This charter school in Washington Heights had a crazy notion: Maybe if we pay teachers a lot of money, we will get good teachers. Did it work? It's too early to tell, until the kids all get old enough to be either in jail or in Goldman Sachs. But one thing is for sure: teachers at this school are getting paid $125K. Per year! They are bankin' it. If they can avoid being robbed for crayon money by other, public school teachers, they'll live to tell the tale of this wild magical "livable wage" experiment.

Even crazier? North Dakota, the state that still conducts all business transactions with beaver pelts, is maybe the most financially stable state in our disintegrating union! They are "cutting taxes and fretting over how much of its budget surplus to spend or save." This is because no humans live in North Dakota so what will you spend all the money on? That's right, on millions and millions of luxurious beaver pelts.

Finally, celebrated architect Frank Gehry. He's been fired. From building a basketball arena. Back to sketching out plans for new Papa John's outlets, Gehry. Leave the moneymaking to the North Dakota teachers HERE IN CRAZYWORLD.

The heavy Internet users of Digg, YouTube, Fark, and StumbleUpon have little background in the usual experience of art: a rich education that lets viewers appreciate a work in context. They get their news as a stream of unrelated stories. (While the rest of this story concentrates on Digg, the same rules apply to many other sites including Fark and StumbleUpon. Stories on these sites trickle out to millions of Internet users through blogs, e-mail, and IMs. Plus I've already ripped YouTube apart for its own aesthetic.)

Right now, Digg's front page includes election news, iPhone tips, clips from last night's Conan O'Brien, a video of a panda, and the story of a drunk driver who put a seat-belt on her beer and not her baby. Art is presented the same way: One story at a time, usually focusing on a single work, surrounded by unrelated items.

This format has encouraged five aspects of the Diggbrow aesthetic:

The Lowest Common Denominator
Most of Digg's favorite items are, well, crap. The all-time top Digg item described as "art" is just a composite photo of a tree:

It's pretty, but it's more "cute photo illustration" than "high art." Still, over five thousand Digg users voted for the item (headlined as "1 Tree, 1 Picture, 4 Seasons. (Pic)" and described only as "A beautiful piece of art work"), and over 240 thousand people saw it on Flickr.

The second-favorite artwork is a gallery of desktop backgrounds. The third-favorite is this custom-painted Lamborghini:

This barely even works as a paint job, much less art. And Digg commenters hated it. But 3800 of them still voted for it, driving tens of thousands of people to look at it.

So far, Digg fails at appreciating and promoting art. But the fourth all-time favorite art on Digg, while nowhere near highbrow, at least demonstrates an artist's attention to craft and an appreciation of artistic tradition. It's the work of three sidewalk chalk artists, Edgar Mueller, Julian Beever, and Kurt Wenner. Wenner particularly seems to transcend the medium's trompe l'oeil novelty:

Accessibility and Novelty
Of course, those are just the crowd-pleasers. Plenty of worthier art gets onto Digg. But just like Clinton makes it to Digg news not for her fiscal policy but for crying, art gets onto Digg not for its value to traders and artists but for novelty reasons. A recent link featured this YouTube video of a sculpture that makes eerie noises in the wind:

It's not that Digg rejects the traditional measures of good art, but it focuses on the novel bits. Duchamp could make it here if an author focused on the "he put a toilet in a museum" aspect. Art stories from online newspapers come from the "offbeat" section of the news as often as "Arts and culture." The work must have an immediately catchy effect, as above, or a "what'll they think of next" quality in its creation, like the photo-realistic drawing below, composed freehand in ballpoint pen:

Artist Juan Casas told the Daily Mail that his ballpoint drawings "started off as a joke," and though he's now serious about them, he worried that serious art competitions would write him off.

Post-post-modernism
The Diggbrow crowd also appreciates a good prank. Art with a populist, ironic meaning has an advantage, which helps post-modern artists with stunt-like work.

This playful recontextualization of Damien Hirst's "For The Love Of God" made Digg as "Prank on Artist Who Created $100 Million Diamond Skull." Diggers appreciated the turnaround and criticized Hirst's work.

Among household-name artists, the most obvious Diggbrow hero is Banksy, who, while lacking nuance and arguably not worthy of canonization under traditional terms, is still a Digg favorite for his lucid messages and his reputation as a renegade. This street cred puts his work on the same scale as the Lamborghini art and "Hammer time" stickers on stop signs, though at the opposite end.

