critic on 3 Aug 2000 14:32:14 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] The Net Art Gold Rush |
We present here an excerpt from an article currently available in it's entirety at the URL below. http://www.conceptualart.org/features/rush/index.html This article was written by the newest member of the conceptualart.org family - critic. Please direct all responses to this address. RUSH -- The Net Art Gold Rush Every so often consumer publications have a revelation about the repeating nature of history. The current narrative as it pertains to the Internet is of the Net Gold Rush, and it covers nearly every combination of similarities -- from the renewed belief in the equality of man to the impending doom of unharnessed rapacity. It examines the moral responsibility of multi-national corporations and exposes their frightening role in the decision making of the United States Government. It speaks of our reckless response to greed, while we day-trade our life savings away -- or worse -- as we accrue a level of insurmountable margin debt while shifting important savings from our tax-sheltered retirement plans into unmanaged brokerage accounts with checkwriting privileges and discounted trading agreements. Moreover, it reinforces the Great American Myth that we need not be of pure breeding or born into wealth, we need only have the spirit of an entrepreneur to achieve the dream of unlimited fortune. However, one chapter of the "Westward Ho" Internet allegory is not discussed when referring to the repetitive nature of history: the Western Worldıs habitual practice of rationalizing, undermining and exploiting other cultures in a sinister and Machiavellian fashion. Over half of the responsibility for the near-extinction of the North American Bison lies at the hand of intended 49ers. The Westward expansion of the 1800s brought a plague of small-pox on the native inhabitants of this continent, and the involution of their farming and tracking methods all but depleted the resources necessary for their survival. The Internet constitutes a culture, regardless of its corporate/government birthright, and it endangers its own survival by negotiating with the western expansionists of the New Millennium. Chat rooms, like The Open Ear, Usenet groups like alt.sex.domesticviolence, and invaluable encyclopedias of information from university libraries (accessible through the nearly forgotten search utility Archie), have all but disappeared or been rendered practically inaccessible. This list of examples is at least a hundred times too short to accurately depict the toll of the commercial promotion of the web browser as the sole intended interface for the Internet. The art museum takes an active role in the exploitation of Internet culture by seeking profitability at the expense of an accurate history. In this case, the innovation that Net Artists have brought to broader aspects of Internet culture are all but ignored so that browser-based art can flourish under the frequently misapplied title of "Net Art." Meanwhile, Net Artists and their proponent historians and critical theorists are more worried about a potential for grander exposure for Net Art than about the ramifications of allowing this all-too-familiar historical narrative of cultural exploitation to unfold. The museum is embraced as the means by which Net Art will finally be considered "equal" to all other forms of art. The utter lack of necessity for this transition from the cathode ray of the home computer to the brick-and-mortar temple of the institution of art is insufficiently examined. The Western worldıs approach to the broader world of art and culture has always carried a tradition of misappropriation and flagrant disregard for the less consumable aspects of any foreign culture. It yields not in its belief that weeding out less profitable aspects of another culture is imperative to its survival as a Democratic Society. The current phrase for describing this act when referring to Net Art is "Filtering." Net Artists and their public advocates openly listen to the museumıs idea of filtering as if it were the sermon of missionaries. The museum convinces them that it will: locate the important artwork for them, help them to use the Internet to increase dialogue on a global scale, assist in providing international exhibition spaces for provincial artists, and, finally, use its research to improve education. We have heard this rhetoric before, though we refuse to acknowledge its relevance to the culture of the Internet. In her book Primitive Art in Civilized Places, Sally Price describes this missionary tendency as the Universality Principle, a phrase coined by Leonard Bernstein in 1976 (though not initially intended to be relevant to our discussion). Price deconstructs some of Bernsteinıs essays on the topic of musico-linguistics (a reference to Noam Chomskyıs socio-linguistics) and describes this process as playing the role of the white patron to non-Western "musicians." Where Bernsteinıs goal was to find an underlying one-ness between the guttural sounds of a hominid and modern vocabulary across separate languages, his unscientific approach served only to excuse his broad generalizations of anthropology and more specifically of non-Western cultures. In 1969, Bernsteinıs readings of Noam Chomsky entered into his own research on music, and he began to write a series of lectures for Harvard Univiersity. In one lecture Bernstein states that the infant cry for hunger is "Mmm," and when the breast enters its mouth the child says "Ah," thus forming the sound MA for mother. He asserts that this is the first "proto-word" and that "for most languages, the word for mother employs the root MA or some phonetic variant." There is no scientific basis for this deduction, yet it was quickly included in the Norton lecture series at Harvard, where it is still frequently sighted as a reference. In another lecture, Bernstein writes "Somehow it all added up. Way back before and behind and beyond all these comparatively recent languages, there must lurk, I fondly hoped, one universal parent tongue, which contained the great simultaneous equation: Big = Good and Small = Bad." Again, there is no scientific basis for such a statement and this is further underlined with phrases like "hoped" and "must". In Sally Priceıs words, "ideological commitment can easily override such obstacles [as making difficult analysis possible for the laymen to understand]." (The parenthetical completion of this sentence is obtained from the preceding paragraph in her book.) Leonard Bernstein speaks with the superior voice of Western culture, but disguises it in a well-intentioned humanitarian search for unity. In this fashion (and by carrying the standard of ideology) members of Western society can use such phrases as Fellowship and Equality when discussing exploitation and appropriation of non-Western art. She mentions other popular expressions which are obviously untrue in the larger context of art, but which are frequently used to excuse the hostile assertion of Western ideology on non-Western culture. "Art is the great unifier, for it is the most obvious outpouring of the linking humanism of feeling between peoples. (Anon. 1970)." She sets a tone by undressing and exposing the larger intentions of this Western practice. Price confirms this position as it pertains to primitive artı by adding, "The equalityı accorded to non-Westerners (and their art), is not a natural reflection of human equivalence, but rather the result of Western benevolence." Broad, generalized statements like "improving education" and "increasing dialogue on a global scale" fit nicely into the same unsettling scenario, and serve as warning signs for the ultimate fate of the Internet culture. The museumıs inclination to better understand this medium and the voice it expresses in the broader world of culture is the same act of mistaken benevolence suffering from the misunderstanding that Net Art must exist in another context to make it more accessible to a broader population. Unlike other forms of non-Western art, Internet art is already accessible to much of the Western world through the home computer. The fellowship and equality being offered by the institution isnıt as desirable to Net Artists as it sounds, and through the decades of witnessing these relationships it is surprising to see Net Artists so eager to engage. This approach to equality through benevolence means two things for Net Art. First, from a standpoint of experiencing art, Net Art will be viewed in the same manner as all other art in the institution: by involving the walls and the space confined by them (framed within a "collection", projected on a wall, or exhibited as interactive sculpture). This emphasizes the importance of the museum as a venue, revealing that the museum sees itself as more important than the art. The museum also views Net Art as a tool for its own survival more than as an important facet of contemporary art to be recorded in the name of posterity. Second, Net Art will follow the same equality of ideas, (for example, Net Art that passes through the filter will register familiarity in the viewer). Instead of challenging the potential for alternatives to experiencing art, the museumıs treatment of Net Art, in the benevolent attempt to elevate Net Art to the status of other forms of art, will ignore what is historically significant in place of what is widely accepted and popularly received. This is a point Price made very clear in her assessment of the exploitation of non-Western art (though her book is an account of history, and we are discussing things in the present while they unfoldı). -- critic, conceptualart.org www.conceptualart.org "subverting the visual in art" /"\ \ / X ASCII ribbon campaign / \ against HTML mail _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold