I have been reading parts of Geert Lovink's book Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. Lovink has been around the new media scene for a long time, since before the internet got ubiquitous. He says some pretty harsh/funny things about new media as a discipline in his chapter "The Cool Obscure." Here's a few zingers:
Digital aesthetics have developed a hyper-modern, formalist approach, and seem to lack the critical rigour of standard contemporary art pieces. (p.56)
Links to contemporary social movements are weak, and the awareness of basic postcolonial issues is often absent. This is not the case if we look at individual works, but certainly if we look at the way festivals and conferences are programmed. (p.58)
Putting content online is a last resort, but funnily enough it is not very popular among new media artists. The Internet is looked down upon by some as a primitive device, left to an in-crowd of Internet artists and discourse leaders who prefer to perform formalistic experiments, combined with a subversive political action every now and then...(p.58)
There is a widely spread belief that tech-based artworks have the potential to be genius. Supposedly there are not yet traces or fingerprints of society on recently developed technologies and the artist therefore has the full range of all possible forms of expression in front of him or her. [...] According to this "myth of the blank page," new media artists are not limited by existing cultural connotations because there are no media-specific references yet. It is the heroic task of the new media artist to define those cultural codes. (pp.50-1)
Lovink is worried about the viability and sustainability of new media art as a discipline. A lot of his criticism resonates with me, although of course I can think of lots of examples of awesome artworks that contradict his general thesis. He makes the disclaimer, however, that he is not addressing specific works, but rather new media institutions and general trends. Here's a bit that cracks me up:
Why did new media art miss out during the exuberant dotcom days and why do geeks and IT millionaires prefer buying cars and other middle class baubles of consumption, and turn their backs on their own art form? (p.40)
Um...cause for young guys who suddenly come into wads of cash, art is almost never the first thing on their mind? For artists who are used to juggling day jobs and multiple types of gigs to pay the rent, the idea that new media would provide some kind of ongoing access to big money might seem a little silly. But that only goes to prove Lovink's overall point:
Electronic art, an earlier synonym for new media art, is in crisis. So is virtual art and net.art. These carefully gated communities have proven incapable of communicating their urgency and beauty to their ever-rising (potential) audience. (p.41)
Lovink positions himself as a kind of whistleblower, and suggests:
...we urgently need to analyze the ideology of the excessive 1990s and its associated political consciousness of techno-libertarianism. If we do not disassociate new media quickly from that decade, and if we continue with the same rhetoric, the isolation of the new media sector will eventually result in its demise. Let's transform the new media buzz into something more interesting altogether before others do it for us. The will to subordinate to science is nothing more than a helpless adolescent gesture of powerlessness and victimhood. (p.68)
ouch!
As Harwood would say, one blown fuse away from irrelevance.
To his criticism of new media institutions and festivals, when will curators stop getting excited over the word 'data' in artist statements?
b/t/w That reminds me, one of the quotes I used in my first class was from Dragan Espenschied in: Gravity
"The pressure to be up to date with technology appears insane to me. It doesn't bring any more beauty or pleasure. Instead it creates things that are hard to understand and impossible to handle. So nobody can actually experience them beyond reading the artist's concept."
(Then I pressured them to get up to date with technology, destroyed all the beauty and pleasure in their young lives, showed them art that was hard to understand, and talked about my dog who is impossible to handle)
The efforts by some people to canonize net.art are pretty funny: self-historicizing in print format. But it will probably work, because the gallery artworld is also infected with nostalgia for newness. In their introduction to At the Edge of Art, a 2006 book about net.art, John Blais and John Ippolito say that society should support internet art because technology is like a virus and art is like an antibody. (I'd say that art is technology, but if you want an analogy it's more like a digestive enzyme than an antibody). They quote Marshall McLuhan suggesting that art is "information on how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our extended faculties." And they go on to say that "...cell phones, genetic engineering, and global trading networks set in motion entire new cascades of perceptual and philosophical quandries. At a time of accelerated technological progress, art that tackles such quandries before they are clearly articulated offers an essential prophylactic against future shock." (At the Edge of Art, p.11) The whole point of their argument is this: "...if art serves society in its own perverse way, society must serve art by providing mechanisms for recognizing and preserving it." (p.12) Doth the lady protest too much?
Tom Moody recently made an interesting distinction here, a la Guthrie Lonergan's Hackers vs. Defaults, between "new media" and "artists with computers." He linked to some online feedback he got here.
