ES: Some people would call what you do, "shitty, ignorant and
irrelevant trash." What would you say to them?

BB: Usually, I say, "Geez, Mom. I'm doing the best I can."

+ + +

Art on the Go–An Interview With Ben Benjamin of Superbad.Com

Eryk Salvaggio: A lot of people might say that Superbad is really just a
graphic design portfolio. In my opinion that's kind of missing the point
that you are using graphic design as a language…. sort of the way JODI
uses HTML and broken code. Do you think that's accurate?

Ben Benjamin: It's not much of a portfolio–I rarely show it to clients;
it scares them. So, yes, I think "using graphic design as a language" is
an accurate description. I was an artist before I was a graphic
designer, so now to do art, graphic design is mainly another tool that I
can use.

And Superbad tries to draw attention to the language of design itself. I
like how Godard does that in his films–draws attention to the film, or
how Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker do that too; they did "Airplane." But
I'm no Godard and Superbad is no "Airplane."

ES: Kids seem to be a big part of the content on Superbad. Or the
idealization of childhood. It's innocent; even things that are
disturbing (the boy who gets attacked and killed by bees) are
_innocently_ disturbing. Even Mao becomes a cartoon character….

BB: Yeah, it's like Mao, cute-ified. Cartoon, but also he's a logo. The
real Mao's face IS a logo, used to represent his brand of communism; in
the same way a company uses a logo to represent itself. I just tried to
show the connection in an entertaining way.

As for the innocently disturbing stuff, it's there because it's
entertaining. And the childhood elements I like to use because everyone
was a kid, so everyone can identify with them.

ES: There's a lot of childhood nostalgia, like "Being Silly," or the
vaguely recalled family stories. If you combine that with the idea that
Superbad is a lot about logos and corporate design, you could say it's a
statement about the homogenizing effect of the mainstream media. Again,
the cartoon Mao.

BB: In the beginning, Superbad started out doing a lot of parody, and
what was on the web at that time were a lot of personal sites. Since
then, the web has become more about commerce. So over time, both of
those things have been parodied.

I'm not sure that it makes sense to try to understand how those two
parts fit together. It's more like some of it is accessible by being
childlike. And some of it is a little bit slick and commercial and is
accessible in that way. But both aspects are just using that
accessibility to communicate ideas other than what seems to belong
there. It's sneaky.

ES: I think the text on Superbad is one of my favorite aspects. The
sort of trivial tragedy.

BB: Trivial and lurid at the same time. Like someone in the office
stealing your lunch from the fridge. It's a real drama, and it's really
upsetting, but if you have a reasonable perspective, you understand that
it's a very small personal drama. Still it's compelling. Same with the
cigarette shoplifters and the guy who bought all the meat. I honestly
don't know why I wrote the meat part. I thought web pages had to have
words, so I just started writing.

ES: And its drama! And entertainment. "But Is It Art?"

BB: At first I didn't want to call it art because I thought it would be
more fun for people to be surprised by it and I wanted to leave it open
to different interpretations. I like it when people think of it as a
site for kids or a site showcasing "experimental fiction" or whatever.
However, "art" seems to be the word that does the best job of describing
it.

ES: It seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Superbad, within
net.art theory, falls into giving it a reputation for being irreverent
and trivial, whereas other work is praised for bridging a gap into pure
entertainment.

BB: Hmm. I'm not sure I understand that criticism. Who's saying art
shouldn't be irreverent, and where were they during the twentieth
century?

Anyway, the comment about it being "trivial" is probably valid. I think
most websites are pretty trivial, and Superbad is, probably more than
most. Making it entertaining is definitely more important to me than
making it non-trivial.

ES: Well, you don't seem to care about criticism anyway. Your site
doesn't exactly work towards textbook sorts of discussions. But that
seems intentional.

BB: My site works best as a website. That's intentional. I'm better at
making stuff than talking about it. Plus, talking about my site is
usually about fifty times less interesting than actually visiting the
site itself.

ES: And people do visit it. The most popular site on the web, I think,
as far as Internet art is concerned. Your site's hits, according to
Netscape, are higher than JODI's and Hell.com's…

BB: It's the most popular website in THE WHOLE WORLD. Because I'm the
most popular person in the world.

(Serious answer now.) Actually, I don't understand how popularity is
quantifiable. And I don't know that it's useful to compare numbers like
that. It's not like Superbad is trying to compete with other websites.
Popularity contests are kind of exclusive and annoying and are pretty
far removed from what I want Superbad to be about.

ES: I just mean to say your site has got Populist appeal, not that it's
running for class president. I would think that is probably more
valuable to an artist than a handful of academic criticism?

BB: Superbad is like colorful, splashy Art-Lite (TM). E-Z Art for people
on the go. So it plays by most of the same rules as a pop cultural
product, which makes it somewhat Populist. Still, I don't devalue
criticism. I dig well done art criticism, though none of Superbad was
created with academic criticism in mind.