Personal expression
Diggbrow has a low barrier to entry; while some works earn their place in its canon because they represent hundreds of hours of labor, others make it despite minimal effort because of their novel concept. One encouraging aspect of that thirst for novelty is how Diggbrow appreciates the artistic value of personal expression.

At first, the work below (linked on Digg at one of the site's favorite sources, Neatorama) might seem worthless: some kid drew on herself. But here Diggbrow shows an unexpected appreciation for the context of the work, showing that sometimes these kids can actually read a paragraph instead of flicking through an image gallery.

Artist Ariana Page Russell explains:

My own skin frequently blushes and swells. I have dermatographia, a condition in which one's immune system exhibits hypersensitivity, via skin, that releases excessive amounts of histamine, causing capillaries to dilate and welts to appear (lasting about thirty minutes) when the skin's surface is lightly scratched. This allows me to painlessly draw patterns and words on my skin, which I then photograph.

Diggers might even click through to Russell's web site, which shows she's not just screwing around but an artist whose work ranges far beyond these skin drawings.

If Digg readers can follow stories past the initial link, they may learn about an artist's entire body of work, its themes, the movement into which it fits, and about the tradition that gives context to every wind sculpture and skin drawing. Which leads to Diggbrow's final redemptive theme.

Piecemeal Art Education
The Internet is a tough place to learn about art. There's little structure, and there are too few high-quality images. The online galleries of major museums only carry as much explanatory information as the real-world exhibit. Serious guides to art are hard to search for.

But piece by piece, blogs are picking out art history and explaining it, so that reading enough could amount to a skim through an art textbook. One great example from Digg is this exploration of Frank Gehry's first deconstructivist building. Diggers are also particularly fascinated with scientific advances in art, such as a new device to detect painted-over paintings.

Internet culture isn't the end of art. It's not exactly a classical education, but it's instilling some artistic value in viewers. And after enough time figuring out what the hell Damien Hirst's point is, I can appreciate a little Diggbrow.

Gehry's Disney Center in downtown Los Angeles allegedly gives passers-by sunburn, Case Western has experienced the same problems of falling ice, and the University of California had to demolish a leaky Gehry building in 1986. It doesn't take a slide ruler to add this one up. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Mr. Gehry said "value engineering" — the process by which elements of a project are eliminated to cut costs — was largely responsible for the problems.

"There are things that were left out of the design," he said. "The client chose not to put certain devices on the roofs, to save money."

You'd think that smarty-pants MIT might've noticed these huge design flaws before they started construction though? They couldn't let some of the engineering and design nerds take a peek at the blueprints?

Not everyone at MIT is upset. "It is a joy to work in this building," said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics. Drunk robotics.

M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry, Citing Flaws in Center He Designed [NYT]

Gehry To Design Playground [AMNY]

"Today I'm walking in for the first time," he said. "Of course, all I see is 'unfinished.' ...Around the corner, linen and flowers decorated a long table below a much larger video wall—120 feet wide—showing scenes of the High Line park being created atop 22 blocks of deserted elevated train tracks in Lower Manhattan..."Is this what you're going to see when the people come in?" Diller asked several technicians, gesturing at the park-to-be images on the wall. "Why have you chosen to have the frames so small? Make it big. OK? Soon after, by a bank of elevators, he had another question, about the up-and-down buttons: "Why do we only have these on one side?"

Frank Gehry Drops Anchor in New York [LAT]

re VF's mysterious second bank of elevators:

as an architect of highrises here in the city (employed by a certain large firm involved in a recent competition you may have heard something about), i'm sorry to have to disappoint you about at least one possible conspiracy dimension in the conde nast edifice.

that mysterious second bank of elevators in the VF offices is just an unfortunate (or poorly planned) result of how their offices got distributed in the building. highrises divide their elevator banks by groups of floors—about a third for lowrise floors, a third for midrise, another third for highrise. i.e. not all elevators go to all floors. sounds like VF's offices got caught on the frontier between elevator zones so that you have to switch between lowrise and midrise banks to get up that one additional floor in the other zone...

btw, one other note: i can't comment on the difference between iceberg and romaine, but i'm pretty sure the gehry partitions in the cafeteria are actual double-curvature glass, not plexiglas, as you spied. a very expensive and much lusted after fetish detail among architects.