Bishop Claire Digital Divide on Contemporary Art and New Media

5/28/2018 Bishop Claire Digital Divide on Contemporary Art and New Media

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SEPTEMBER 2012

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART?Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we

got our first e-mail accounts. Wasnt there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get

digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But

somehow the venture never really gained tractionwhich is not to say that digital media have

failed to

Carol Bove, La traverse difficile(The Difficult Crossing), 2008, mixed media. Installation view, Kimmerich,

Dsseldorf. Photo: Ivo Farber.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART?Cast your mind back to the late 1990s, when we

got our first e-mail accounts. Wasnt there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get

digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just beginning to transform our lives? But

somehow the venture never really gained tractionwhich is not to say that digital media have

failed to infiltrate contemporary art. Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most

stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption. Multichannel video installations,


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Photoshopped images, digital prints, cut-and-pasted files (nowhere better exemplified than in

Christian Marclays The Clock, 2010): These are ubiquitous forms, their omnipresence facilitated

by the accessibility and affordability of digital cameras and editing software. There are plenty of

examples of art that makes use of Second Life (Cao Fei), computer-game graphics (Miltos

Manetas), YouTube clips (Cory Arcangel), iPhone apps (Amy Sillman), etc.!

So why do I have a sense that the appearance and content of contemporary art have been

curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital

revolution? While many artists usedigital technology, how many really confront the question of

what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematizethis, or

reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence? I find it

strange that I can count on one hand the works of art that do seem to undertake this task: the

flirtations between Frances Stark and various Italian cyberlovers in her video My Best Thing,

2011; Thomas Hirschhorns video of a finger idly scrolling through gruesome images of blown-

apart bodies on a touch screen, occasionally pausing to enlarge, zoom in, move on ( TouchingReality, 2012); the frenetic, garbled scripts of Ryan Trecartins videos (such as K-Corea INC.K

[Section A], 2009). Each suggests the endlessly disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera of the

virtual age and its impact on our consumption of relationships, images, and communication; each

articulates something of the troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance that characterizes

our new technological regime, and proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly

physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued.

But these exceptions just point up the rule. There is, of course, an entire sphere of new media

art, but this is a specialized field of its own: It rarely overlaps with the mainstream art world

(commercial galleries, the Turner Prize, national pavilions at Venice). While this split is itself

undoubtedly symptomatic, the mainstream art world and itsresponse to the digital are the focusof this essay. And when you look at contemporary art since 1989, the year Tim Berners-Lee

invented the World Wide Web, it is striking that so little of it seems to address the way in which

the forms and languages of new media have altered our relationship to perception, history,

language, and social relations.

In fact, the most prevalent trends in contemporary art since the 90s seem united in their apparent

eschewal of the digital and the virtual. Performance art, social practice, assemblage-based

sculpture, painting on canvas, the archival impulse, analog film, and the fascination with

modernist design and architecture: At first glance, none of these formats appear to have anything

to do with digital media, and when they are discussed, it is typically in relation to previous artistic

practices across the twentieth century."But when we examine these dominant forms of

contemporary art more closely, their operational logic and systems of spectatorship prove

intimately connected to the technological revolution we are undergoing. I am not claiming that

these artistic strategies are conscious reactions to (or implicit denunciations of) an information

society; rather, I am suggesting that the digital is, on a deep level, the shaping conditioneven

the structuring paradoxthat determines artistic decisions to work with certain formats and


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media. Its subterranean presence is comparable to the rise of television as the backdrop to art of

the 1960s. One word that might be used to describe this dynamica preoccupation that is

present but denied, perpetually active but apparently buriedis disavowal: I know, but all the

same . . .

THE FASCINATION WITH ANALOG MEDIAis an obvious starting point for an examination of

contemporary arts repressed relationship to the digital. Manon de Boer, Matthew Buckingham,

Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Rosalind Nashashibi, and Fiona Tan are just a few names from a

long roll call of artists attracted to the materiality of predigital film and photography. Today, no

exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technologythe gently clunking

carousel of a slide projector or the whirring of an 8-mm or 16-mm film reel. The sudden attraction

of old media for contemporary artists in the late 1990s coincided with the rise of new media,

particularly the introduction of the DVD in 1997. Overnight, VHS became obsolete, rendering its

own aesthetic and projection equipment open to nostalgic reuse, but the older technology of

celluloid was and remains the favorite. Today, films soft warmth feels intimate compared with thecold, hard digital image, with its excess of visual information (each still contains far more detail

than the human eye could ever need).#Meanwhile, numerous apps and software programs

effortlessly impersonate the analog without the chore of developing and processing; movies

imbued with the elegiac mood of Super 8 can now be taken on your cell phone. So why continue

to work with real analog equipment? Artists like Dean, the preeminent spokesperson for old

media, stake their attachment to celluloid as a fidelity to history, to craft, to the physicality of the

editing process; the passing of real film is a loss to be mourned. The sumptuous texture of

indexical media is unquestionably seductive, but its desirability also arises from the impression

that it is scarce, rare, precious. A digital film can be copied quickly and cheaply, ad infinitum; not

so a 16-mm film.Rosalind E. Krauss has invoked Walter Benjamin to elucidate the use of analog

media in the work of William Kentridge and James Coleman, drawing on Benjamins belief that

the utopian potential of a medium may be unleashed at the very moment of its obsolescence. But

today this assertion needs to be subject to scrutiny. The recourse to Benjamins argument, so

closely tied to the historical avant-gardes, sounds almost nostalgic when applied to these younger

artists, especially when analog film seems fashionable, rather than cutting against the grain. (It

also seems striking that this discussion didnt happen decades ago, when video began to

supplant celluloid.) The continued prevalence of analog film reels and projected slides in the

mainstream art world seems to say less about revolutionary aesthetics than it does about

commercial viability.


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Manon de Boer,Attica, 2008, 16 mm, black-and-white, 9 minutes 55 seconds. Installation view, Lunds Konsthall,

Lund, Sweden, 2009.

