“A teacher of Latin and Ancient Greek, a TV travel magazine presenter, a documentary filmmaker, a radio reporter and an advisor to the EU Commission on its “MEDIA” programme: Régine Debatty was once all this and more, [...]. In any case she was all of these things before starting her blog called we make money not art”

Interview met Régine Debatty van we-make-money-not-art.com.

creative.arte.tv/de/space/From_Sketch/message/2044/_From_Sketch__Regine_Debatty___EN_/

today and tomorrow, een uitmuntend en uitputtend inspiratief weblog met een hoogwaardige kwaliteitsfeed bestaat vandaag vijf jaar.

todayandtomorrow.net

Een nano interview met de maker:

Wie is today and tomorrow?

Today and tomorrow ben ik, Pieter, een Belg in Berlijn. Ik krijg vaak email gericht aan het today and tomorrow team, maar ik werk alleen. Ik denk niet dat ik today and tomorrow zou kunnen delen. Alleen bij hoge uitzondering, zoals vandaag. [Vandaag 21 juli vanwege de verjaardag een dag vol gastbijdragen, Red.] Dat is wel af en toe voor herhaling vatbaar.

Waar staat today and tomorrow voor?

Het is niet eenvoudig om today and tomorrow in een vakje te plaatsen. Het toont een bonte verzameling van dingen die ik mooi vind of die me interesseren. Ik zou today and tomorrow niet kunnen beperken tot alleen kunst of design of…

De inhoud van today and tomorrow is zeker veranderd door de jaren heen. Oorspronkelijk was het mijn openbare persoonlijke internet archief. Dat is het eigenlijk nog steeds, alleen kijken er nu een pak meer mensen mee.

Het liefste post ik projekten van onbekende kunstenaars of studenten. Collaboraties tussen bekende merken en grote kunstenaars vind ik zéér zelden nog interessant. Als ik ergens iets zie, moet het heel snel click maken bij mij, anders komt het niet op today and tomorrow.

Hoe zie je de toekomst van today and tomorrow?

Op korte termijn zou ik today and tomorrow graag een beetje professioneler maken. Dus sinds vandaag heeft today and tomorrow een logo!

Ik denk dat ik vaker inhoud offline zal gaan zoeken en ik wil ook meer mensen ontmoeten.

Op lange termijn hoop ik dat today and tomorrow een hobby kan blijven – ook al doe ik het dan misschien fulltime.

Hoogtepunten van de afgelopen vijf jaar?

De tofste dingen aan het hebben van een blog: emails ontvangen van mensen van wie een fan bent. Mensen ontmoeten die je anders nooit zou hebben ontmoet. Emails als feedback. Dat kompenseert de tijd die je erin steekt.

Erkenning krijgen van instituten zoals Wallpaper* Magazine of de LeadAwards – dat is natuurlijk ook leuk.

Favoriete kunstenaars?

Dit is een eenvoudige vraag!

Mijn aktuelle top 10 in willekeurige volgorde:

Ignacio Uriarte
Rafaël Rozendaal
Constant Dullaart
AIDS-3D

Fountain – Sylvie Fleury

Sylvie Fleury
Evan Roth
Nick van Woert
Olafur Eliassion

Beim Chef – Roman Signer

Roman Signer
Yarisal & Kublitz

Similar But Fundamentally Different – Ariel Schlesinger

21 juli vanaf 21:00: today and tomorrow’s 5th birthday SPEED SHOW.

Congrats Pieter!

todayandtomorrow.net

(Eerder op trendbeheer: nano interview VVORK en interview Régine Debatty van We Make Money Not Art.)

Vorige maand waren The Yes Men op bezoek in de Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago. Een mooie gelegenheid voor een interview met Lumpen/ Proximity/ Co-Pro voorman Edmar Marszewski.

(via Proximity Magazine)

Hij is geen Pierre Bokma, zij is geen Katja Schuurman. Het verschilt maar het lijkt ook erg op elkaar. Beter of slechter? Niet te zeggen.

imdb.com/title/tt0480269/

Het origineel:
imdb.com/title/tt0360674/

VVORK: curating original content. Een artlog met een waanzinnige dagelijkse feed van de allerhoogste kwaliteit. Momenteel het beste kunstlog van de planeet.

Wie zit er achter VVORK.com?

Een nano-interview. Want spraakzaamheid zit nu net niet in des VVORK’s palet.

(Eerder op trendbeheer: interview Régine Debatty van We Make Money Not Art.)

Who is VVork?

Aleksandra Domanovic, Oliver Laric, Christoph Priglinger, Georg Schnitzer.

Our personal projects include exhibitions, publications, music, videos, fashion, bodybuilding and more. We do use vvork for self-promotion.

Friendship brings us together. We all live in Vienna. We have jobs as artists, curators, editors and designers.

Is the lack of design of VVork a design?

It’s design and it’s the most sophisticated we could do.

The only categorie you use is city. Why only the city categorie?

We did not want to indulge in the tiresome debate of categorizing art and design. Countries would have been too nationalistic. Choosing cities seemed to be an unusual but logic approach to categorizing.

