Miltos Manetas
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Miltos Manetas (born 1964) is an artist and the creator of the Neen art movement.
Born in Athens, Greece, Manetas currently shares his time between Paris and Los Angeles. He received art training in Brera-Milan, Italy.
Manetas' work consist of depictions of computer-related items such as oil paintings of computer hardware and videos that utilize clips from videogames. * http://www.manetas.com/art/videoaftervideogames
Another side of Manetas's work are his art-websites. http://www.manetas.com/art/websites His most famous website, http://www.jacksonpollock.org is included in the list of the 50 Coolest Websites of 2006 released by the Time magazine.
Lev Manovich wrote about Miltos Manetas: "Playful fashion-conscious objects are not like any other objects we ever interacted with previously. Each of them is the nerve of information society. Although we encounter and participate in this society daily, capturing its typical or essential dimensions visually so far aluded most artists. Manetas is one of the few who has been systematically doing this. Therefore he truly can be called “the painter of contemporary life.” -How to Represent Information Society by Lev Manovich, 2006 -
His works have been shown in Galleries and Museum exhibits in New York, Paris,Shanghai, Houston, and Basel.
[edit] Controversy and criticism
On Tuesday, March 23, 2004 Eric Rodenbeck posted to Stamen.com asserting that Miltos Manetas' most well known work, jacksonpollock.org was made using technology stolen from fellow Stamen member Michal Migurski, and that Miltos Manetas had admitted as much in an email.
jacksonpollock.org uses files from the animation "Splatter" by Michal Migurski, an animation available for download and use under a liberal Creative Commons license. Manetas claims he always gave the credits for the animation to Migurski and that his idea was to create a "ghost" of artist Jackson Pollock on the Internet. Web.archive.org's Mar 20, 2004 copy of the site has been put forward as "proof" that Manetas gave credit to Migurski. The credit is given in the html source code and is not visible on the site itself.
As of Nov 16, 2006, the site is in violation of Migurski's license agreement, which requires "a prominent link to the project website, http://stamen.com/projects/splatter, visible at all times on any web page where Splatter is displayed." No such link is visible on the site.
A public outing of the unauthorized appropriation on the cultural weblog BoingBoing brought the unauthorized use of Migurski's file to wide public view.
This episode, demonstrates clearly the difference between Flash Animation, Net Art, Computer Art etc and Neen Art. A Neenstar doesn't have to make himself his pieces: he is free to "appropriate" of any existing material. As Manetas writes in the Neen Manifesto: "Neenstars love copying in the same way that the city of Hong Kong multiplies its most successful buildings. The same, but a little different: Names, Clothes, Style, Art, and Architecture are important for Neenstars. So they create all that from scratch, as if what has been done before them is not so important." In other words, Neen artists love to copy. In fact, the issue of copyright is a central theme of Neen philosophy. While not all Neenstars think alike, many would hold that all art should be freely available for vigorous and unrestricted appropriation.
Part of the Neen point of view is that "ideas want to be free". Therefore, a Neen creator may not necessarily reference the original author in a clear or transparent manner, which follows from the belief that "ownership" is not legitimate or desirable. Some find this to be problematic in that the Neen style of appropriation not only questions the notion of "authorship", but sometimes obfuscates the origins of the work. This may be with regards to labor (as in the example of using source code) or creativity (as in the example of coming up with the idea for an artwork or website).
A common method of appropriation in art deliberately "points" to the original creator of a specific work, by creating a new piece that references it. Indeed, the strength of the "new" art usually derives from the assumed public knowledge of the source material. This can happen when an artwork represents cultural icons and ideas from the public domain, or if it references or copies "well known" work. In such cases, a derivative piece does not require explicit references in order to acknowledge the original.
If on the other hand an artwork is a copy of an obscure or relatively unknown piece, or makes use of complicated source code, the question arises as to whether this falls under the traditional category of "appropriation", in that the "new" work does not reference the "original" work for it to function. Should credit necessarily be given to the "original author", and if so, how much? Herein lies a new concept of appropriation, one that denies ownership not only of copyrighted material, but of public credit for that material. This is an interesting question which is applicable to the larger art context, as well as Neen.
[edit] External links
Distant Explosions, a book by Miltos Manetas * http://www.cafepress.com/eoproducts.15802654
"To whom it may Concern": Selected Emails, ny 2003, 250 copies, 20 copies signed softcover published by onestarpress. * http://www.onestarpress.com/v2/pdf/manetas_light.pdf
NEEN Editions Charta , 2006 , Curated by: Miltos Manetas