Another contemporary mode steeped in the analog is social practice. It is worth recalling that

Nicolas Bourriauds earliest texts on relational aesthetics set artists desire for face-to-face

relations against the disembodiment of the Internet; the physical and the social were pitched

against the virtual and the representational. In the past decade, socially engaged art has tended

to favor intersubjective exchange and homespun activities (cooking, gardening, conversation),

with the aim of reinforcing a social bond fragmented by spectacle. Yet social relations today are

not mediated by monodirectional media imagery (the mainstay of Guy Debords theory) but

through the interactive screen, and the solutions offered by useful art and real-world

collaborations dovetail seamlessly with the protocols of Web 2.0, introduced in 2002: Both deploy

a language of platforms, collaborations, activated spectatorship, and prosumers who coproduce

content (rather than passively consuming information devised for them).As we have seen so

many times in the past decade, most recently at the Seventh Berlin Biennalewhere the curator,

artist Artur $mijewski, invited Occupy activists into the KW Institute for Contemporary Art for the

duration of the showthe results of such coproductions are difficult to contain within the

traditional format of the exhibition. In 2001, Lev Manovich presciently observed that in

foregrounding two-way communication as a fundamental cultural activity (as opposed to the one-

way flow of a film or book), the Internet asks us to reconsider the very paradigm of an aesthetic

object: Can communication between users become the subject of an aesthetic?The centrality of

this question to social practice is obvious: Does work premised on a dialogic, prosumer model,

seeking real-world impact, need to assume representation or an object form in order to be

recognized as art?

Manovichs question also haunts more traditional sculptural practices. The recent prevalence of

assemblage and unmonumentality in object making has been productively described by Hal

Foster as precarious sculpture (in the work of Isa Genzken and others), even though the

tendency is manifested more frequently as retro-craftiness, as seen in the fiddly collages and

tapestries of the recent Whitney Biennial. Both iterations suggest some of the pressures that


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current regimes of technology and communication have placed on the object, which becomes

increasingly fragile and provisional, as if to assert subjectivity (and tactility) against the sealed,

impregnable surface of the screen. Moreover, if Genzkens work exemplifies an older model of

bricolage, in which found elements are treated as raw materials whose histories are incidental,

then the more prevalent strategy since the 1990s has been to maintain the cultural integrity of the

reused artifactto invoke and sustain its history, connotations, and moods. Books,

performances, films, and modernist design objects are incorporated into new works of art and

repurposed: Think of Carol Boves or Rashid Johnsons shelves of carefully arranged

knickknacks, or Paulina O%owskas copies of paintings by Polish artist Zofia Stryje&ska (1891

1976). This trend is manifest in other disciplines, too: Poetry, theater, and dance have all enacted

their own forms of repurposing in sync with visual art, from Elevator Repair Services eight-hour

play Gatz(which uses F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby), to Rob Fittermans poems

(repurposing anonymous tweets and Yelp reviews), to Richard Moves reperformances of the

modernist choreographer Martha Graham.

These forms of repurposing differ from appropriation art of the 1980s, when artists seized

imagery from art history (Sherrie Levine) or advertising (Richard Prince) with a view to

questioning authorship and originality while drawing attention, yet again, to the plight of the image

in the age of mechanical reproduction. In the digital era, a different set of concerns prevails. The

act of repurposing aligns with procedures of reformatting and transcodingthe perpetual

modulation of preexisting files. Faced with the infinite resources of the Internet, selectionhas

emerged as a key operation: We build new files from existing components, rather than creating

from scratch. Artists whose work revolves around choosing objects for display (Bove, Johnson) or

who reuse previous art (O%owska with Stryje&ska, Simon Starling with Henry Moore, Ryan

Gander with Mondrian) are foregrounding the importance of selection strategies, even when theoutcome is decisively analog. Questions of originality and authorship are no longer the point;

instead, the emphasis is on a meaningful recontextualization of existing artifacts.

Any consideration of this drive to gather, reconfigure, juxtapose, and display leads quickly to

Fosters influential theory of the archival impulse. For Foster, the term denotes art that undertakes

an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy,

and history.Artists archives are fragmentary and material, writes Foster, and call out for

human interpretation rather than machinic reprocessing; here, he clearly draws a line between

subjective and technological.Artists both have recourse to archives and produce them,

displaying a paranoid will to connect what cannot be connected.Fosters examples are Dean,

Sam Durant, and Hirschhorn, but we might equally consider Kader Attia, Zoe Leonard, or Akram

Zaatari. Often refuting established taxonomies as a systematic organizing principle for their work,

these artists embrace subjective rationales or arbitrary systems. Presented as carefully displayed

collections, their installations belie the extent to which everyone with a personal computer today

has become a de facto archivist, storing and filing thousands of documents, images, and music

files. (I often feel as if I dont listen to music so much as perform upkeep on my iTunes

collectiondownloading new acquisitions, categorizing them, and deaccessioning unwanted


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tracks.) Comparing these vernacular forms of aggregation with artists physical arrangements of

ephemera and objects, we are once again returned to the rarefied aura of the indexical and to

questions of supply and demand.

Susan Hiller, Dedicatedto the Unknown Artists(detail), 197276, 305 postcards, charts, maps, one book, one

dossier, mounted on fourteen panels, each 26 x 41 1/4.

Artists select and aggregate not only in the production of individual works but also in the

exhibitions they curate. In the 1990s, this practice was reflexively attuned to the institutional

context (Fred Wilson, Mark Dion), but in the past decade it has taken a more automatist form,

subordinating legible or didactic connections between works to the imperative of individual

sensibility, as for example in Mark Wallingers The Russian Linesman (2009), Vik Munizs

Rebus (2009), or Grayson Perrys phenomenally popular The Tomb of the Unknown

Craftsman (2011). Tacita Deans An Aside is an exemplary instance. As she details in the

catalogue for this 2005 show at Londons Camden Arts Centre, works by Lothar Baumgarten,

Paul Nash, and Gerhard Richter (among others) were selected on the basis of chance, anecdote,

and coincidence. From a twentieth-century perspective, this is the logic of the drive. From a

twenty-first-century perspective, it is the act of surfing: the pursuit of impromptu, subjective

connections via the aleatory free assocation of navigating the Web. In the 1960s, this kind of drift

was understood as an exodus from the logic imposed by postwar city planning; today,

the driveis the logic of our dominant social field, the Internet.


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ONE SIGNIFICANT SIDE EFFECTof the information age is that research is easier than ever

before. As the digital archive increases exponentiallyat one point, Google was archiving books

at a rate of three thousand a daythe phenomenon of research-driven art proliferates in tandem.

Unlike previous generations of artist-researchers (such as Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, and

Martha Rosler), who tended to examine the social, political, and economic conditions of their

present moments, contemporary research-based art (e.g., that of Andrea Geyer, Asier

Mendizabal, Henrik Olesen) exhibits a conspicuous preoccupation with the past, revisiting

marginal histories or overlooked thinkers. Some artists even make a point of using laborious, non-

Google methodologies: Consider Emily JacirsMaterial for a Film, 20042007, an investigation

into the life of poet Wael Zuaiter, the first of many Palestinian artists and intellectuals to be

assassinated by Israeli agents in the 1970s. The work attempts to reconstruct as much

information as possible about Zuaiters life, bringing together objects owned by or important to

him (books, postcards, films, records), and Jacirs efforts to locate these objects are narrated

diaristically in wall texts. The presentation of research-based art and archival installations is

typically at pains to confer aura and value on carefully selected physical objects; moreover, theseobjects remain fixed and static rather than being adaptable by users. Such works reaffirm the

paradoxical compromise wrought by contemporary art when confronted with new media: The

endless variability and modulation of the digital image is belied by the imposition of a limited

edition and an aesthetics of the precious one-off (sepia-tinted prints, display cabinets, file boxes

of ephemera, etc).

Acknowledged or not, the research possibilities afforded by the Internet have made themselves

felt in other aspects of contemporary art, too. In the early 1970s, Susan Hiller amassed a series

of 305 postcards that she found in British seaside towns, Dedicated to the Unknown Artists,

197276. Each postcard is captioned ROUGH SEA and depicts the same motifa rather bleak,turbulent ocean encroaching on human structures. Three decades later, Zoe Leonard exhibited

more than four thousand postcards of Niagara Falls, clustered by type, tracing this natural

wonders evolution into a tourist destination between 1900 and 1950 (You see I am here after all,

2008). The postcards, largely sourced via eBay, attest to the possibilities of Internet searchability.

But our consumption of this work in turn reflects the changing patterns of contemporary

perception: It is impossible to take in all four thousand postcards, so our eyes just scan the

surface, in the rapid-fire skimming with which we browse news and reviews on our smartphones.

Poet and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith refers to the literary equivalent of this kind of work

as the new illegibility: books like his own Day(2003), a retyping of one days edition of theNew

York Times, which invites random sampling rather than straight-through reading. When online, he

writes, weparsetexta binary process of sorting languagemore than wereadit to

comprehend all the information passing before our eyes.!Today, many exhibitions (by curators

rather than artists) model this new illegibility as a spectatorial condition. Documenta 11 (2002)

was significant in many respects, not least of which was its inauguration of a tendency to include

more work than the viewer could possibly seein this case, six hundred hours of film and video.


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We dont ask how big a show is anymore, but how long: A tiny gallery can contain daysof art.

The result is that we filter and graze, skim and forward.


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Kader Attia, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures , 2012, mixed media. Installation view,

Fridericianum, Kassel. From Documenta 13. Photo: Roman Mrz.

My point is that mainstream contemporary art simultaneously disavows and depends on the

digital revolution, evenespeciallywhen this art declines to speak overtly about the conditions

of living in and through new media. But why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our

experience of digitized life? After all, photography and film were embraced rapidly and

wholeheartedly in the 1920s, as was video in the late 1960s and 70s. These formats, however,

were image-based, and their relevance and challenge to visual art were self-evident. The digital,

by contrast, is code, inherently alien to human perception. It is, at base, a linguistic model.

Convert any .jpg file to .txt and you will find its ingredients: a garbled recipe of numbers and

letters, meaningless to the average viewer. Is there a sense of fear underlying visual arts

disavowal of new media? Faced with the infinite multiplicity of digital files, the uniqueness of the

art object needs to be reasserted in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via

Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. If you borrow an artists DVD from a gallery, it usually arrivesin a white paper slip, with VIEWING COPY ONLY marked clearly on the label; when a collector

buys the same DVD in a limited edition, he or she receives a carefully crafted container, signed

and numbered by the artist.

Ironically, Goldsmith refers to contemporary art of the 1980s as one model for poetry when

promoting his theory of uncreative writing, citing the history of twentieth-century art as a

chronicle of thieving and stealing, from Duchamp to Warhol to Levine. In actuality, visual arts

assault on originality only ever goes so far: It is always underpinned by a respect for intellectual

property and carefully assigned authorship (Warhol and Levine are hardly anonymous, and their

market status is fiercely protected by their galleries).!!Unlike the poetry world, where the flow of

capital is meager and where works can circulate freely and virtually on the Web, visual arts

ongoing double attachment to intellectual property and physicality threatens to jeopardize its own

relevance in the forthcoming decades. In a hundred years time, will visual art have suffered the

same fate as theater in the age of cinema?

Goldsmith points out that the linguistic basis of the digital era holds consequences for literature

that are as potentially shattering and vitalizing as the arrival of mechanical reproduction was for

visual art: With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography.!"It is telling that two of the

works I cited earlier, by Trecartin and Stark, make language central to their aesthetic. Its possible

that literature, and particularly poetry of the kind championed by Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing,

might now be taking up the avant-garde baton, finding ways to convey experience in ways

adequate to our new technological circumstances. Yet the hybridized solutions that visual art is

currently pursuinganalog in appearance, digital in structureseem always biased toward the

former, so favored by the market. If the digital means anything for visual art, it is the need to take

stock of this orientation and to question arts most treasured assumptions. At its most utopian, the

digital revolution opens up a new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of

collective culture; at its worst, it signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.


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Claire Bishop is associate professor in the Ph.D. program in art history at CUNY Graduate

Center, New York.

NOTES

1. Even traditional forms of art, like painting, are supported by a digital apparatus: PDFs sent to

the press or to collectors, JPEGS on gallery websites, etc.