Do you have any idea where VVork is going?

We would like to curate more physical exhibitions and work on further projects with print publications. The Documenta would be fun.

How many visitors has VVork?

Currently 3000 to 4000 a day. Our highest was 30.000 after being linked from boingboing and Shaggy’s official site.
The BoingBoing link was to Carpet Invaders by Janek Simon.

It’s nice to know that some people have similar interests.

Who are your favorite artists?

We have some favourites we have not posted as of yet. The following are some of our favourites from the ones posted:

Helmut Smits
Körner Union
Roxy Paine
Tim Knowles
Matthias Herrmann
Florian Ladstätter
Xu Zhen

VVORK.com

Quene, 1 AM, 2004, 9 kleurenets, oplage 100, 16.000 € ex online te bewinkelen bij Other Criteria.

Voor wie liever zelf de puntjes op de i zet heeft eyestorm Painting By Numbers 2 in de aanbieding. 90 kleuren, 90 kwasten en de doos is met de hand gesigneerd door de artiest zelve. Oplage 175, prijs € 6462.50 inc

“A middle-aged businessman? [...] he seems every bit as interested in his £3m country house, his £100m fortune [...] These days he employs 65 people, including a full-time business manager [...]“

Etc.

Maar ook, over criticaster Adrian Searle, die over hem schreef “The shallows of Andy Warhol’s art were deeper than Hirst. [...] Joseph Beuys had better dress sense. Paul Thek put weirder things in boxes, Francis Bacon told funnier jokes, and Jeff Koons had a smarter team of photorealist knock-off artists working for him.”:

“If he writes something like that then it’s very difficult, next time you see him, not to punch his fucking face in.”

Leuk leesvoer kortom.

arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1801572,00.html

flickr.com/photos/nearnearfuture

Régine Debatty is geboren in België, leeft in Italië en is op weg naar Berlijn. Gaf les in grieks en latijn, maakte TV-documentaires en was ooit werkzaam voor de EU.

Régine Debatty leeft van haar log. Nummer 64 in de feedster top500. Winnares van een webby in de categorie persoonlijk kunstlog. Een van de weinige logs die je niet mag missen.

we-make-money-not-art.com

Een kort interview.

You make money not art is your splendid logtitle: ironic and to the point. But how much money do you make?

I make enough to live from it. It’s not a lot but I also get invited to cool festivals and workshops here and there in Europe, so at the end of the month, I’m a fairly happy gal!

You’ve got google adsense, blogads, a site of the moment and a sponsored place. What are the revenues from these services and for what money can I become a WMMNA sponsor?

Just a precision: the “site of the moment” is a totally free space, it’s a way to advertise young talents, interesting events, or works I like. I get no money for that.

Google adsense doesn’t really work for me. The ads proposed by google are not well targeted at all. I mean, I get ads for slaughter houses, plush frogs, vacuum cleaners, etc. Very few readers click on that!

Blogads isn’t a great source of cash either. I reject most of the ads proposals i receive: if it’s about loans, credit, products or services I don’t like I’d rather say no. So the blogads space is often occupied by an ad for petistic. I get no money for it as petistic is just a blog i’m working on with three friends.

Now the sponsored link does bring some money, it’s $200 a week and the space is usually dedicated to art/design/communication schools.

So how do I make money? I get invited to speak at events and to write for online mags, that helps a lot.

A log as sexblo.gs copy’s your entries 1 on 1 now and then. happyfamousartists copy your links even without a via. Does these ways of “information-sharing” bother you in any way?

First of all, sexblo.gs always mentions the source of every single post. It uses the reBlog system that does that automatically.

And well… It’s the first time I’m saying this in an interview but I’m actually one of the contributors of sexblo.gs. It’s my boyfriend’s blog and I think he’s doing a great job with it!

Back to your question: I’m awfully pissed when people repeatedly steal the stories without mentioning where they found them. It can happen once in a while (I mean I’m not the only one who’s reading new scientist or rhizome so others get stories before me). The blogger ethics is to always link to the source of a post. But some people just don’t bother.

I think that readers are not stupid and after some time they are bound to notice who’s doing an honest job and who’s not.

Btw, I quite like happyfamousartists so i forgive them ;-)

Because you write WMMNA on your own, there is a danger of fatigue. It’s a real danger because you make a living out of WMMNA: you cannot quit without at least some concequenses. Where do you think you and WMMNA stand in four years?

I write most of the stories but we-make-money-not-art has some wonderful contributors like new media artist Sascha Pohflepp and researcher Konomi Shin’ichi.

Sascha writes mostly about the German art scene and I wish I had more money so I could pay for his travels: he’d cover art festivals for the blog so that I could stay home more often with my boyfriend.

Konomi blogs about the Japanese art scene which I think is very important. It is important to keep up with what’s going on in other parts of the planet. I often buy books about new media art and the perspective is mostly occidental which is a pity.

I’m making a living of the blog but it’s also a wonderful way to have my CV out there. And i’m used to changing jobs very radically: I’ve been teaching latin and ancient greek, producing or directing documentaries, worked for the European Commission. So where will i stand in four years? No idea.

