Artkamp209

Paul Villinski edits

Hi! I'm just flagging why your edits on the article for Paul Villinski have been reverted multiple times now, I understand it can be frustrating to have your edits removed. First off, the article has definitely reached its limit of exhibitions - artist biographies should not include exhaustive lists of exhibitions, or even a majority of an artist's exhibitions, per the Manual of Style for Visual Arts. Adding so many exhibitions just turns artist bios into lists with little context. Secondly, as you stated in your question to another user, you work for the subject of the article. As such, you should disclose that info on your talk page and avoid editing anything related to your employer. If you see things that need to be updated in the article, you can request those changes on the talk page for the article, noting your conflict of interest so other editors understand why you can't edit it yourself. Again, understand it can feel frustrating, so I wanted to flag why those were reverted. You can also go to the "View History" tab on individual articles to see edit explanations for why your edits were reverted. 19h00s (talk) 21:05, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all this to me. I looked at other artists' on Wikipedia, for example, Howardena Pindell, and followed that model with many exhibitions listed. Paul Villinski is a fellow colleague, not my employer, and I offered to update his page. I'm not sure how this is a conflict of interest.

I would appreciate any help. Artkamp209 (talk) 16:41, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

No worries, happy to help explain. Re: the other artist bios with extensive lists, there's a recurring problem with art biographies in particular where editors keep adding to exhibition lists, often because that is the most easily accessible piece of information about an artist's career (listed on their gallery CV, in exhibition catalogues, etc.), and it is the easiest form of information to translate into Wikipedia's format; transcribing a list is a much simpler task than incorporating information about an artist's stylistic evolution or career trajectory, which requires a deeper grasp of how to synthesize information about an artist's career arc, usually from an array of sources, and transform it into an article that doesn't just quote those sources. It's a Wikipedia-wide problem, often labelled scope creep or list creep - it's always easier to build a list than write a complex narrative - but artist biographies in particular suffer from this issue because, as I'm sure you're aware as someone seemingly in the arts, it can be very difficult to access in-depth critical texts about artists who aren't among the "superstar" class, especially if you're a novice editor or arts enthusiast without much institutional access or knowledge. Adding to the issue is that it can be much more difficult to remove excessive detail like this from an article once it's been there for a long time, as other editors may come to view it as a long-term product of their editing labor. So you often run into examples like you pointed to earlier, where an editor at some point in time began creating an excessively detailed list of exhibitions in a biography, and any attempts to pare it back now that it's become unwieldy are met with protests that the details add necessary context. Generally it's easier to cut off excessively long lists at the pass, rather than let them develop into something truly exhaustive which would make the article a collection of bullet points rather than a narrative biography.

Re: the conflict of interest question, you can find much more info about this topic at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest. Looking at your question to another editor regarding these edits, you said you were "trying to update a page for an artist I work for." That could be a misphrasing or I could be misinterpreting what you mean there, but I read that as you saying you are either employed by, or managed in a work setting by, Paul Villinski. If that's the case, then editing his article at his behest would, to some, count as being paid to edit the article. I don't necessarily see it as being that drastic, but I do agree with the general guidelines on the conflict of interest page that you shouldn't edit articles about people or things that you have a direct relationship to (close friends, family, employers, yourself, etc.) If you are a colleague of Villinski's as opposed to his employee or direct report at work, then I think you're probably far enough away to update basic info in the article. But generally in situations like this where your closeness to the subject could be questioned, it's best to either stay away from editing the article or stick to editing the more factual aspects of the article, avoiding writing/editing about things like an artist's conflicts or controversies. In this case (again, if you are simply Villinski's colleague), I think the edits you made are certainly within the realm of what would be appropriate, but I still think we should avoid making the list exhaustive.

This is probably way too much detail, but I wanted to be thorough so you could understand all the considerations here. Happy to add more or clarify if you'd like. 19h00s (talk) 19:31, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

Oh my gosh, your writing style is beautiful and I appreciate your guidance. Wikipedia must be thrilled to have you monitoring its site. I misspoke, I work with Paul Villinski in our local community trying to develop more art awareness. My employer for the past 19 years is the Dia Art Foundation. I admit, I did kind of nerd out with the list, removing the exhibition title's apostrophes and italicizing them trying to make it look cleaner. How do you suggest getting Paul's page up to date? Is this something I can actually take stab at?

BTW: I looked at your View History and saw you were also in conversation with my dear friend, Mara Kearny, Al Loving's widow, who was inspired by me to look at Al's page. She has no idea who wrote Al's page and battles misinformation about Al's work all the time. Artkamp209 (talk) 11:39, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Sorry to bother you once again but I'm learning how to navigate Wikipedia editing policies. Would it be best for me to post the edits in my sandbox for approval? Or is this something I can send to someone like you, who then can update the page?

Thanks again for your help. Artkamp209 (talk) 14:09, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the kind words about my writing - I like to joke that artist bios on Wikipedia are where wannabe critics go to pontificate, and I'm certainly not exempt from that myself lol. And I myself have also definitely nerded out before with lists regarding my favorite artists on here, so I don't blame you at all - I'm quick to help educate new arts editors on this so they don't suffer my experiences of spending hours gathering details just to have everything removed by editors with a longer-term understanding of how articles become cluttered.

