Economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, national defense, law, cognitive science, and myriad other fields are increasingly focusing their investigative energies onto the ramifications of the ever updating financial flows, communication paradigms, sub-cultures, social norms, personal security concerns, and general experiential phenomena emerging in relation to the growing public usage of the Internet.
That said, it would really be something for the rarified air of the contemporary art world to not follow suit.
But, nevertheless, that is largely the case.
Contemporary art, for a variety of reasons, chooses to bypass or ignore the opportunity to reflect on these technologies.
Stroll through the kunsthalles of Europe or the galleries of Chelsea (to name two prominent examples), and one would be hard-pressed to find any indication (outside of certain for better or for worse ghettoized new media spaces) that the constellation of technologies surrounding digital networked computing have any influence over one’s relationship to space and time.
It’s like it doesn’t exist.
Which seems like a problem (if, that is, one believes that art, as a “humanity,” is pressed to reflect on the condition of being a human).
Perhaps I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, though.
After all, I spend a lot of time on my computer and while it seems to me like my own life is radically different than it was before I started logging onto my friend’s Prodigy Internet provider when I was a kid, that doesn’t necessarily mean that other people are quite as hooked.
In fact, most people don’t spend nearly as much time on-line as I do.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the opposite is actually the reality – most people are luddites who are actively not engaging with these technologies – they write letters not e-mail; they read books not blogs; they read The New York Times not nytimes.com; they have big family dinners not social network updates.
Even in this case, though, the actions just mentioned are conducted in explicit reaction to the phenomenon of the Internet.
A world of “not Internet” still presupposes the existence of Internet – be it an existence worth celebrating or problematizing.
To go out of one’s way to not use the technology, the technology still impacts one’s actions.
But still, it might be argued, that’s obscuring the problem here.
It’s not that there is a world of Internet and not-Internet, but that most people in the world have never even thought to think about these technologies because they’re too busy breaking their backs in manual labor and, as such, it’s imperialistic (not to mention petty) to suggest that anything so wild as the Internet is worth taking seriously.
Fair enough, but even if, for the sake of argument, most people in the world will never interact with these technologies (or choose not to do so), their lives may very well be effected, nonetheless.
With the proliferation of n.g.o.’s and transnational corporate interests into parts of the world where Internet access is limited, the livelihood of all but the hardiest human beings is in one way or another dependent upon capital which is now streaming through and enabled by digital computer networks.
But, perhaps, that, too, is missing the point.
Perhaps it’s not that the art world doesn’t think these technologies are on some level “worthy” of inclusion into the contemporary art discussion, but that it’s never really been the job of contemporary art to automatically start wringing its hands over new technologies.
In this reading, it’s not that the art world doesn’t understand the Web, but that the Web doesn’t understand the art world.
Neither Internet art nor art about the Internet actually partakes in what’s interesting about the contemporary art discussion and, as such, makes it difficult for themselves to be included.
For better or for worse, contemporary art is a world and (as worlds tend to do) it spends a lot of time reflecting on its self.
If the artists can’t figure out a way to connect the development of the steam engine or the television to contemporary art, then why would contemporary art have to automatically reflect on the steam engine or the television?
They might be important technologies (no one is arguing that they aren’t), but it’s simply not the job of contemporary art to account for them just because somebody outside of contemporary art demands that it be so.
Besides, that’s what new media art spaces or art & technology journals like Leonardo are for.
Related to this argument is the question of quality.
Again, it’s not that contemporary art is automatically predisposed to reject the inclusion of art made about these technologies or with these technologies, but that, entre nous, there just hasn’t been any good examples of this type of art.
The proof is in the pudding and one can’t expect artwork that’s at best working at an undergrad level of sophistication to just waltz right in and take over the conversation.
This might be the most powerful argument against the notion of contemporary art’s embrace of work explicitly made on or about digital computer networks.
However, I believe it’s an argument which is ignorant regarding the work that is actually out there – the proof in the pudding so to speak.
From one view, the artists I’ve written about on this blog, for example, are working very creatively in the wake of (again, from one view) early video art, “the Pictures generation,” painters like Christopher Wool, and on through the Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker crowd.
From other views, other genealogies could be posited and, if one is willing to put aside their own embarrassments concerning the computer, then one might see how these connections aren’t forced, but are rather logical and even obvious.
That’s not to say that this is the most astounding work ever made, but that at the very least it’s positioning itself in ways that seem like they should be intriguing for a contemporary art audience to reflect on.
Now, in contemporary art’s defense, it’s not so easy to just up and change its whole game plan.
First of all, there’s the problem about how to create financial value around this type of work and, thus, circulate it through its own well-oiled economy.
But outside of that, there’s another anxiety.
Contemporary art, to my mind, is in the business of asking “what is contemporary art?”
If contemporary art were pressed to say “contemporary art exists in the digital network as much as it does outside of the digital network,” then contemporary art would all of the sudden be operating from radically different premises.
The “white cube” paradigm (as the site where contemporary art occurs) would be threatened from within.
The “where” of “where the art occurs” would be altered as the simulation of the physical work through (primarily) the Web archive would be understood to be art’s arena.
To my mind, work which successfully bridges the worlds of the digital computer network and contemporary art is work which, on some level, implicates contemporary art into this very network.
It’s not work about the digital computer network, it’s work about contemporary art’s own entanglement in the digital computer network.
And for contemporary art to acknowledge this, it would demand that contemporary art changes the way it sees itself.
As such, contemporary art wouldn’t be taking in an orphan, but a virus.