Digital art duo MTAA link to a Donald Kuspit article that makes some over the top claims for digital work. I haven't studied the essay in depth but agree with about half the premise ("digital art is the new art; code is the new subject") and practically none of the examples. Now MTAA is duking it out in their comments with an anonymous meanie who makes the obvious argument that art has to have that undefinable something regardless of the medium and then backs it up with ad hominem attacks on MTAA's twhid. Guys, don't give that fellow too much of your brain power. (Like I follow that advice with rude anonymous commenters.) More on the Kuspit soon--it's surprising he wrote this because he's usually the spokesman for the Healing Power of Art and fecund interiority over bloodless conceptualism. Possibly he's in full contrarian mode but then his principles are never rock-solid.

Update: The Kuspit piece is disappointing. He bases his link between early Modernist painting and the computer on squishy metaphors of pixeled space that leap across several decades and don't take into account photographic grain, TV rasterizing and other developments that came between Seurat and the first computer art in the 60s. "Code" is also used in a broad metaphorical sense so it could mean almost any systematic approach to art. The only current digital work he discusses in depth is Michael Somoroff's video Query (2004), which is more of that damn art about art, riffing on Duchamp's and Richter's famous nudes descending staircases by subjecting them to the inevitable high-tech imaging analysis. Ugh.

- tom moody 8-07-2005 6:09 pm

thx Tom... have yet to read the entire article :-)
- twhid (guest) 8-07-2005 6:24 pm


you suck!
- anonymous (guest) 8-08-2005 2:29 am


[Healing Power of Art and the fecund (I'll ditch the interiority) over bloodless conceptualism]

I like both without the over or under. Can we have that? Bloodless conceptualism (that plops us in a place perhaps (Dat) we aint skidded, myoped, or landed upon before), along with the x-ray specs for the fecund to add some depth to the territorial skip, keeping in mind the band-aid as a lucky charm.

>the contingent reality of the matrix of sensations
- brent (guest) 8-08-2005 3:55 am


This didn't seem to come up in the previous post...

SOUNDS LIKE DONALD KUSPIT HAS BEEN READING STRINGS. Maybe we all should, great poetry, and heals like all...
- brent (guest) 8-08-2005 3:57 am


I just have no patience for this insanely overwrought thinking about art. For me, Kuspit-like writing is part of the problem in the art world, rather than part of the solution.

His wildly intricate postulations are exactly the kind of approach that left us with dead split cows in tanks of formaldehyde. I write this in spite of the fact that Kuspit apparently hates the Hirst tanks, and agrees with me and others who think a lot of similar conceptual artwork are destructive to art in general. The thing is, Kuspit takes 20 pages to say it, while other critics can say it in 2 sentences and move on.

http://www.billgusky.com




- Bill Gusky (guest) 8-09-2005 3:14 am


if you all find Kuspit hard to follow, you need to smoke another joint
- googleburger (guest) 11-19-2008 10:39 pm