Curating netart

The rise of the net art market...

posted by curating netart @ 1:17 PM 1 comments links to this post

Pssst! top secret...

Dear Ursula,

compared to the last Transmediale , which was still meditating over the question whether there is such a thing as media art at all, the Transmediale 08 at least committed itself to a more contemporary approach to this topic:

In his introduction speech, Stephen commented on the question of a journalist ("but there's a painting in the exhibition. How can this be media art?") with a simple statement. He said, that the Transmediale commissions and selects works that reflect on the conditions of today's networked media, regardless of their materiality or mediality. And even the representative of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, who normally need to "categorize" art forms in order to match them with the respective funding program, did her best to avoid the label "media art".
Yet still we discuss this question of how to curate digital art forms, especially netart, in this blog. And I think it is worthwhile to keep this discussion going. Because of a very simple reason: I still come across many media-based exhibitions which either leave the audience under- or overchallenged.

"Underchallenged" in that context means the mere reduction to media (re)presentation in an exhibition space, without a dedicated strategy to mediate the artworks.
And sometimes I feel "overchallenged" when I see curatorial approaches with ambition and spirit, but which nonetheless fail to provide an entry point for the viewer. And this brings me to the extreme tricky balance between the information about the work and the work itself (which should always speak for itself, of course).

The "Conspire"-exhibition of this year's Trandmediale was discussed very controversely among the people I know. Most of them agreed that the general approach was conspirative indeed, introverted, maybe even a statement of separatism. And the motto of course reflects on the conspirative scene of digital art connaisseurs, too.
Others objected that most of the visitors had no chance to understand the works, as there was a significant lack of background information. Not even the catalogue, which accompagnied the exhibition as an independent publication, provided much insight into the works of art.

And for some of the works this was simply a pity. My friend Alice Miceli, an artist from Rio de Janeiro, showed some photos of her ongoing "Chernobyl project". The problem was that the photos were presented like x-rays in a doctor's cabinet, thus suggesting a specific context which in my opinion did not match the aims of her project. There was possibly no chance to fully provide an idea of her really complex and intelligent research by just displaying some photos.
Apart from that, there have been other artistic contributions which really provoked the question a) what they were all about and b) in what way they refered to "conspiracy" at all.

I can't see what's wrong with presenting background information as an addition to the artist's work. In my opinion, this brings a new dimension to the work: creating a platform for discourse, questions and exchange should be part of an exhibition, too.
I think that a clever mediation strategy also increases the visibility of the curator's work. For me, the essentials of curating lie not only in the selection of art pieces within a certain thematic framework, but also in sharing the passion and interest one has for a specific issue.

Somebody once suggested, that curators have the role of "meta-artists"...well, I am not sure about this. Whether this makes sense or not: what is a meta-artist anyways, do we want or need that?

By the way, I want to take this opportunity to make some cross-promotion to our latest collaboration, the Tabu project at the Theater am Neumarkt in Zürich / Switzerland. Dear blog readers, please check the tabu blog and make your contributions - in whatever language you like...

Greetings from Berlin,
Ela

posted by curating netart @ 2:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

Souvenir from Munich

Dear Ursula,

just before this year comes to its end, I want to send you a souvenir from Munich, where I spent christmas this year. This photo shows the ZKMax, a public media art space situated in a former pedestrian underpass in the city of Munich. ZKMax is a collaboration between the ZKM and the Kulturreferat of Munich. I like their approach to use the public space to show international media art works - it's free and accessible for everybody. People can look at it on their daily walks through the city and whenever they find something inspiring they just stop and take their time to look at the work. In that sense, it's a part of the city and it represents some key qualities of media art: movement, change, flexibility...
I think it's a nice model for a public media art showcase. Do you know if there is anything like that in New York?