2. I will leave aside painting for the moment. Its recent exponents (in the US, at least) have

consciously deployed digital referents: Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, for example, produce

hybrid analog-digital paintings. Rather than downloading images from the Internet, Walker

sources his imagery in library books, which are then scanned, and altered on his computer,

before being transferred to canvas for one-off paintings. Again, however, these

works usetechnology (and rather decoratively) rather than reflecting on digital visuality per se.

See The Painting Factory: A Roundtable Discussion, in The Painting Factory, exh. cat., Los

Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 1112.

3. The analog fascination is not exclusive to contemporary art; to cite just one example, UrbanOutfitters website now offers more than sixty products relating to cameras, most of which are

based on 35-mm film or Lomography.

4. Of course, digital files are also subject to degradation through resizing and compression; the

products of these processes are referred to as lossies.

5. Like performance art, social practice increasingly depends for its production and

documentation on e-mail and digital photography.

6. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 16364. In

the words of activist and law scholar Lawrence Lessig, we no longer live in a Read Only but

rather a Read/Write culture.

7. Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October110 (Autumn 2004): 3.

8. Ibid., 5.

9. Ibid., 21.

10. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing(New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 158.

His formulation plays off and departs from current theories of scanning and saccadic vision. The

precedents for this work are both literary and artistic: Gertrude Steins The Making of

Americans(1925) and On Kawaras One Million Years, 1969.

11. When cut-and-paste operations are transferred to literature, as Goldsmith and his many

colleagues are doing, the stakes are quite different, since the economy of literature is much

smaller and weaker and has no original to speak of.

12. Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, 14.


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DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART

AND NEW MEDIAA discussion related to the September 2012 In Print art icle:

Re: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.01.12 07:34 pm)

excellent piece.

I can think of Helen Marten and to an extent, Seth Price. Both are able to bring digital into proper

material contexts.

Art has been behind the times for years. It is mistaken about the scale of its relevance to non-art

audiences.Re: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.02.12 09:22 am)

As someone who has been a practicing artist and deeply involved in media art culture, since early

90s, and also co-founder of Furtherfield (www.furtherfield.org/), an on-line arts community which

also has a gallery in the Park, in Finsbury Park, London

(www.furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/www-world-wild-web) - Where at each opening weget well over 350 visitors, and over a 100 a week at the space. I find it strange that those whom

propose that they know about art and its culture, are still finding it difficult to take on this very

contemporary field. The audiences are there - we know this as real.

Yes, there is a divide, and Media Art has its specialization, but just like all different forms of skilled

practices - each field possess its own, particular and variant levels of artistic and critical

engagement. But still, there are many cross overs culturally. The divide is institutionally related,

and I would say that many art magazines and galleries are behind the times. The public we

engage with every day are more open and interested in discovering what this stuff is all about

they are more clued up. The art world is stuck in a rut, and it can only remain relevant to others,

by expanding and letting in new ideas beyond its hermetically sealed silos.

It is happening, but slowly. In the future we will look back and see that digital art, and media art,

like any other critically engaged or challenging art practice; was not accepted during its flourishing

period. Not because, of its quality, but more because of the limited imaginations of those in

control of the dominant culture at the time. This not necessarily an unusual situation, many

people are already aware how the art elite rely on privilege and celebrity status to define whats

worthy of interest, for others to see. This will pass, even if the ever expanding Media Art field just

takes it over or becomes, as equally as big as the officially prescribed, art culture.

The Media Art fields use of open networks has introduced an autonomy that has brought about a

deeper understanding of the medium, and how to exploit it creatively. Appropriation of the

software and the hardware has shaped how media artists interact with each other. Peer critique

and shared ownership of ideas have enabled individuals, small groups and communities to learnand initiate projects together on their own terms. This has created an alternative art universe out

there. This also means there are different traditions, such as hacking software, the networks, and

influences Fluxus and Situationism. There are different histories and values guiding many artists

whom are involved in media art practice. Much of it includes essential critiques about the art

establishments relevancy and role in governing and gatekeeping of what is allowed to be seen as

the correct type of art.


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Personally, my own view regarding up and coming art whatever its function and reason, in its

process of understanding what it is has to question what was before, by comparing its

differences, sense of place, values and its own particular voice. This can take place amongst,

contemporary peers as part of its critical sensibility, and as part of wider culture. Remember, if

we are not seeing it in the main press, it is not down to it not being out there. There are reasons

why a prevailing hegemony decides to opt for easier modes of information to describe its alreadyaccepted forms of culture, and it is political unfortunately.


(09.02.12 09:54 am)

This is a very timely piece, and beautifully written.

However, one of the central reasons contemporary visual art hasnt come to grips with digital, is

that it explicitly disavows the visual art that has, and Bishops article is emblematic of this.

Bishop begins by rightly saying that contemporary art [has] been curiously unresponsive to the

total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution.

But then somewhat alarmingly states that she will not be addressing contemporary art that could

be considered new media. She writes, there is, of course, an entire sphere of new media art,

but this is a specialized field of its own ...

It is this so-called specialist sphere, which includes many artists who exhibit widely within

contemporary art forums - such as Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Trevor Paglan, Cory Arcangel, to

name but a few - that has consistently produced works which do address the total upheaval in

our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution with acuity and intelligence. To rule out

a discussion of this practice perpetuates the very problem Bishop is attempting to address within

the article.

This becomes clear later in the essay, where Bishop makes awkward statements such as, the

digital, by contrast, is code, inherently alien to human perception.

Code is written by humans. It is a little absurd to describe something created by people as

inherently alien to human perception. Its certainly not alien to the humans - who are, it should

be noted, often artists - that write it.

Later, in Bishops analysis of contemporary research driven art, she concludes that theres a turn

away from examining the social, political, and economic conditions of the present. Where does

that leave the work of Trevor Paglen, for example, or Marko Peljhan, or many others we might

cite who create rigorous research-driven work that examines how our contemporary human

experience is being shaped right now by (for example) covert military technologies?

The problematic point of the article resurfaces at this juncture. Perhaps Bishop deems these

artists too close to the specialist sphere of new media art to warrant relevant consideration.