What I’d like to do is to be more helpful to young creatives, find a way to make their talent more visible and help them better communicate their work.

Are there some hightlights in WMMNA last year that stil make you smile. (I remember a time when you had nothing to write about media & art and started No Garlic Please for the more fashionlike entries.) What makes you go for WMMNA?

It’s not that I had nothing to write about media & art, it’s just that I’m in contact with so much “fashionable” stuff in europe, i thought it was worth sharing.

But I couldn’t get as excited by fashion and design as I am by new media art and bio art and wearable tech and the rest. I didn’t have time enough to dedicate to both blogs. I still have regrets, I really liked No Garlic Please.

Some highlights from last year?

I think one of the events that impressed me most was the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/

Jussi Angesleva and I had been given the oportunity to tell hackers about the work of new media artists and the audience was awesome: very open-minded, critical and receptive.

I learned a lot from that conference.

I had been pleasantly surprised to be invited to guest-blog on gizmodo. I couldn’t blog more than one week because I like my own blog too much to share stories with other websites but I was happy that they offered such opportunity to 1. a girl 2. someone who’s not usually blogging about consumer goods.

New media artist Jonah-Brucker Cohen is writing for them regularly. Gizmodo is a rather mainstream blog but they asked him to write the “gizmodo” gallery: portraits and interviews of new media artists or interaction designers.

I don’t know how successful that column is but it is extremely well done and it was a brave move from gizmodo. Here’s a link to the latest gizmodo.com/gadgets/art/[...]sabrina-raaf-172890.php

Last highlight is that I got to meet people whose work I admire a lot: Jussi Angesleva, Julian Bleecker, Toshio Iwai (briefly because I was so star-struck that I couldn’t open my mouth in front of him), Paul Granjon… I’m forgetting many names here. And I met two of my favourite bloggers: Emily Turrettini and Nicolas Nova.

With all attention, a webby and x pageviews/visitors each day (please fill in whatever you want) do you feel like a star?

Noooooooooooo! Most of my old friends never read my blog. And we-make-money-not-art doesn’t have that many readers: 25 000 unique visitors per day. That’s wonderful but quite modest compared to BoingBoing or Gizmodo.

Then the blog is famous for people who like new media art but at design festivals for example very few people have heard of my blog. I’m living in Italy which is not a very new media art-oriented place. I’m about to move to a more exciting location but I doubt paparazzi will follow me to the supermarket there ;-)

You might not believe me but when someone whose work I admire tells me that he loves my blog I always feel like I’m a fraud. I find great stories, that’s it. The people I write about are doing awesome stuff and they are the one who really make the blog interesting.

Everyday you serve us lots of educated links (I mean with explanation/text), You have interviews, reviews, all original content. I am used to that now and thus very demanding: I expect you to update very often and with good links and stories.

Do you feel presure about having to publish, do the demanding expectations ever take its toll?

Yes!

I feel a lot of pressure, but it’s a pressure I put on myself.

If I have to take the plane at 9 in the morning, I’ll be up at 5 to post one or two stories if possible.

And I have days when I’m totally depressed because I can’t find any interesting stories or feel like what I’ve published is crap. I can’t go to a foreign city anymore and relax, all I obsess about is going to art shows so that I can share what i’ve seen with readers.

I started blogging in March 2004 and haven’t had any real holes ever since. I spent most of last Christmas reading my feeds. How pathetic is that? [Sounds completely normal, JB]

Art is all about hypes and media art more then that: there are so much sponsored/government subsidised events these days – at least in Holland – that there are more conferences then artists. There is a danger of disillusion for a new audience.

I see a proliferation of new media art festivals all around europe. And there’s a lot of repetition, not always in favour of the best works.

On the one hand it’s great for new media artists, on the other hand the audience is not growing as quickly as the number of festivals. This doesn’t apply to every country, you lucky Dutch are spoilt with events, conferences, workshops and festivals! And I have always admired V2 initiatives and boldness.

In Italy we’re not having that much fun.

Reverb: a question from Régine:

I’ve got a question for you: you’re mainly writing about fine arts and I blog about new media art (or whatever is the name you want to give to it). Do you feel that they belong to different categories or do you think people should be given more opportunities to see a fine art piece next to a new media art piece more often?

Trendbeheer is about beeld, imaging, and includes outsider art, art that isn’t art as wel as classical pictures of an exhibition or internet based memorabilia.

There is a perfect place for (a prominent part) of new media art and that is the internet. I am sometimes even offended when I stumble about yet another computerscreen in a museum. I am bored by all the tedious video-art in musea: hey, you can stream that too! Offcourse it’s a different story if it is some sort of installation.

I don’t make a distinction between fine art and new media art.

I think one interesting part about new media art is that the artists have to find a way to present the works. You cannot simply put a laptop on the wall next to some paintings. In fact you can: Peter Luining did. trendbeheer.com/[...]peter-luining-art-rotterdam-2006/
But he wasn’t very excited about the result.

I wasn’t either but hey I had some nice pictures for trendbeheer.

Régine’s website:
we-make-money-not-art.com