Lennaart van Oldenborgh on Sun, 16 Mar 97 22:36 MET |
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nettime: Net Art, Schmet art |
Net Art, Schmet art Whatever you call it, it tends to be useful to create 'constuencies' for emerging arts. It happens in any medium, and it is only a matter of time before 'exciting artists' are crystallized into recognizable form. 'Video Art' as a circuit onto itself may be fairly discredited by now, but it has served as a breeding ground for some of the most credited artists of our time; in the 1992 Documenta (right in the middle of video's alleged 'absence' form the artscene) the works by Bill Viola and Gary Hill were among the most-talked-about, and both artists emerged from the now marginalised 'festival circuit'. Surely a large percentage of works in the video festivals seem hardly worth a look, but the same can be said of the majority of more object-based 'special interest' group shows scattered over the 'alternative spaces' of the western world (for example, there has been a re-emergence of 'painting-only' or 'works-on-paper' theme shows). As for 'ex-video-artists' like myself and David Garcia, most have either moved on to 'newer media', or have got wise to the fact that in the established art world it doesn't matter so much where you come from (since the ice for video has been broken, so to say), as long as you get yourself written about in flashy art magazines. And as far as the quick and dirty approach is concerned, this is as much a legacy of the grungey, streetwise approach of the Young British Artists (who, as legend has it, never had the money to use anything but recycled material as a result of Thatherite economics) as of any 1970's precedent (by the way, Matthew Barney makes a poor example of this approach; his big-time special effects for Cremaster-4 owes more to Hollywood than to Ulay/Abramovic). Another way the Y.B.A. has broken some ice for video is that it is now becoming acceptable to charge large sums of money for 'limited edition' video works by hot artists, a concept that somehow never took off before... See, the Artworld still ticks on the sale of precious objects, and preciousness in this case (well, in almost any case) hinges on exclusivity. As a means of survival for technologically-minded artists the video-art circuit has probably served its time, but I can imagine the same is not true for a net-art circuit. Even if most big art institutions seem eager to jump on the new media bandwagon, I don't know of any that has managed to put up a credible format for showing net-based work (which would, in a sense, be a useless exercise since the net provides the format). With the knowledge of the net still relatively rarefied, the gulf of misunderstanding between 'techie' net-artists and 'traditional' art institutions is bound to persist for some time. In the mean time I wouldn't mind some self-proclaimed net-artists developing some standards and driving some of the low-res online art-cataloguing (which 99 percent of 'art on the net' seems to amount to - including, I confess, my long-ago-aborted attempt on desk.nl) off the web. Lennaart van Oldenborgh -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de