Towards the end of the piece, Bishop asks, is there a sense of fear underlying visual arts

disavowal of new media?. A somewhat ironic, or perhaps obsolete, question given that Bishop

herself has disavowed it right from the beginning of the article.

Bishop concludes by perhaps providing a reason for both the fear and the disavowal:at its worst [

the digital revolution] signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.

I greatly enjoyed reading the article, and respect Claire Bishop enormously, and am grateful for

these issues being raised in Art Forum. But I think its highly problematic to dismiss the practices


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of so many visual artists who do address the fundamental societal shifts brought about by the

proliferation if digital technology. It does tempt one to wonder if that obsolescence Bishop alludes

to is really the worst case scenario.

Honor Harger

Director, Lighthouse

Brighton, UKwww.lighthouse.org.uk


(09.02.12 11:32 am)

Its hard to disagree with the basic tenet of this article (i.e. that contemporary art largely ignores

the digital.) But to exclude the specialized field of media art misses the point completely. Media

art is what contemporary art becomes when it does in fact engage with technology.

The digital divide is a fact, although this article fails to mention the growing number of artists that

manage to straddle the two worlds. The notion of a media artist having a gallerist was unthinkable

10 years ago, now not so much. Media artists are getting shrewder about exploiting art world

mechanism, maybe theyll get there yet.

But there are a few key points that will remain hard to overcome:

Bishops article heavily implies but strategically avoids saying what should be obvious: The

contemporary art world is not only disinterested in digital art, it seems to abhor the very notion

that such work should be considered art. Lay audiences have historically shown great enthusiasm

for media art, but the deafening silence from curators and museums is telling. Gallerists, when

approached, are at least honest about where they stand, ranging from sarcastic rejection to

commiseration about how the work is interesting but sadly the gallery couldnt sell it to its client

base.

Media artist fail to speak about their work in a way that would make it compatible with

contemporary art. Even worse, they often insist on a jargon that, while often appropriate, is

willfully alienating. Those artists that have made the crossover (and there are a growing number

of them) have learned to walk the walk.

The funding boom for new media art in the late 1990s and the 2000s led to an unfortunate

ghettoization of media art. It was convenient to claim a specialized status in order to be funded,

but ultimately this led to isolation from the art world at large. There is no easy way to end this

tendency. Media artists depend on the infrastructure of specialized festivals and conferences to

develop their work, failing to realize that they are simultaneously painting themselves into a

corner.

Galleries feel comfortable with what already works. Why change it when it isnt broken? Painting

and sculpture with a smattering of video and mixed media will do nicely. The only way to break

the embargo on media art would be for collectors to show a genuine interest in digital work. (Btw,

the idea that digital work is uncollectable is a myth.) The market moves instantly to meet any

demand. Sadly, the arrival of a generation of millionaires that grew up with computer games has

done little to increase the collector base. Startup CEOs invariably buy Warhols for their shag

pads.

ps. There has perhaps never been a more appropriate time to link to the 1967 letter from Philip

Leider, Artforum to art historian Matthew Baigell:


15/23

Thanks for the enclosed manuscript on CHuck Csuri; I cant [sic] imagine ARTFORUM ever doing

a special issue on electronics or computers in art, but one never knows.

csuriproject.osu.edu/soS1b0rdRe: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.02.12 06:20 pm)

the question i would like to ask here, which is probably a naive one, is: why do you (new media

critics, art historians & other specialists) keep creating borders / frames where artists need to be

in a camp or the other?


(09.02.12 07:05 pm)

Youre asking some good questions, and uncovering some subtle connections between analog

and digital art. But new media art as a specialized field? Id say a little broadening of perspective

is in order:

Metropolitan Museum of Art

2 million artworks

5 million visitors per year

2.5 visits per artwork

Rhizome.org

600 artworks

4 million visitors per year

7,000 visits per artwork

(Source: the museums Web sites, 2003)

Shift to todays mobile platforms, and the discrepancy is wider. Art world insider Amy Sillman

made some prints drawing on an iPhone. New media art specialist Scott Snibbe created an

artwork that was the top free app in any categoryin the Apple App Store. 500,000 people are

walking around with his work on their iPads.

Oh, and whats this about photography and video gaining instant acceptance by the mainstream

art world when they emerged in the 1920s and 60s? As a fifteen-year curator at the Guggenheim,

I recall it took until 2000 for the chief curators to admit that the most interesting thing happening in

the art world was video. So, at that rate, the mainstream art world should catch up to the rest of

us by 2040.

See you then.


(09.03.12 05:58 am)

Reading this article was a pleasure, and a pain. Some of the points made here are really good,

and I also felt a lot of empathy for many of the examples raised, such as the use of obsolete or

dead media, or the archival impulse, which have been the polar stars of my curatorial and

critical work so far.

The problem is that Bishop fails in formulating the main question, that is: contemporary art should

respond to the digital age - why it doesnt? In my opinion, this question should be reformulated

this way: why the mainstream art world, the small niche I belong to and Im talking to hereby,

doesnt respond to the digital age?


16/23

To put it simple: there is the new media art world, which is a niche- true; there is the mainstream

art world, which is a niche as well (a couple of magazines, and a few dozens of galleries,

collectors, institutions, curators and artists); and there is the real art world, which is comprised of

all the people who recognize themselves as artists, of some who dont (but do something that can

be understood as art as well) and of all the people working around them. In the real art world,

there are not five, but legions of artists responding to the digital age. Some of them are really bad,some are really good, but just a few became successful in the mainstream art world: the ones

Bishop named, and some of the ones named in this discussion. These artists are neither new

media artists nor mainstream contemporary artists: they are artists that sometimes use digital

media, sometimes dont; sometimes do unique objects for galleries, sometimes spread their work

on the internet; they work with second level galleries, and with curators that arent art stars yet;

they dont sell out at art fairs, but they have a market and collectors; they are rarely featured in

mainstream art events such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta, but they have an increasing

presence in a big network of institutions, despite the fact that Claire Bishop doesnt know them.