Ela

posted by curating netart @ 2:44 PM 1 comments links to this post

Net Art Spaces

Dear Ursula,

while I start to write this new entry, I am still staying with you in New York...
Thanks a lot for your last post, which inspired me to write about netart and its representation in the physical space. Your text touches upon this topic in many ways, starting from the fact that netart pieces are mostly constrained to computer screens up to the funny story of how we improvised the net into the Galerie Tristesse exhibition space last month in Berlin.

Many theoretical works that have been devoted to netart gravitate around its representation in space. Since the discussion on netart curating started something like 10 years ago, there was quite a range of topics of which netart curators have tried to come to terms with: be it bandwidth constraints, the issue of copy and original, questions of ownership of netart pieces or the challenge of how to survive as a net artist.
Until now, the question of how to present netart in a gallery space or a museum remains as fresh and challenging as it has been back in the origins of netart.
The question is if the very nature of netart rejects the traditional notion of a gallery space altogether? And, furthermore, if netart simply has no other choice than defying the traditional notion of a curator?
Netart curators, as we can read in the introduction of the catalogue "CURATING MEDIA/NET/ART" by CONT3XT.NET, are often deemed „cultural context providers’, ‚meta artists’, ‚power users’, ‚filter feeders’ or simply ‚proactive consumers’.“
Their task is not only the mediation of the artwork itself, but the handling of communication processes and methodologies surrounding each artwork, while addressing different audiences on different levels of knowledge. And on top of that, a netart curator faces manyfold technical and architectural challenges at the same time.
Sometimes, this reminds me of how Bill Viola described the role of media artists during his key note speech of ISEA in 2006: “they are jumping into a train for a high speed ride while they’re still laying the tracks ahead.“

If we look at video art, for instance, we can see that it has been ignored for more than two decades, until the video art hype emerged at the beginning of the Eighties. Is netart destined to sustain a similar period of marginalisation by traditional art institutions?
Or maybe we didn’t even realise that netart has died in the meantime? Different people mentioned different dates of netart's decease. Mostly, around the time of the dotcom crash in 1999.
But besides the speculation, let’s look at it from that angle:
Does netart really has a steady representation in my city, Berlin, today?
Well, we still have the Transmediale festival. It has appointed Stephen Kovats as its new artistic director, who comes up with the wonderful call to „conspire".
Besides this temporary institution, there is TESLA, the one and only venue in Berlin dedicated to media art. Due to a shortage of state fundings, TESLA will have to close its doors as of January 2008.
This means that there is no permanent, representative space for media art / net art in Berlin.
So - what's the perspective? Will netart continue to reside in places of conspiracy, appreciated by an inner circle of net art professionals and connaisseurs only?

Or maybe it is about time for us to reconfigure the way we perceive spaces (for example a gallery) more towards the reality of the „network society“? Maybe this would help us to see new perspectives for netart.

The Harvard sociologist Manuel Castells has coined the label of the network condition as a “spaceless space.” In one of his key findings he states: “The de-localization of communication and exchanges leads to the space of flows as the spatial dimension of instrumentality in the Information Age (...)“
Even though Castells has applied the space of flows mainly on global information networks, it is worthwhile to consider his theories for netart as well.
This dissolving of space, as described in Castell’s works, might be one of the reasons why we can’t look at the relation between netart and galleries from an art-historian point of view.
Netart in many ways escapes from being pinned down to what was formerly considered a „work of art“. Why is that? Here are some attempts of an answer: Because it is intangible, computer-based and networked, because it involves different methodologies and artistic practices such as the denial of the concept of authorship, because it very often provides its own methods of public-based curating – and because it generates its own public domain on the web.
And for sure there are many more reasons why we cannot approach netart from the „display“-angle.
Charlie Geere, in his essay „Network Art and the Network Gallery“ (2006) even declares netart representations in galleries a total failure: „Netart (...) has failed, for the moment at least, to make whatever adjustments are needed to make it a gallery-friendly practice.“

So what are the options? Christiane Paul sees the future of netart outside of gallery spaces or art institutions. She, like many other net activists and theorists, envisions a radical open-source use of netart: „the source-code of any art project made available to the public for further expansion outside of the proprietary concerns of curators or art institutions (...)“
I found this quote also in the CURATING MEDIA/NET/ART" by CONT3XT.NET catalogue, namely in the essay of Joasia Krysa, a curator and researcher. She is one of the initiators of the Kurator, an "open source software application designed as an online curatorial system and a platform for curating source code that can be further modified by users." It is really worthwhile to check their website., as they work with the question of how media art curators respond to new forms of self-organisation, collaboration and shared distribution outside of galleries or museums.
If we bring all these thoughts further, what does that mean for future netart places?

