Talk:Neoism

message: Surrealism is not a genre or category of experimental arts.  --Daniel C. Boyer 00:04, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  experimental arts 

message: Much of the introduction is very abstract and full of metaphors. I think it's bewildering to someone who has never heard of neoism. Can someone give a more concrete, straightforward intro? Derrick Coetzee 19:53, 21 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introduction 

message: I just finished reading the entire article, and I still don't know what Neoism is. You know, it says something about Wikipedia when someone has to go to UrbanDictionary to know what something is...
Agreed! This article doesn't explain what neoism is to anyone who doesn't already know. Best I can gather, it's some sort of updating of dadaism influenced by punk...  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.206.151.130 (talk) 00:44, 6 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is it then? 

message: I get it, and by telling you that I don't get it by getting it (or vice-versa) shows that you that I get it by not getting it.  In fact, if I really got it, I would destroy it, and probably lie about doing, or not doing, so.  Does this help?  Probably not--this sounds like Zen on LSD.
Neoism is significant.  Because neoism is designed to prevent historification (their word), art historians have precious little neoist art to grasp, and so, basically, ignore it.  Which is fine by the Neoists.
'''
The two things that strike me about Neoism that it are shockingly predictive:
*Mail art
*Open use of names'''
Both of these predict key components of Internet culture.  Their mail art created an interconnected relationship between its members specifically, and democratically as a matrix, where plagiarism really meant sharing art between artists to construct better art in social science sense of Constructivism.  It is interesting to me that sharing here is called plagiarism; I have experienced insults of "piracy" when promoting open software. Apparently, according to the neoists, sharing is equivalent to stealing to the dominant culture.
Their open use of names, and its obvious attack on intellectual property ideas, along with their variety of plagiarism, places the neoists far ahead of any anarchist!  And openness, as we know it, is partly an engineering concept (the open architecture of the IBM PC, and the open systems of the Unix variants and the (potential) interconnectedness of the Internet in general), and also an Internet societal concept, such as the open editing of this very web system, which shows how to create complete security through complete openness: security through insecurity. 
While meant to be funny (it probably kept them all in a continual state of involuntary giggles), it reminds one of the discordians and nihilists, but different in that neoism is meant only in fun.
This site, sztuka-fabryka -> neoism gives an excellent history with good supporting material.  One of the links is for an invitation to a neoist festival from the mid-90s (or 90ies, as neoists write).
The first line in the application in the invitation reads thus:
:" I want to preserve the purity of Neoism as anti-art and therefore I am strictly against any festival or exhibition. I will take the following active counter-measures:_______"
This should give you a pretty good idea of where the neoists were at, or where they possible still are.
Seriousness in neoism apparently starts with Stuart Home, who attempted to codify it, and then reverse-pervert it by leading the neoists towards something he called "praxis."  Of course he failed because you cannot reverse-pervert something, so he returned to traditional neoism to rejoin the other neoists when they refused to follow him.  While neoism seems anarchistic, neoists did not reject Home as a leader for attempting to alter it.  And further, Home's art does not give the neoist flavour; instead it seems a visual extension of punk rock, which he admits; punk rock being a musical new-comer in the Dadaist scope.  Home gives neoism as an extension of Dada and Fluxus, but that trivializes neoism as neoism completely stands on its own with its startling predictive-ness.
Ironically I came to neoism a few days ago while doing research to describe a different neoism, which I think of as the first modernism.  The prefix itself implies Fascism to me as the first group of what have thought of as neoists knew were neo-nazi punkers, and the second were the neo-liberal corporativists, both of whom I feel I can easily link to original fascism.
To extend this journey a little further, the first modernist (in this context) was Plato, and his Republic looks much to me like the template not so much for modern society, but specifically for the modern corporation.  If this is so, the corporate structure cannot necessarily be something new, as capitalists like us to think it is.  (In fact in the current TV show V, capital media shows it to us as science fiction!)   This use for "neoism" is then very ancient, and is arguably the basis of Western Civilization.  The neoist art movement is obviously so antithetical to capital that we barely need mention it; perhaps they were mocking that ancient centralized culture that many of us think of as capital by naming themselves after it.  Completely missing from this article is truism that neoism is defined
 "as prefix and a suffix without anything in-between."
And Stewart Home clearly capitalized on it's openness, even extending it into feminism by creating a female open name, Karen Eliot, to countermand neoism's male dominance with the self-admitted purely selfish and narcissistic goal of capitalizing on neoism!
Within the unlikely microcosm of neoism, we see the entire cycle.  
Stewart Home is confronted with altermodern in an interview, and insults it in every way he can.  He is obviously jealous; altermodern's creator, Nicolas Bourriaud, successfully leveraged alter-globalism, a movement that apparently attempts to capitalize on global capital by pretending to oppose it.  Bourriaud, the alter-globalists, and Home agree, that the path to successful exploitation is to tear away at the traditional; perhaps in the same way the blood-diamond terrorists do, by killing the elders while pretending to represent the indigenous.  Capitalists of course do this in ways so much more cleanly and efficiently than either Home or Bourriaud could ever realize; with the shiny blades of bulldozers immense in size and numbers.  And of course with Mumford's "false charity" follow-up: Ronald McDonald.
And Home is in no way shy when he describes his art in terms of exploitation.  He tells us his art
:"was a process of bureaucratic manipulation, that art was whatever those in a position of cultural power said was art. So I set out to establish myself as an artist to prove that anyone who understood the art system could manipulate it in this way."
Home failed where Bourriaud succeeded only because Bourriaud quite rationally leveraged an exceedingly well-disguised form of subversive capital apparently created by the World Social Forum. 
Links I collected to understand neoism:
*Stewart Home on neoism, plagiarism and altermodernism
*sztuka-fabryka -> neoism
*The Book of Neoism?
*Altermodern: Movement or Marketing?
*Altermodern manifesto
*Neoism on The Seven by Nine Squares  
Obviously my writing contradicts much of the article. Here is a link to material from a previous wp neoism article; this shows that the present page is what I would describe as an excellent example of  creep .--John Bessa (talk) 00:18, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Research citations and references