This is the background where mainstream artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn and Thomas Ruff

go fishing to find ideas like the ones displayed in Touching Reality, or in the Zycles series. The

true innovation takes place there, and not in the mainstream.

And - I think - it couldnt be otherwise. To ask with mainstream contemporary art is not reacting to

the digital age would be like to ask why William-Adolphe Bouguereau and the French Academia

werent reacting to the industrial revolution and to photography. At the time, to see true innovation

you should make a visit to a photographers studio in Paris; now, dear Claire, Id warmly

recommend you a trip to Rhizome.org.

Domenico Quaranta

Artistic Director, Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age

linkartcenter.eu/Re: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.03.12 09:11 am)

Clair Bishops article insightful in pointing out that the mainstream art world has an active

disinterest in the technological changes of the last 20 years. Her critique of the current retrogeist

fashion for analog media (e.g. 16mm film) is also correct. But these are symptoms of a larger art

world malaise.

By and large the art market, museums and festivals have a backward looking focus - almost an

obsession with the 1960s and 1970s. The quickest path to success for a young artist, born in the

1980s, is to imitate ideas, styles, media from a period before their birth. Meanwhile a plethora of

new collectors from the finance industry (with of course little, if any, training in art history or

aesthetics) collect exactly what resembles what they see at MoMa or the Tate Modern - further

discouraging artistic innovation in favor of a cynical nostalgia.

Of course, this has happened before. In Paris of the 1850s-1870s most art - the academic stylethat filled the salons - was a pastiche of neo-classical finish and romantic themes: Gerome,

Meissonier, Cabanal, Bouguereau are the examples we remember today.

The art historical narrative of the day (read T. Gautier, Freres Goncourt) held that these were the

great artists of their time. Courbet, Manet, Degas were marginal figures, as often as not maligned

as poor artists. Of course, by the early 20th century this view had been revised and reversed.

It is ironic that Bishop decides to exclude an entire sphere of new media art. It is exactly the

artists she excludes from her essay who will most likely be the focus of art (and media) historians


17/23

in the mid 21st century. Or perhaps someone can make the case that in 2040 young artists,

scholars, the general public will be more interested in early 21st century artists whose work

neglected the transformative changes of their own era in favor of a nostalgia for the previous

century.


(09.03.12 10:51 am)

I think one aspect of the new media that is overshadowed by the Web/social media aspects is a

discussion around the fact(oid) that (in general) a generation of Artists has yet to properly emerge

with a craftsmanship of, in particular, the 3D technologies for design and

fabrication/manufacture both CAD and CAM as they exist in their engineering/commercial form.

Knowing ones working materials in the form of how to design or sculpt in 3 (or more')D

beyond the design of a practical component is key. Having a good enough technical

understanding of a medium (geometry) and higher level mathematics/algorithms to be able to

programme software (rather than just using existing CAD software), to produce a design of

beauty either in the virtual world or moving into realizing a design as sculpture either through

CNC machinery or 3D printing (for me the former produces artifacts of greater inherent beauty).

Of course this needs to be extended to a proper understanding of how the new digital methods ofmanufacture relate and interact with the materials used, which will be different to those for hand

crafting look at a CNC machined surface to see not only geometrical cusps but surface marks

caused by machining speed and tool deformations.

Too many digital pieces today are often simply assemblies of reused fractal algorithms (and so

fitting in with our ages obsession with nature and the natural) rather than confidently exploring

the artificial and creating beauty rather than always looking for it in organic nature


(09.03.12 11:45 am)

Massive irony loss here, IMHO. And a little willful ignorance.

To summarize Bishop: Contemporary art has disavowed dealing with the upheavals wrought by

digital existence. Except for, uh, New Media art, which, naturally, I disavow from the present

consideration.

Also, New Media art uses a medium called code that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how

to understand, so Ill dismiss this entire area of cultural production as specialized and this code

stuff as alien and inhuman. Ill pretend to ignore that code is a human-created language, that

digital life is constituted through code, that there are artists who work natively with code as an

artistic medium, and the possibility that those artists who perform cultural operations with code

might have something to add to the conversation.

One observation that Bishop gets right is that computers are now indispensibly used in nearly all

areas of contemporary arts production. Bishop, correctly, has the intuition that these proverbialfish are unable to discover the water around them but then, oddly and sadly, through her

dismissal and ignorance of those with the understanding she seeks, reveals herself to be a

member of the school.


(09.03.12 12:44 pm)

I realize that this discussion is increasingly moving away from the scope of Bishops article, but

just for the record:


18/23

Domenico is correct, artists like Carsten Nicolai and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer would in all

likelihood reject the label of media art, yet their work owes much to the discourse (and funding

power) of the media art niche. Meanwhile, it would not be hard to compile a significant list of

other artists whose work fit all the qualifiers of media art, and who have achieved recognition in

the mainstream art world.

The distinction between the real artworld (i.e. anyone making art or otherwise engaged in art)and the mainstream (as represented by art fairs, high-end museums, etc.) In the former media

art is doing fine, thank you very much, still reaching audiences and thriving on a vibrant online

community. (By which I dont mean pristine portfolio sites, rather artists actively engaging each

other and the public, developing their practice out in the open on blogs, Twitter or Github.)

So why should media artists even care about the mainstream niche? Why not reject it and find

alternate markets? I know plenty of media artists who do. Some go into academia to support their

work (and their families.) Others claim an anarchic underdog role, embracing a nomadic lifestyle

of residencies and exploiting new funding sources like Kickstarter.

But I can still think of some reasons why media artists would care about the mainstream art world:

A. Pride aka desire for recognition. Being ignored does get tiresome, particularly after a decadeor two of hard work. Pride may not be a very helpful instinct, but its hard to resist.

B. Money. Selling work allows you to make more work, which is the ultimate goal. But collectors

or museums wont buy anything that has not been vetted somehow by mainstream art world

indicators, hence the need for artists to hustle their way in somehow.

C. Posteriority. A good friend once asked: Do you want your work to be forgotten? The

mainstream art world might not be the only game in town but it does have a serious choke hold

on the writing of art history. Maybe media art can hope for vindication 20 years from now, but I

wouldnt count on it. There is already 30 years of media art history that has all but been erased.