Will we soon witness how netart stumbles over its native qualities? Tilman Baumgärtel writes in The ZEIT, a weekly German magazine: "if so, then netart would be the only art form which would fail because it has met the key requirements of modernity, namely the dematerialisation of the artwork (Lucy Lippard) and the total independence from the art market(...)." I would maybe add another quality, which also has a downside to it: its ubiquitous access.

Personally, I believe in two things (which I know can be contradictionary in a way):

1. The art world has always managed to integrate even art forms which aimed at the decomposition of the "traditional" art system. Baumgärtel names for example Dada, Fluxus, the Happening movement or video art. All these experimental artistic expressions have finally been embraced by art institutions - and found their place in the art market, too.

2. I think, we are facing the beginning of a radical shift of art institutions towards the conditions of the networked society. Instead of worrying too much of how to bring netart into galleries, we should simply rely on the fact that the galleries and museums will transform according to the requirements of a networked world, which has been shaped significantly by the internet. As an example, I want to mention Charlie Greere's essay on the Tate Gallery's net art commissions. There he writes: "In becoming a network Tate ceased to be primarily a physical entity, a building, and became instead a sign or brand that could be applied to different places, processes and activities. In this it mirrors the paradigmatic post-industrial company, for which the means and location of actual production are less important than the sustaining of the brand." I am curious to see if he will be right with his conclusion, stating that "the Tate is transforming itself from an institution concerned primarily with things to one concerned with information and knowledge."

Despite this massive cultural shifts which certainly happen around us, there are still enough challenges for us...I like to think back to your show last month in Berlin, at Galerie Tristesse in the Wallstrasse. No High Speed internet access in the whole street, my cellphone as a modem, which enabled us to present your work at all (well, at slow speed)...I can't help to find myself in a reminiscent mood, because it is so romantic in a way, isn't it?

All the best to you,
back in Berlin,
Ela

posted by curating netart @ 9:23 AM 2 comments links to this post

Another Planet Wide Web?

Dear Ela,

Thank you so much for all your thoughts and research on the questions of net art and the art market.

This sets a very valuable basis for further discussions!

But as I have just recently returned from a six week "tour" through the European (net-) art scene -- I feel like sharing my observations with you before continuing with our previous thread.

On my travels I came across several Biennials and "Media Festivals" to find a variety of approaches towards art, net art and contemporary curatorial and artistic practice. And as much as I am always interested in finding multitudes of approaches towards art that happens right now -- specifially net art -- I found some of it very "niched" in its discourse.

Let's start with this year's Venice Biennial. I was disappointed. Don't get me wrong, there was great work presented and fabulous artists included in it, so I am not talking about singular art pieces or Pavillions. But one show really irritated me, the main show in the Arsenale "Think with the Senses - Feel with the Mind". I had a hard time with its overall structure in terms of contemporaneity. In the press release I find statements by Robert Storr, the curator, such as: "While this show looks forward it does not look back" and a description of what the show intends, it "hint[s] at what the emerging patterns might be without presuming to map them entirely", and so i understand that this show does not intend to present a complete picture of our time. And what a task this would be...! But I wonder, why, in this glimpse into the future and it's emerging artistic developments, the Internet is completly blocked out? I find no conceptual trace of the Web in this show, and of its influence it has on all of us on a daily basis, and this since more than ten years now. No trace of the changes the Internet has induced in how we produce art, in how we communicate with each other, the way we think about and build communities online and offline, and the way we question and react to current topics, the way news are made now! And where are the artists working within these topics and within this medium since more then a decade?! He further states "Since the early 20th century the development of modern art has been world wide". So I wonder, why do Biennials have such a problem addressing the actual "web of the wide world", especially that we are living now in the 21th Century? The Internet with its groundbreaking changes seems to have been totally overseen. And again, I am not critizising the artists and the art work in the show. What saved the show in my mind, is the inclusion of two art works that refer to the Web, more as a quote, a hint, that on a different planet called Web there might be something else to see and feel.

