.

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  • Don’t forget to tag things for ArtCal

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    The new ArtCal uses feeds from Flickr, blip.tv, and also searches for links back to each listing via Bloglines Citations. When you’re out taking photos and videos, or writing about shows, don’t forget to tag/link appropriately.

    This page
    (which was used for the screencap above) shows a good example of all three.

    Update: Here is another idea for artists and galleries. If you have video or computer animation in a show, and your website isn’t really set up well for video (unlike this), put some excerpts on blip.tv and tag them so that people visiting the exhibition page on ArtCal can watch them.

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  • Noticed how quiet it’s been around here?

    new-winkleman.jpg

    The blog’s been quiet due to multiple art-related projects. Not only did ArtCal relaunch with a new look this week (and a new programming framework for the geeks in the house), Winkleman Gallery is now using ArtCat for its website. This is my favorite part of Ed’s post announcing it:

    I can attest to how much easier making changes to the website has become with this new tool. One of the complaints I often heard with the old website was that there were not enough images. Well that’s because adding images was a huge pain in the ass given the way that site was designed, but with ArtCat, adding images is a breeze, so you can expect to see plenty more moving forward. In fact, I’ve added some behind the scenes shots of Thomas Lendvai creating his truly astounding new installation (he’s been working very hard on it all summer), which opens, you guessed it, next Thursday.

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