Memento Mori in American Express Black Ink

American Express Publishing Corporation "produces authoritative lifestyle content that empowers affluent, primed consumers – and the businesses that serve them – to make informed decisions".

American Express Publishing Corporation is the publisher of Black Ink - the art of extraordinary living.

Published quarterly, Black Ink is exclusively for American Express Centurion® members. The notorious Black Card and by extension Black Ink is available by invitation only to the highest echelon of American Express cardholders. Each issue of Black Ink focuses on a single topic, such as the worlds best restaurants, and explores it in a way that is relevant and beneficial to the lifestyle of the discriminating, ultra-high-net-worth individual. Black Ink advertisers constitute an elite group of the worlds most respected, super-premium product and services.

The Fall/Winter 2011 issue is The Art Issue and it features an article titled "The Rise of Internet Art". Here are the first few lines of the article.

In 2009, a private collector and San Francisco entrepreneur named Tho Armour acquired a piece of Internet art called Memento Mori. Here's what Armour received: a contract stating that the website's URL was now his property and a lovely Japanese cast-iron box containing a flash drive that held the site's source code, the string of unique demands that functions as a website's DNA. Like most Internet art Memento Mori is created and displayed on a computer. These works are not reproductions of tangible paintings merely shown online. Instead, according to collectors like Armour, this is art that takes full of advantage of and is, in fact, made possible by the Internet...

Needless to say I was very pleased to receive a copy of the magazine that American Express publishing sent to me. As of this writing, I do not yet have permission to display the whole article. I am looking into how I can do this.

My first reaction is that the author, Ben Austin, does a very nice job of combining my enthusiasm and optimism regarding Internet art with reporting on all the issues that surround the actual production of Internet art by everyday artists – including managing intellectual property rights, convincing collectors that this really is an art form, and locating galleries that understand how to educate clients as to this new media.

All in all, a very nice read – and I hope to be able to let you all read the entire article very soon.