My second, in part, positive observation comes from finding that several Media Art Festivals are refreshingly rephrasing their scope about their program and intentions. The Transmediale in Berlin calls itself now a "Festival for art and digital culture" which I find fantastic. Which means to me: Let's branch out and not bind art per se onto a medium, but let's keep the variety of media in sight! And, then there was, for the second time, the Paraflows Festival in Vienna, "A festival for Digital Art and Cultures", which, this year, was exploring "inaccessible, invisible, theoretical, and immaterial spaces" in media art, net art and net culture. While being happy to be a participant in this year's festival -- and the exhibition in the MAK art-tower showed an interesting interplay of how the dark and unmovable architecture of a WWII bunker adds an additional conceptual dimension of space and (mental and physical) reflection towards any work that was projected onto its walls -- I was a bit bummed though that net art works were not given more "space", or "spatial" consideration within the conceptual framework. Net art was, once again, forced into the "office space" scenario -- constrained into a monitor, while there are uncountable ways of how to bring the web into space and make it part of a larger disussion about art.

What are you expecting?, some colleagues and friends ask me. And what am I expecting?

Has nothing changed to -- let's say to a year ago? Is net art still the inconvenient stepchild in a "grown-up" art world ?

But then again I just came accross two exhibitions which present themselves in a wider conceptual understanding in how technology has influenced art making in the last decade till now and how it influences even our daily behaviour:

One show that sounds intriguing to me is called "Vertigo. The century of off-media art, from Futurism to the web" currently at the Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna. The website states: "The event documents the crossovers and contaminations that have occurred from the historic avant-gardes onwards ...[]... affirming the demise of the artistically “specific” such as painting and sculpture to be supplanted by a blend of multimedia art." The show talks about the becoming of "linguistic interdisciplinarity" in art over the last century -- the term "off-media" standing for the multiplicity in media. (not offline versus online, what my Web-infested mind read into it at first ;-) It would be interesting to see how much of the Web's influence, and cross-polinating approaches and media, were considered for this show. How far into "now" is this show going? Maybe we get some feedback from one of our readers, that would be fantastic. The show will end November 04.

A show that strikes me as one that address contemporary behavior with and around technology, including the Web, is "Multitasking. Synchronicity as a cultural practice" at the NGBK, Berlin. It states in the introduction that "[ ].. synchronicity of today's media-backed daily life means that multitasking penetrates into almost spheres of life and has a particular influence on our perception, communication and interaction. The exhibition presents the multitasking phenomenon as a metaphor to describe the profound changes currently taking place in the economy, the media and society." I did unfortunalty not find much information about this show online. A catalog was produced, but I think only in German.

So, altogether, I guess I am looking for explanations why the Web is not included in exhibitions that claim to be on the pulse of the moment ...or why net art is not treated with the same "respect" like the "other" media.

Sometimes one still hears the argument, we don't have a connection here...

This reminds me of how we dealt with issues around that ourselves, Ela, when we "brought" the Web into an exhibition space in Berlin, a few weeks ago. The cellphone eventually served as the modem for my laptop...! Otherwise another part of my performance series "Website Impersonations: The Ten Most Visited" -- this time I impersonated "www.youtube.com" -- could not have been performed. Maybe you like to tell your part of the story... :-)

This cross section through a few exhibitions in Europe shows to me, nevertheless, that there is a multiplicity of possibilities (to come) how to "channel" this enormous world called the Web, including its art, into an exhibition.

