Late last week, artist Man Bartlett threw a potluck that spanned from New York to Sydney, Australia in a cacophonous storefront apartment space located in the depths of Brooklyn's Bushwick neighborhood. Part of Portal, a dynamic, international series of cross-platform exhibitions organized by Janis Ferberg and Stephen Truax, Bartlett's #FEEDFEED event used online social networks to connect physical social networks, uniting two separate groups of people in one communal meal through video chat and Twitter interfaces.

In a set up that functioned like a doubled one-way mirror, #FEEDFEED participants observed and were observed in real time, within a space that formed a hybrid between virtual and physical. A screen in the Bushwick apartment projected a group of Sydney participants going about their own brunch, while another in the Sydney beamed the happenings of the Bushwick dinner, which featured social-media-punning food like "Ritz Bitcoins," "Rice Krispie Tweets," and "Hashtag Browns." Meanwhile, a third, online-only audience participated through the #FEEDFEED hashtag on Twitter. Impromptu versions of the performance dinner popped up in Alaska and Maine while others tweeted about what they were eating at the moment.

Bartlett identifies as someone who makes "social media art," a practice that he defined as "interacting with people using the medium of social media in the creation of art" during a recent phone conversation. In a growing body of work that includes "#24hKith" (2010), a performance in which the artist translated dream descriptions sent in via Twitter into physical constructions formed of brightly colored feathers attached to a blank mannequin, and "#24hPort" (2011), a Creative Time Tweets project that saw the artist asking Port Authority visitors where they've been and where they're going, and tweeting the results, Bartlett uses the Internet to engage his audience, working with online social networks like Twitter and Facebook as platforms to host participatory projects that interweave the physical and the digital world.   

At the same time, earlier last week, the Pace Gallery opened its "Social Media" exhibition with a private artist panel exploring what makes up social media art, in the context of the show (perhaps the most professionally executed exhibition pertaining to "social media art" yet created). Musician and artist David Byrne, filmmaker and artist Miranda July, and artists Aram Bartholl, Penelope Umbrico, and Emilio Chapela discussed their work in the framework of "social media" — but this "social media" is different from the form broached by Man Bartlett and other emerging social media artists.

Where Bartlett's work is inseparable from the Internet, some of the Pace panelists didn't necessarily engage the Internet as a medium. Byrne seemed to struggle to connect any of his work to the web, and explained that he "doesn't want work just about the novelty of the Internet." Yet Byrne's own contribution to the show, satirical iPhone application concepts presented as app store advertisements, seems to fall directly into this trap — the posters are superficial engagement with the novelty of new technology.

July said that she "uses the web to rebel against the web," fighting against what she sees as the tendency of the Internet to disconnect people rather than connect them. Her project with Harroll Fletcher presented at Pace, "Learning to Love You More," called on participants to carry out tasks described on a central Web site and send back their results as photos and writing. Begun in 2002, the project created its own social network well before the advent of Facebook and Twitter. The resulting project shown in the gallery was an artifact of that site, a collection of the physical results of the project. Elsewhere in "Social Media," new media artist Aram Bartholl turned Internet "captcha codes" (those things you have to type out to prove you're a human online) into elegant metal wall sculptures, and Penelope Umbrico compiled and cropped thousands of photographs of the sun from "social media sites like Craigslist and Flickr," and, at Pace, prints them out into an enormous grid. Umbrico has also distributed the images as postcards in the online video game Second Life.

The art works on view at Pace often reference online culture without directly participating in it, whether the pieces are actually live online or not (none were). That doesn't mean that the Pace show is not "social media art," or that it's bad, or invalid; rather, it's just a different kind of art that deals, sometimes obliquely, with social media. Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic editor and curator of "The Social Graph," a recent exhibition focused on social media art, told me that if a work of social media art "exists off the grid," or offline, "then it should have some form of commentary on the online aspect. There needs to be a level of engagement, otherwise it becomes a passive critique." Much of the work on view at Pace passively appropriates or collects material from the Internet without engaging its greater background. These are not particularly social works of art. 

The artists who have come to be at the forefront of online social media art (that is, art that engages online social networks in real time) allow themselves to become part of their audiences, interfacing directly with their viewing community in a way that the context and execution of the Pace exhibition does not allow. In her performance "The Artist is Kind of Present," artist An Xiao played off Marina Abramovic by stationing herself right across from in-person visitors, but communicating with them only via Twitter. Ai Weiwei has turned his Twitter feed into a monument of social media art by creating a massive, dynamic community around his online presence, a community that became politicized when the Twitter feed fell silent after the artist's arrest.

Art Fag City editor and critic Paddy Johnson critiqued Bartlett's and Xiao's works for privileging "meaningful exchange" over "the creative juice that defines truly great art" in a contentious L Magazine article. She was called out in a Hyperallergic comment thread for not engaging with the work enough, and for not being invested enough in social media to properly experience the pieces in question. The performances of Xiao and Bartlett can seem superficial — at surface level, "#FEEDFEED," for all its intentions, could be an average Friday night in Brooklyn thrown onto Chatroulette, and "The Artist is Kind of Present," is, as Johnson noted, a lot like Gchatting with a coworker two desks away.

But it seems to me that we are dealing with two types of social media art that must be evaluated each on their own terms. One form takes the online world as its inspiration and source, taking elements of the Internet offline and presenting it in a more easily consumable framework. The other type of social media art, that of Bartlett and Xiao, deals with the development and management of ad-hoc experiential communities and personal relationships in real time, mediated by the live Internet.

There is a quality of danger in an artist subjecting themselves to a live audience — we can look to Chris Burden for a prime example — that is not present in a cordoned-off gallery setting. This risk is what I find compelling about online social media art, and what makes "#FEEDFEED" or "The Artist is Kind of Present" more viscerally involving than Pace's "Social Media" exhibition. But I also hope that these artists can embrace the danger, and bring online social media art into a less anodyne realm. As we all know — it's rough out there on the Internet.  

PICK YOUR OWN: Recently put on view at the online-only Fach & Asendorf Gallery, Brandon Blommaert's "Omni Gate Supercel" is a series of animated GIFs, shown as a triptych, that viewers can flip through, switching out images to create their own combinations of images. The polygonal abstract animations are reminiscent of Neo-Geo abstrationists like Peter Halley, as well as Lynda Benglis's gloopy sculptural forms and acid colors. I like the process of switching between different compositions the most, though. Similar to Brazilian sculptor Hélio Oiticica, Blommaert creates an interactive abstraction machine.