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This essay
originally appeared in art journal
http://www.artsjournal.com/
artswatch/digitalcritical.htm
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Perspectives
on the Arts : Art Journal
DIGITAL
GOES CRITICAL
Now
That Digital Art Has been Brought
Inside the Museum, Will the ArtWorld
Take it Seriously?
Jack Miles & Douglas McLennan
There is a tendency among some to want to make an “art” of anything… the art
of business, the art of tennis, the art of the Dow Jones...
But acknowledging that there is an “art” to doing something
well, and declaring something to be an art are entirely different
things. There is clearly an art, for example, to creating good computer
programs. But is there such a thing as digital art?
First,
a clarification of terms. Digitized art is what you get when Canada, the
United States, and Mexico collaborate in an exhibition of North
American landscape art [CBC] that is displayed
only in cyberspace. Or when the Canadian
government offers an online gallery [CBC]
of 200,000 images—everything from the Group of Seven to Inuit sculpture. It's
not actual art but the digital representation of actual art.
Digitized art spawns the virtual gallery or museum. The Smithsonian
Museum of American Art [New Jersey Online]
is attracting more visitors per month (60,000) to the virtual images on
its website since it physically closed for renovations than it attracted
“live” visitors (54,000) during the last month its building was open.
In
the commercial marketplace, enormous digital image archives have been
assembled by companies such as Corbis and Getty Images. Neil Rudenstine,
stepping down as president of Harvard University, recently said he will
head an effort to create
a mammoth digitized art archive [New York Times].
DIGITAL ORIGINAL
But digital art is something quite different from digitized
art. A generation of artists working in pixels and logarithms and CART
monitors proclaims that digital is a new medium, a fully legitimate medium
in which 0’s and 1’s replace paint and canvas.
Getting critics and curators to agree, however,
has been more complicated. Despite numerous websites devoted to digital
art and thousands of practitioners, many mainstream art critics have maintained
that digital as an artform has not
yet really taken shape [New York Times].
What hasn’t really taken shape, however, may be, more exactly, a framework,
a vocabulary in which digital art can be discussed and appreciated by
non-practitioners.
The online world has promised us a new, more
democratic way of doing things, where innovation and understanding of
the world are untethered from the traditional arbiters of taste and legitimacy.
But the online world, for all its innovation and vibrancy, can itself be quite
exclusive, and it has taken recognition by a more traditional but ultimately
more accessible authority– the museum – to push digital art into the wider
world.
The Whitney’s first digital acquisition was made as far
back as 1994 [The Art Newspaper]. Last
year for the first time, the Whitney Biennial (the show everyone loves
to hate) included art in a digital medium, serving notice that the larger
artworld was paying increasing attention. Also last year the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art awarded a prize [Wired]
for digital art.
Then,
as the clock ticked 01:01 on January 1, 2001 (01/01/01), SFMOMA,
its doors closed and locked, opened 010101: Art in Technological Times
for online viewing. Director David Ross, a longtime champion of art in/and/about
digital technology staked an unmistakable claim
for the medium [Wired] and for his own
institution.
Now, a few months later, digital art may have achieved
some critical mass [New York Magazine]
with the opening of BitStreams on March 22, 2001, the Whitney’s
first major exhibition devoted to the practitioners of a kind of art that
even now few can yet
define [The New Republic] and some still
say does not yet exist.
There are
signs that longer term admittance to the art club is shaping up as well.
The Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, by way of a gift from AOL, has assembled the first-ever museum
collection [The Art Newspaper] of internet
art.
Like
its most immediate ancestor, video art, which has struggled for decades
for legitimacy, digital art is finally in play in the larger artworld,
and discussions about how it can be defined are now taking place well
outside of the immediate digital community.
COMING OF AGE
“Digital art is like soccer—it never attracted the best athletes until this
generation,” asserts Mark Tribe, founder of the pioneering art site Rhizome.org….
‘As a practical matter…, we’ve
now reached a tipping point’” [New York Magazine].
Digital
art reaches the tipping point when it successfully turns the wired world
to artistic ends remote from those envisioned by the engineers who brought
that digital fusion of the telephone, the television, and the computer
into existence.
Glenn
D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan explains: “The digital
reproduction of works of art on the Internet is just that, but the experience
of works of art uniquely created for the
Net is a fundamentally different category” [New
York Times]. A stored Winslow Homer is digitized art. Jeremy
Blake’s Station to Station, “a series of five monitors on which
geometric forms and landscape images appear
and disappear in a fairly complex contrapuntal sequence” [The
New Republic] is digital art.
If
Station to Station, a part of BitStreams, does not quite
break the mold of purchase and display by private or public collectors,
other digital art does, and some of its creators, though trained conventionally
as painters, prize it for its power to “thwart conventional
categorization” [New York Times].
ARTWORLD CREDIBILITY
But
despite “uncertainty surrounding what it means to own, exhibit, create,
or simply view works, computer-aided art is gaining credibility from collectors
and institutions, who are not only buying it but commissioning it too.
Last summer, Magdalena Sawon, co-director of Manhattan’s Postmasters Gallery,
sold two editions, for $15,000 each, of Text Rain (2000), a digital
work by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv. "This was the
first time a substantial interactive computer installation was bought,
[ArtNews] by people who were also buying this
for the first time," says Sawon.
The
history of digital art may go through a set of steps increasingly familiar
in cyberspace. First, creative amateurs circulate their own work without
charge partly because there is still no market for it and partly because
no one quite knows how to charge for it.
Second,
nonprofit institutions
confer legitimacy [New York Times] upon
and provide protective custody for the kids while introducing them to
the right people. Third, a true market emerges, and the kids get rich,
if they are lucky, or are cast aside, if they are not.
The combination of 010101
and BitStreams may mark digital art’s passage from the first stage
to the second as “digital artists…break down another boundary: the one
between them and
the art world’s upper echelons” [New York Magazine].
But
it also expands a discussion once confined to a truly
tiny coterie of freaks and geeks [San Francisco
Chronicle]. Though major shows on the left and right coasts may
mark a museum breakthrough in North America, there are, in fact, more digital
artists in Europe [The Art Newspaper].
From
the Europeans, the American shows may provoke something less like imitation
than refutation. Some refutations will be of the “there is no such thing”
sort. When digital goes critical, art goes epistemological
[Feed]. Others will be of the “been there, done
that” sort [Wired].
But such dismissals may, in turn, provoke a counter-attack
from a nontraditional constituency excited above all by the technology
and inclined to dismiss more narrowly art-critical dismissals
as elitist [New Republic].
Of such assertions and counter-assertions are vocabularies
created and art historical canons established – essential conversations
which help to establish and extend any artform. One thing is certain though,
digital art is here to stay. As David Ross put it when the SFMOMA show
opened, “We’re all frogs in the
slowly boiling pot, …and we’re not jumping out” [New
York Times].
Letters,
opinions, reactions, suggestions?
Send your e-mail to mclennan@artsjournal.comThis
essay is orign
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