I am looking forward to your thoughts!

Greetings from New York,

Yours,
Ursula

PS: I am very happy, Ela, that we collaborated on the contribution to a book about "extended curatorial practices on the Internet." On Monday, October 15, in Vienna, CONT3XT.NET will present "CURATING MEDIA/NET/ART" which discusses contemporary concepts of curating and displaying (New) Media Art. The introduction reads: "In contrast to the late 1990s when Net-based Art was celebrated as avant-garde spectacles, today Technology-based Art views for the attention of a broader public interested in art. Higher demands are made on curators to include these art forms in conventional exhibitions, which simultaneously poses several problems: "curating immateriality", a term postulated a few years ago, is faced with immense technological challenges and at present theoretical groundwork is being laid for providing ways of addressing Technology-based Art that extend beyond viewing them as "Techno Art" and the tacit implication that "The Medium is the Message". "
(More information can be found online at cont3xt.net.)

posted by curating netart @ 5:11 PM 0 comments links to this post

To sell or not to sell - thoughts on the net art market

Dear Ursula,

you have brought up some challenging views in your last post. I especially want to come back to what you said about new strategies of capitalising netart. This is really an interesting issue: above all, the question remains if you can really “buy” net art – as it is originally designed for a computer network, thus accessible for everybody online.
Of course you can always restrict access to the artwork and ask people to pay for it – but honestly, who would ever do that? There have been several attempts to trade art over the net and they all have failed. If we look at the most popular net art galleries such as Rhizome or Turbulence we understand that accessibility and interaction are key elements of their success as online art institutions.
Then the next question is what you actually acquire when you purchase a net art work: the source code, the software instructions, the exclusive right to exhibit the piece? Even though there is a current vogue for treating net art just like any other category of contemporary art – if it comes to acquisitions we have to admit that we need to see things in a different light.
John Ippolito, the Guggenheim Museum’s curator of media arts, puts it like that: "The Holy Grail of selling a Web site is a red herring. To collect an artist Web site is less about owning property than stewarding heritage." (read the full article here).
What I find problematic with this view is the retrospect notion of art, evoked by the term “heritage”. In my opinion, it is a hopeless endeavour to try to safeguard net art pieces, which by their very nature undergo a continuous revision: they will keep on changing as long as online visitors will interact with them. Plus the technological infrastructure advances towards new generations of browsers, plug-ins, hardware etc.
Flux is the prime condition of net art works. And this is maybe one of our biggest challenges when it comes to developing models for a net art market. How can it be possible to safeguard the transient and turn it into a market value?
Another problem that comes into my mind, at least here in Germany, is the subvention policies of net art. Due to the lack of a market for net art, most of these art pieces are subsidized by governmental bodies. I don’t want to critize the state for investing money in net art., but if state institutions become the one and only addressees for net artists to make their living – then we might well end up with a problem.
Having said that, I agree with you that very slowly there is a fresh breeze starting to blow in the art market. Especially when I look back at the year 1999 and projects like the net.art consultants, a website where artists can donate net.art pieces to collectors worldwide – then things have changed indeed.
But still it seems to me that many net art projects rather twist knifes in the wounds of this consumptive market – instead of really making money with what they do. I think of projects like the online gallery teleportacia.org by Olia Lialina, or net-activism like Google will eat itself by Ubermorgen.com or the Google adword happening by Christophe Bruno. I think these projects are phantastic, because they reveal a number of things to us: for example Google’s monopoly of information or the fact that the web is not as public as we like to see it. But still the question remains of how these projects generate a basis for artists to make their living. I know that the ZKM for example has commissioned a large number of net art works over the last years – their exhibition “masterpieces of netart” is also a statement of how they want to see net art: as an artform of high standards and value, just as any other category of art, too.
Did you read Mark Amerika’s ebook How to be an internet artist? In chapter eight he states: “Use highly subversive marketing skills to attract attention to the fact that you are producing income from your narratological presence, and successfully transform that attention into its own media-virus or cultural meme that solidifies your brand-name as one of the industry leaders.” I think he is touching upon a very important aspect: maybe it is a precondition for net artists who want to be economically successful to create their own myth?
Look at Cornelia Sollfrank and how clever she did it:
She shows how “smart artists let the machine do the work” when she sold her net.art generator to the Sammlung Volksfürsorge in Hamburg in 2004. What was basically acquired was the software to generate the images, based on the input of users. I think this is a phantastic statement and it’s certainly the feuilleton’s darling when it comes to recent net art sales stories.
However, my web research brought up more results of which I haven’t been aware so far: Have you ever read www.netartreview.net, which later turned into newmediafix.net? In one of their netartreviews in 2004 they have posted a list of net art purchases of the year 2004. If this is all true, then what are we discussing about? I would be curious to have a look at more recent figures, but I could not find any sources for that on the web.
Finally, I want to mention that there are of course net artists who deliberately refrain from producing their art for any kind of market. Last week, I met Lucas Bambozzi, a net artist from Brasil, who presented his work at the Urban Media Salon, hosted by Mirjam Struppek. He pointed out the moment in his career when he decided to devote his art to other standards than economical ones. And obviously it works well for him…
On the netartreview-site Eduardo Navas asks: "How can the concept of property merge with the sharing one?" I think this is a very interesting question.
I am looking forward to your comments and ideas on that…
All the best from Berlin,
on this Friday 13th...