Cybernetic Serendipity might have been a milestone exhibition, but ask any art historian you

know and youll probably get a blank stare.

D. The media art world has plenty of disadvantages:

- Everything you do is a group show. Theres little space for an exploration of an idea, except

through a single grand gesture.

- Conditions for exhibiting work are often poor, whether due to ad hoc locales, lack of art handling

experience or the fact that there is a noise concert going on next door.

- There are very few media art writers who will write about the work in terms of being art. There

are plenty of blogs who will discuss the technology or cool factor involved, but they wouldnt touch

your artistic intent with a 10 foot pole.

- If your work is formalist or concerned with aesthetics youll usually be asked to do partyentertainment. I say this somewhat facetiously, but its basically true. Your work will not be the

focus of theoretical discourse, except as a part of historical reviews of computer art or live

cinema.

My own concerns about the media art world span all of the above. Pride I can overcome, the

other points are harder to ignore.


19/23


(09.04.12 06:30 am)

Thank you to Claire Bishop and ArtForum for publishing this essay, and to the commenters who

have posted already, as I think this discussion will be useful for teaching, especially for teaching

my curatorial MA and PhD students who already know that the art they should be paying attention

to is the art after new media. Without getting bogged down in the very legitimate questions ofwhy new media art emerged in its own scene and why contemporary art has ignored it, this essay

asks a broader but still useful question why does contemporary art ignore our digital condition?

It is unfortunate that Bishop ignores the sector (even the philosophy) which is best placed to

refute the basis of this question and thus I think it is telling that Bishops first evidence of the

works she can count on one hand which to her mind do address our digital age are three videos

works not remotely commenting, to my mind, in form and behaviour, on the digital in terms of

means of production and dissemination, with no disrespect to those artists and works. This is one

of Bishops many confusing contradictions as to what kind of work might comment on the digital,

and her stated wilful ignorance of the work, that other commenters have mentioned, which

actually does.

As a curator, academic, and writer (both art criticism and art history), as I read the article I kept

wanting to insert examples from the missing field of new media art to round out her argument

given that she had said she wouldnt. Indeed I almost just did a Steve Dietz-ish rewriting of her

article (www.walkerart.org/archive/5/B473851A45B7748A6161.htm), swapping all the examples

for different ones (for instance, for the postcard example she uses Id suggest George Legradys

Slippery Traces from

1995 www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/slippery/Slippery.html and for the archive

examples she uses Id suggest Olia Lialinas My Boyfriend Came Back from the War from

1996rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/1729/ - both works as much a comment on their form as on

their content).

It is curious, this disavowal and where it comes from. The wilful disregard for new media art itself Iwould argue has been far more on the part of institutionalised curators, gallerists and art critics/art

historians, including herself here, than on the part of artists. It could be looked at, in retrospect, as

laziness, as lack of capacity, as ignorance of opportunity to engage with it. Bishops case of

techno-fear is thankfully not as severe as some other art historians I shall not mention here, and

so I am glad of this article. Bishop characterizes the fear as one that arises when, faced with the

infinite multiplicity of digital files, the uniqueness of the art object needs to be reasserted in the

face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.

The need to reassert the object of course is only important if you are playing in the Art World and

seek to control the boundaries of it, and not just practicing art if you fear that something is not

unique or original enough to be Art, rather than multifarious enough to be a shared art

experience. This is one thing my book (co-authored with Beryl Graham) Rethinking Curating: ArtAfter New Media (mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12071) tries to unpick

further. Weve discovered that the fear driving the disregard on the part of curators and other Art

World professionals is not just one of the loss of the original art object or the surety of the single

author, but one of not knowing, as Bishop herself exposes, how technology works, what code is,

what interaction or participation in networked new media entails.

Bishop writes,

If the digital means anything for visual art, it is the need to take stock of this orientation and to


20/23

question arts most treasured assumptions. At its most utopian, the digital revolution opens up a

new dematerialized, deauthored, and unmarketable reality of collective culture; at its worst, it

signals the impending obsolescence of visual art itself.

This is to my mind a good thing. As we all know there is no chance that art will become obsolete,

but there is a good chance that Art and the trappings of the Art World could, and for some in the

new media sector, thats what weve been working towards not getting included within Artsboundaries, but obliterating boundaries altogether, seeing art not as a noun but as a verb, as

something one does, one practices, not something that is. And here I would refer readers to

Caitlin Jones great article in the Believer Magazine about Cory Arcangel, My art world is bigger

than your art world (www.believermag.com/issues/200512/?read=article_jones)

Other comments about this article and its implications for the practice of writing art history and

curatorial work can be found on the CRUMB new-media-curating discussion list at jiscmail.ac.uk

orwww.crumbweb.org

Sarah Cook


(09.04.12 07:32 am)

Further to my earlier message, I am very glad that ArtForum has pullied together a great issuewith many articles about media art aside this one; I am glad that ArtForums editor is one who is

familiar with Media Art History, having undertaken PhD research about Experiments in Art and

Technology, her introduction is spot on, so if youve read this far and not read that, click over

now: artforum.com/inprint/id=31950

Otherwise, to add to ArtForums own archival response, here is a curated selection of readings

about new media art published in ArtForum as sourced from the online archive, in no particular

order:

artforum.com/inprint/id=10623 - Nam June Paik

artforum.com/archive/id=20619 - Trevor Paglen

artforum.com/inprint/id=30804 - review of Younger Than Jesus

artforum.com/inprint/id=5670 - Rafael Lozano Hemmer

artforum.com/archive/id=21993 - review of Predrive: After Technology

artforum.com/archive/id=29975 - review of New Document

artforum.com/inprint/id=6580 - Ant Farm

artforum.com/inprint/id=1672 - Christiane Pauls Hotlist

artforum.com/inprint/id=2888 - Jon Ippolitos hotlist

artforum.com/inprint/id=22120 - Barbara London

artforum.com/news/week=200116#news84 - Variable Media Initiative

artforum.com/archive/id=20592 - review of Superlight

artforum.com/archive/id=21297 - review of Untethered

artforum.com/inprint/id=4509 - Sylvere Lotringer

artforum.com/archive/id=19211 - Claude Closky

artforum.com/archive/id=465 - Rachel Greene on web art

artforum.com/archive/id=278 - etoy

artforum.com/inprint/id=8261 - The Yes Men

artforum.com/inprint/id=20915 - on service aesthetics in art

artforum.com/inprint/id=22117 - Dara Birnbaum and Cory Arcangel

artforum.com/diary/id=25360 - review of Seven on Seven

artforum.com/inprint/id=2704 - Maciej Wisniewski / Open_Source_Art_Hack


21/23

Sarah Cook


(09.04.12 03:38 pm)

