If I encounter the work of a contemporary artist through their website or some other form of managed presence on the Internet and I do it again and again and again and again, then the evolution of their website or managed presence itself becomes a work.
That is to say, the more I view the artist’s work as an ongoing chronological development accounted for in a database accessible on the Web (as opposed to, say, seeing an object first-hand and, then, relying on memories or reference books to account for the artist’s previous body of work), the more I view a whole new type of first-hand:
A performance of the artist as an artist, moving in and out of positions and tempos, and, in some cases, picturing their own inhabitation of time.
Tags: contemporary art, database, website