Ela

posted by curating netart @ 8:34 AM 1 comments links to this post

The Web versus Minimalism

Dear Ela,

Thanks for your vivid descriptions about museums, tagging, and audience participation for defining classification systems of artworks. My threads of thoughts during the last weeks included the art market, digital and online art, “trends”, minimalism versus "complexitism,” and how information is collected, sorted, spread, and lost again...
Thank you for asking me also to talk about feedback in regard to my project "html_butoh" and the "html-movement-library", as it falls, how you described it, into the discussion of user-generated libraries.

So let me start with my observations of audience participation within my latest exhibition, which will also bring in more “personal” experiences, which will help me spin through the thread of topics I mentioned above.

As you know, the html-movement-library and its accompanying projects including html_butoh are web-based projects. They are accessible online, but I am also interested in transferring these projects into the gallery space. My interest lies in collecting user-based material not only through online submission by a “global” audience, but also on location, introducing the library -- as an installation in a gallery space -- to local and smaller communities. Both “worlds” bring in material that can be viewed online and in the gallery space. It is great to see that the database of user-submitted videos is constantly growing.
So for this library I am inviting a wide audience to define what (physical) movements or gestural representations of html could look like. There have been posts of carefully choreographed athletic dance movements on one side, and a gesture spontaneously performed by somebody who just walked into the gallery with several bags and a rain coat, on the other side... Again, the audience submits short video clips through which they are demonstrating their approach of how to translate html into movements and how to give a technological language a physical representation. Anyone who submits seems to get a kick out of seeing themselves appear in a constantly running Web-theater. :-)

During a discussion with a friend and colleague of mine at her visit to the installation/exhibition we touched upon the topic of the art market. She mentioned that she sees an obvious return to “minimalism” in the artworld, and works that touch on its philosophy and approach are doing well in the art market.
My installation now is, I would say, truly multi-media. It is a “translation” of the functionalities of a web-based piece into an architectural and interactive setting, which includes real-time, web-based information feeds, projections, a walk-in video recording station for instant movie making, and the ability to upload a movie on the spot to the library. The visitors to the gallery can instantly see themselves be part of "html-butoh", which is the synthesis of the installation, where all participants in the library – submitted online or right in the gallery – perform together on the Web. And, finally, there is a visual thread of some of the html-movement “hieroglyphics” as decals on the wall –- a visual representation of one movement combined with the according html tag -- kind of framing the whole installation with its visual language. It was these simple icons, which struck her fancy as a possible sellable product, maybe putting them on silkscreen, she said. And this was the point where the term minimalism came up.