Totally understand the typo re: your relationship to Villinski. I think you can definitely update the page, especially as you're mainly focusing on specific, cited facts, in this case his past exhibitions. In terms of how to go about updating the exhibitions list, my suggestions would be to a) use your knowledge of Villinski's career arc to help narrow the list to the most important and impactful of his exhibitions (i.e., the shows that most typified his stylistic evolution or most affected his career trajectory), and b) treat additions with a "one in, one out" sort of attitude. You don't need to follow that 1:1 ratio exactly, but with lists like these that can continue growing almost exponentially as the subject continues creating/exhibiting work in the present, it's best to treat space like a scarcity rather than be exhaustive. You should feel empowered to remove minor preexisting items from the list in order to add more.

In terms of executing the edits, you should be good to go ahead and do them yourself now - your original edits were reverted the first time for adding excessive list detail, and reverted the second time because I read your earlier mentioned query to another editor and interpreted it as a conflict of interest. I won't revert anything now that I understand the situation, and other users shouldn't revert your edits if they're less exhaustive than before.

Re: Mary Kearny, I had no idea she was Loving's widow until she told me! I left her a Talk message because she had uploaded several high quality images of Loving's art to Commons and normally that would be a copyright violation - I didn't realize she was his widow and thus the inheritor of his copyright, meaning she has the right to make those uploads.

Also a big fan of Dia, so keep up the good work haha. I was wearing my Dia hat like 20 minutes ago on my walk to get coffee lol

Happy to help with anything else, just let me know. 19h00s (talk) 14:23, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

(Also, a trick to help you avoid having to completely re-create the list you previously added. If you go to the history tab on the article, you can browse previous versions. When you navigate to the previous version that includes your list, you then have the option to edit that previous version; if you go to that edit window on the previous version, you can copy the source code or plain text of your list and reformat/pare it down, before re-adding it to the current version of the article. A helpful feature that lets you recover anything you've published that gets reverted.) 19h00s (talk) 14:33, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Many thanks once again for your help. I will take another look at it and edit that list down and hope it works.

Have you seen the Delcy Morelos show at Dia? Not to be missed, a full immersive, sensory experience. Artkamp209 (talk) 17:14, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

I actually just recently took a few days off to come up to the city and gallery hop and Morelos' show was the main draw. It was genuinely revelatory imo, although I had some qualms with the interpretation materials. I suspect you'll find this out rather quickly if you looked through my edits so I might as well say it, but despite my love for Dia I have some, er, feelings about its curation and policies.

I don't necessarily agree with the canonization of some Dia-associated artists like Michael Heizer, or the foundation's approach to copyright specifically. This being Wikipedia & Wikimedia Commons, places where copyright, fair use, and licensing technicalities essentially underpin the entire structure of the project, Dia's claims of copyright ownership for several works by land artists have sparked some significant arguments between editors about the legality of copyright claims over both ephemeral and permanent land art; if these works themselves were indeed copyrighted, that would mean editors couldn't upload high quality pictures of, say, Spiral Jetty, without violating copyright, which on its face feels a bit ludicrous, even with my own love for land and conceptual art: how can you copyright piles of rocks and restrict people from publishing pictures of a lake vista? This had led to many discussions about the legal principles undergirding copyright in the US, specifically phrasing in the law that states, to be eligible for copyright, a work must be "fixed, in a tangible medium." Some of the canonical land art that Dia owns would not seem to meet this standard, including Spiral Jetty and The New York Earth Room, both of which have been photographed by editors and published on Commons after administrators decided they didn't count as "fixed." Obviously this stretches well beyond the legal ramifications, into the territory of individual artist's agency and ownership of their work, so I understand in principle why Dia takes the position that the works are copyrighted and seeks to restrict photography in the case of De Maria's work, presumably to avoid third parties using the artists' art or legacies in potentially negative ways, but I'm also of the mind that if something is legally in the public domain, people should be free to copy and use it (as is their legal right, which is also reflected in Wikipedia/Commons' core missions of aggregating free information & images for the public to learn from and use).

Anyway, this context was probably not really necessary, but I've never actually encountered a Dia staffer on here before and figured you'd eventually find your way to the discussions and images on this topic given your job, and would probably see my contributions/comments. It's also my day off so I guess I'm just bored and rambling. But I personally try very hard to keep my opinions on the issue out of my edits in articles; my main engagement with this has been through Commons discussions about images of Dia's collection. 19h00s (talk) 18:21, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

So interesting. I don't work in the Rights & Reproductions department (I'm in Visitor Services, I'm a people person) but from what I understand, most of Dia's photo permissions has to be approved through ARS (Artists Rights Society). Each artists' studio has a different policy, for example, Walter De Maria was adamant from the very beginning while he was alive to no photography of his artwork or being interviewed. He insisted on a personal, bodily engagement with the art; unmediated and durational, hence his Lightening Field project, where you spend 24 hours at the field (no photography allowed, of course) but this is difficult to enforce. BTW, I have tons of personal photos from the LF. But I appreciate learning more about copyright ownership and once art leaves the studio, I do believe it belongs to the world. But then again, in the world of AI and misinformation, trying to have some control of images does make a certain kind of sense.

I'm not familiar with Commons so I will dig in further. Thanks again! Artkamp209 (talk) 20:13, 5 February 2024 (UTC)