More feedback (people being annoyed division) here and on Rhizome.
The feedbackers don't like that I'm not parsing what's good and bad in the net.art canon that predates the work I'm interested in. It's not like I'm not aware of that stuff, it just rarely grabbed me. Too anecdotal, too much reading of instructions to "get" the piece, etc.
It's funny that they seized on the "net.art art is too tech-obsessed" part of the critique but are mostly ignoring the part that said "new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich's principles ('new media objects exist as data,' etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian."
Also, as usual in the Rhizome comment threads, there are specific examples on the table (Paul Slocum, Joan Leandre) but they would much rather have angels on pinheads discussions about generalities.
(My post was general, Ceci Moss countered with specifics, I responded to those, and that's where it sits.)
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I have been reading parts of Geert Lovink's book Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. Lovink has been around the new media scene for a long time, since before the internet got ubiquitous. He says some pretty harsh/funny things about new media as a discipline in his chapter "The Cool Obscure." Here's a few zingers: Lovink is worried about the viability and sustainability of new media art as a discipline. A lot of his criticism resonates with me, although of course I can think of lots of examples of awesome artworks that contradict his general thesis. He makes the disclaimer, however, that he is not addressing specific works, but rather new media institutions and general trends. Here's a bit that cracks me up: Um...cause for young guys who suddenly come into wads of cash, art is almost never the first thing on their mind? For artists who are used to juggling day jobs and multiple types of gigs to pay the rent, the idea that new media would provide some kind of ongoing access to big money might seem a little silly. But that only goes to prove Lovink's overall point: Lovink positions himself as a kind of whistleblower, and suggests: ouch!
- sally mckay 12-08-2008 3:35 am
As Harwood would say, one blown fuse away from irrelevance.
To his criticism of new media institutions and festivals, when will curators stop getting excited over the word 'data' in artist statements?
- L.M. 12-08-2008 3:51 am
b/t/w That reminds me, one of the quotes I used in my first class was from Dragan Espenschied in: Gravity
"The pressure to be up to date with technology appears insane to me. It doesn't bring any more beauty or pleasure. Instead it creates things that are hard to understand and impossible to handle. So nobody can actually experience them beyond reading the artist's concept."
(Then I pressured them to get up to date with technology, destroyed all the beauty and pleasure in their young lives, showed them art that was hard to understand, and talked about my dog who is impossible to handle)
- L.M. 12-08-2008 7:13 am
The efforts by some people to canonize net.art are pretty funny: self-historicizing in print format. But it will probably work, because the gallery artworld is also infected with nostalgia for newness. In their introduction to At the Edge of Art, a 2006 book about net.art, John Blais and John Ippolito say that society should support internet art because technology is like a virus and art is like an antibody. (I'd say that art is technology, but if you want an analogy it's more like a digestive enzyme than an antibody). They quote Marshall McLuhan suggesting that art is "information on how to rearrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our extended faculties." And they go on to say that "...cell phones, genetic engineering, and global trading networks set in motion entire new cascades of perceptual and philosophical quandries. At a time of accelerated technological progress, art that tackles such quandries before they are clearly articulated offers an essential prophylactic against future shock." (At the Edge of Art, p.11) The whole point of their argument is this: "...if art serves society in its own perverse way, society must serve art by providing mechanisms for recognizing and preserving it." (p.12) Doth the lady protest too much?
- sally mckay 12-08-2008 3:37 pm
Tom Moody recently made an interesting distinction here, a la Guthrie Lonergan's Hackers vs. Defaults, between "new media" and "artists with computers." He linked to some online feedback he got here.
- sally mckay 12-08-2008 3:42 pm
More feedback (people being annoyed division) here and on Rhizome.
The feedbackers don't like that I'm not parsing what's good and bad in the net.art canon that predates the work I'm interested in. It's not like I'm not aware of that stuff, it just rarely grabbed me. Too anecdotal, too much reading of instructions to "get" the piece, etc.
It's funny that they seized on the "net.art art is too tech-obsessed" part of the critique but are mostly ignoring the part that said "new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich's principles ('new media objects exist as data,' etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian."
Also, as usual in the Rhizome comment threads, there are specific examples on the table (Paul Slocum, Joan Leandre) but they would much rather have angels on pinheads discussions about generalities.
- tom moody 12-09-2008 3:28 pm
(My post was general, Ceci Moss countered with specifics, I responded to those, and that's where it sits.)
- tom moody 12-09-2008 3:33 pm