The Internet has been eulogizing like never before in the last week, with opinion and emotions sprouting, like mushrooms, on blogs and their comment sections in the days since Michael Jackson’s death. Popular modes and tones of commemoration flit by as the Internet community travels through the stages of grief, and everyone is having a go. There’s an incongruous feeling of exhilaration in the air. Saturation is inevitable. To that end, there’s only three points we’d like to quietly note—without platitudes and with respect—after reading about the death of pioneering graffiti artist Michael Martin, AKA Iz the Wiz, at age 50 on June 16th. 1- Martin suffered kidney failure, and lived the last 13 years of his life on dialysis, as a result of the fumes he had been inhaling after painting for decades without protection. 2- He never found a way to live off his work and his name, never in Paris, never in Tokyo, nowhere. 3- He developed his full-car pieces in a pre-1975 climate when the MTA didn’t have an anti-graffiti task force. Wait so that means there was a time when graffiti existed and the MTA didn’t care?

nytimes.com

Tackle shop, Kure Beach, North Carolina, June 20th, 2009.

Published by Rat Press (be sure to check out their entire catalog, its fantastic). The books is available here: www.amazon.com

Daniel Leyva is a 23-year-old artist, programmer and eye, one year clear of a digital arts and film degree at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Leyva is worth noting for his particular refinement in two creative techniques that are specific to the new breed of Internet inhabitants. He hordes like a magpie, downloading images and organizing them and posting them with no commentary, only their crazy cumulative weight, sometimes up to a dozen a day, on his blog. And he relishes every side of the synthetic, dehumanized, digitized look, he can’t get enough. Leyva is a good example of an arriving generation of artists engaged with the Internet: there is something essentially human about his dedication to his art and his hunger for collecting knowledge, yet the images that interest him and the aesthetic he pursues are so cold that he disappears like smoke, an encoded, pixelated cipher, as he pursues them. What will these young artists become?

wordofcommand.tumblr.com

No Soul For Sale is a four-day event at the X Initiative, a temporary non-profit space in New York, that opens this evening. 38 independent art spaces from all over the world have been invited to share a space marked out only by tape on the floor. They can ‘exhibit’ whatever they want in whatever form, and each space has been assigned an hour in a dedicated performance space on the ground floor. With nothing being bought or sold, this event is neither a trade fair nor a symposium, more of a festival, and the glorious absence of rules brings it closer in line with the idea of an experiment in the cooperation and support that these spaces pride themselves upon. Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this event is that it’s totally unclear who’s in charge. Free News Projects Philadelphia friends Vox Populi and Fluxspace are participating, and we wish them well on what will probably be a very strange week.

x-initiative.org