Normally when I give an art talk, I basically wing it for an
hour. I show a bunch of images of things
that I made and things I did not make, and try to make connections between them all. When my wife and I were recently asked
back to Wayne State University as visiting artists / critics, I added another
variable. I prepared a statement, which
I read at the beginning of my talk, accompanied by the above image. I wanted to address some things that have
been troubling me for some time. It
seemed to resonate with people, so I decided to post it here. A brief
disclaimer: I am no Luddite. I don’t want to do away with the internet,
but I do think we need to reconsider how we approach it. More and more, I see people engaging with the
world like this:
In which an ever-increasing number of day-to-day experiences are
mediated by internet-enabled devices, which shelter the user from
the unfamiliar, even when out of doors and around other people. To me, that’s not any good. The model I’d like to see probably looks
something like this:
In which the internet isn't used as a mediator, but as a facilitator. What follows is more or less what I read on the 13th of December, 2011. There have been a few additions, along with some edits for readability.
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One of the things about me is that, if you don’t know me, I
can seem overly negative and difficult. At
times it probably seems that way to people who do know me well, but they also know that I generally want to enthuse about
the things that I love, that I think are important to me, or might be good for
culture as a whole. So if I seem
negative about the current state of the visual arts, it is because I am acutely
aware of their importance, of how powerful they can be. And right now contemporary art and the
attendant processes of displaying it are in a position of seemingly unprecedented
powerlessness within society at large. We are at a point where art, in its
current academicized state—when it is so often produced in the “right way” in
an attempt to build a career at the “right” prestigious institutions—is generally
incapable of producing much more than knowing nods from those few people who
understand it, let alone feelings of wonderment from the public at large. Contemporary art has become its own autonomous
zone—a closed economy ignored by most, one surprisingly content to be ignored,
except by those in its own community.
Artists must remember that art-making is a conversation, and that we
should not be talking exclusively to those within our realm of expertise. Other artists are always going to be
interested in art. OBVIOUSLY. We need to speak to those outside of our
zone. We need to offer the
non-art-making public a point of connection, not the pretentious eye-roll of a
know-it-all. And if the lay-person
requires a certain artfulness of
us—that we make objects (however permanent
or impermanent) to express our abstract notions, or that we consider the craft of what we do—I don’t think that
is too much to ask.
There is an enormous obstacle blocking our reconnection with the
public at large, however: the internet
and the rise of our internet culture.
Here’s why:
It seems that one defining characteristic of the internet—of
its infiniteness—is the ability to
devalue cultural objects by making everything less permanent, everything smaller, and to do it with increasing
rapidity. It’s possible that this has killed
art’s potential to change the Western world; there are no new art heroes or
villains—I could be wrong (I hope I’m wrong), but you might not see an iconic
art figure like a Warhol or Basquiat ever again. It is relatively easy to get "Tumblr famous," but nearly impossible for any artist to get to the point where he/she is
capable of changing the way society thinks, because everybody can occupy their
own little bubble on the web. People
don’t need to engage with things
outside of their comfort zone. And this is a problem, because “Follower” culture is not enough. Algorithms whittle our potential experiences
down to whatever we are likely to “Like.” Even
our online ads are tailored to what we are already predisposed to buy. We are only talking to ourselves. Ask a farmer in very rural wherever if he
knows who, say, Olafur Eliasson is—he probably won’t. Julie Mehretu? Doubtful.
A similar farmer in the ‘50s or ‘60s would likely have known who the
AbEx folks were, would have known who Warhol was, thanks to the ubiquity of Life magazine and other printed periodicals, and as a result of fewer mass media choices in general. They would have probably had an opinion on
these characters, and their kids might’ve been blown away. I don’t need to point out that limited media
access is extraordinarily problematic for a host of reasons, and I'm not saying that things were better then, but I am saying that, as artists, we might be paying dearly for infinite consumer choice, 24/7.*
It is true that the internet makes it possible for more artists
to make a terrible living. It also allows
for small music labels with sustainable business models to not only exist, but
thrive. However, both artists and musicians are generally
selling within their own (now more geographically diverse) autonomous zones,
with very little seepage outward into other markets. It’s all very much a catch-22. More people can kind of make a living doing
what they do, but again, it is highly unlikely that one creative person or
group or collective will be able to shift what it means to think normatively
within our society and queer things up a bit. And that could
happen before the infinite choice of the internet age, because a select few of us had access to nearly everyone. The capability of some artists to act as a counterbalance
to society’s more conservative tendencies may have been forfeit when we chose
silly cat videos whenever and wherever we want.
If nobody has to see what we’re
doing—even to skip the article and turn the page—how do we reach those people who
aren’t already inclined to notice? Are
these meager incomes worth the loss of new broad cultural icons from the contemporary
art world?**
Another key component in all of this is that the internet
stops people from experiencing things in a holistic way. The online experience only involves one or
two senses. For example, you might purchase an MP3 from iTunes, but all you
have is a bunch of intangible data that is processed and turned into sound. I’d
like to suggest that humans generally need to experience a thing with all of
their senses to give it concrete value. When you buy a record, you can hold it
in your hand, it has weight, it’s a very tactile object. It has a certain smell, big vibrant visual
artwork. There is sense of wonder before
actually experiencing the sound, a certain mystique, a moment of anticipation,
and when you play the LP, you might be holding the sleeve with the track
listing or the insert with the lyrics.
You have to flip it. All of your senses
are working together to represent the object in a whole way. It is a complete experience. People who are only downloading music, or
only looking at art on websites, are kittens carried in baskets, only
partially aware of the sensual potential of the world around them. In this way
the internet reduces things to basest level of crass, disposable commodity.
Plus, if you are Benjamin-minded, and consider the tragedy
of our history to be embedded in objects,
then it is possible to view the internet as an attack on history, or at least a
certain type of history, and a certain type of historian: the caretaker of records, of books, of
objects—the archivist.
Our only response as artists is to find a way to embrace
this thing while attacking it—to work with it while working against it, and try
to reassert ourselves into the mainstream consciousness, so that people are
thinking of BOTH Glee MP3s and objects made by Martin Puryear, of Kanye’s Twitter
feed and Margaret Kilgallen’s lasting influence. Is this even possible? Have we been “gone” too long? Has the world bailed on our party while we
were talking amongst ourselves? I don’t
know. But we should probably try to do
something.
*Though I don't necessarily think things are better now, either. I think that the infinite choice of the 'net is as problematic as the limited choices of yesteryear. The problems are just different. Also (and this has been mentioned many times before by a lot of different people), I think it's highly doubtful that maximum choice (all the time!) makes people happier or more fulfilled. Maybe in the short term, but over time?
**It is important to note, and probably rather obvious, that
this was written to be delivered to an American/Canadian audience, and thus an
overwhelmingly Western one. It is worth making
the case that in societies in which the
freedoms of speech, expression, and choice are not a given (or taken for
granted), where a theoretically free media does not exist, the relative lawlessness
of the internet seems to be able to foster exactly what it generally precludes here. Think of Ai Wei Wei’s Twitter feed, for
example. So maybe another question would
be how our internet culture got so—I don’t know—trivial? (Types the guy
who generally writes stuff about pop music on the internet…)