But art that is fed by the Web can hardly ever be called minimalist!? Through its abundance in media, in composition, in the possibility of existing in virtual worlds and expand into RL, and especially through user participation, and through its longevity in terms of establishing user-based libraries that will carry on and evolve – how can this be ever compared to minimalism aka something that SELLS?

I have a hard time accepting that these graphical icons are the only thing in this installation that would serve as a sellable art piece. It is interesting to me though, that I am talking about selling art here today and within this context, and Ela, I do remember that we touched upon net art and new media art and the art market a long time ago. But recently this topic seems to have come back to me in many ways, as I have seen new approaches in galleries and artists alike to invent new models in terms of net art, "intangible” art, and its spin towards the art market. It seems that there is a fresh breeze starting to blow, and I am somewhat optimistic, that with new thoughts on saleability also a new discourse on the relation of net art and galleries, museums and collections will rise! Or maybe it is the other way around… Somehow I think, after more than ten years working with the Web and even longer with computer-generated work, I see a slight shift happening in acknowledging its own, new life as a new art form within the art market. “New”…Well it takes decades to accept all "new" media it seems…

Well, I ask you Ela, is there after all a gap between the “Fine Arts” and the media and Internet arts? Now that we all – philosophically -- try to get away from the term "new media" and call everything simply "contemporary art" are we running into even wider discrepancies?
And how about selling? Every artist needs to make a living, but I wonder how much we still give in to a "trend" in the arts, a trend to what’s sellable versus what we would like to sell. Again, I think that there are new models in the making, especially when it is about net-based art, and new media art, and I have the feeling that I will get back with more thoughts and information on this topic in future posts on our blog. (One important thing to add here: I am not talking about asking viewers to pay to view net art, this is not the model I am thinking of, I am actually totally against this, as it would determine what could be seen/read about/learned on the Web.)

Here, I would like to bring in a quote I came across last month reading a newsletter published by DAM (Digital art Museum), Berlin, referring to a statement in "art review" describing the efforts and development of the Museum and its director Wolf Lieser, and their take towards the future.

"But selling digital artworks remains a far from easy task. It takes a lot of patient explaining. Most people in the artworld still don't have much of an idea about digital art, the impact of computers in our culture, the way the medium is changing the artworld on every level or the amount of work involved in the creation of, say, the rendering of scenery in the three dimensions. Lieser sees DAM as a long-term project. He had to build everything from scratch and foresees that it will probably take another five years of hard work before the value of digital art is really recognized. So yes, there’s a market. It’s slowly coming to light, and as usual, the smart ones are already investing in it..."
(Regine Debatty, “Is there a market for Digital Fine Art?” in “art review magazine”, May 2007)

I find this quote really interesting, specially as a model for what's happening around all the digital arts…

Before I close my post today I would like to add another thought that brings me back to user-based libraries: The user versus the specialist.

What does this increase in self-organization mean to us? With the amount of information rising on the web on a daily basis, it is just clear that we all want and need to be part of indexing/structuring this information in a way we feel comfortable with it. So, the structure might be actually adhered to the “object” somehow -- fascinating thought also in terms of curating...Which systems and structures are applied when starting to put artwork - online artwork - in context? How do we all like to browse, view, search? Who makes the decisions for how to browse? The artist, the curator, the visitor, or all of them? So all these "roles" seem to shift as they all start sharing similar roles. Everyone involved is in search for a new shared vocabulary… and it seems to renew itself constantly.

So I guess the concern is to find an easy but complex way to browse and look at art on the Web (or any kind of knowledge, discussion or information) from a multitude of perspectives...
Getting back to the term “minimalism” -- it doesn't seem to be possible to mention it in the same breath while describing the capabilities of the Web...

Looking forward to hear your thoughts, Ela!

Many greetings from New York,
Ursula

posted by curating netart @ 10:52 AM 1 comments links to this post