What a perfect introductory conversation for our panel discussion Software Art and the Art

Establishment at the 2012 Leaders in Software and Art Conference on 10/16. Thats our last

panel of the day, featuring Christiane Paul and Amanda McDonald Crowley and a couple of otherpanelists yet to be confirmed, moderated by Ken Johnson of the New York Times. For those who

wish to get a glimpse of the year 2040 right now, we open the conference with a panel on

Collecting New Media Art with Bryce Wolkowitz of Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, Michael Spalter, a

computer art collector who is Chair of the Board at RISD, and Asher Remy-Toledo, an avid

collector of media art. Sandwiched in between is an eye-opening array of talks and presentations

of cutting-edge interactive, crowdsourced, social media, net, digital, generative, and software art,

complete with keynote address by Scott Snibbe AND a specific panel addressing the friendly side

of that intimidating code with which many art historians are completely unfamiliar. Please join

us: softwareandart.com/?page_id=953Re: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.05.12 03:31 am)

www.peoplefrommars.org/


(09.05.12 04:52 am)

I think we must all thank Claire Bishop for generating such an intense debate with her article.

At this point, I find the comments posted here and on CRUMBs list more interesting than the

article itself, yet I must also admit that Bishop, despite quickly dismissing the entire sphere of new

media art in a single sentence, presents some interesting arguments about the way in which new

technologies are actually an indispensable tool for producing art nowadays. It is a shame that she

does not want to mention examples made by artists who really confront the question of what it

means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital, and instead comments on how an artist

has bought postcards on eBay.

Of course, as the author explains the mainstream art world and its response to the digital are

the focus of her article, but then my concern is that it can be possible for an art historian to simply

address this issue from the limited point of view of a mainstream art world that surprisingly does

not include the work of artists that are actually participating in the mainstream art world, whose

work is exhibited in major museums and art fairs and reviewed in contemporary art magazines

such as Artforum.

This consciously narrowed perspective on the subject is what broadens the divide between the

new media art world and the mainstream art world, a divide that does not make sense in the light

of the fact that contemporary art is nowadays being produced both with analogue and digital

media.

So probably the point of this discussion is that it should not take place anymore, that the divide is

a fiction supported by a model of the art world that is getting old fast. As Richard Buckminster

Fuller once said: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something,

build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

This does not mean, as Ms. Bishop states, that the digital revolution ['] at its worst, ['] signals

the impending obsolescence of visual art itself. Visual art will not become obsolete, the digital

divide already is.


22/23


(09.05.12 06:06 am)

Claire Bishop is reporting that new media art is not accepted by mainstream visual art, the same

sentiment being expressed by many commenters here. New media artists should be encouraged

by her warning that visual art risks obsolescence because of its disavowal of the digital nature of

modern life.Re: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.08.12 10:35 am)

I love a mystery, and Claire Bishop has started a great discussion on a topic that is central to two

questions I have been asking myself - what do artists want, and where does art belong?

These questions didnt come up for me before the digital age, and so her article opens the door

and looks deeper at uncomfortable questions. Many of her perceptions echo what I have also

found when researching my thesis (2007) on operational patterns in art, fashion, and digital

culture. The key essays that informed my theory were by Walter Benjamin and Rosalind Krauss,

but I wanted to know how big these patterns were so I also looked across the fields of science (

Wilden), math (Wolfram), fashion ( Martin), economics (Hardt & Negri), anthropology (Bateson),

feminist theory (Haraway) and early digital writings (Kelly, McLuhan) to name a few.And thats when the patterns showed up! So when I consider what is central in Bishops rich

essay, what comes up is the issue of PROPERTY - and all its implications. We have been living

on an edge between analogue and digital ever since the desktop appeared in the 1990s and

continues to crash every institution we know. Perhaps our job is to figure out how to make a new

relationship between the ephemeral coded way of being and the tactile gift we have as physical

beings. We cant go back and yet we cant seem to move forward either. An oppositional either/or

world is no longer an option, but we dont have an economic model for a world of abundance, so

we impose the old scarcity model (limited editions) on it. How romantic, but I dont think it can

work! This is a global paradigm crash in an information age and art is caught in it along with

everything else. But I believe the good news is that as creative thinkers and makers, we have a

chance to imagine a new future if we are willing to ask the hard questions - which WalterBenjamin wrote about in the 1930s - that the last and hardest thing to change will be the property

system.Re: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.09.12 12:02 am)

This is a very timely piece, and beautifully written.

However, one of the central reasons contemporary visual art hasnt come to grips with digital, is

that it explicitly disavows the visual art that has, and Bishops article is emblematic of this.

hutbephot70.blogspot.com


(09.10.12 05:44 pm)

Hi all,

Some may be interested on Robert Jacksons take on this discussion...

Claire Bishops new essay Digital Divide, asks why the contemporary mainstream Artworld has,

for the most part, continued to disavow any critical dialogue with the endlessly disposable, rapidly

mutable ephemera of the virtual age. While the questions Bishop poses are welcome and

expertly framed for the mainstream art world, Robert Jackson argues that her call for

confrontation has no relevance, when measured up to the sphere of new media art (Bishops

words) which is in a more advanced stage of critique with its messy materials.


23/23

www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/making-digital-divide-cheap-and-nastyRe: DIGITAL DIVIDE: CONTEMPORARY ART AND NEW MEDIA

(09.24.12 03:19 pm)

I think it would have been better had the essay been titled Why Late Social Realists Arent Very

Interested in the Digital.


(09.29.12 07:24 am)

In preparation for a panel discussion at the ICA on Monday on the subject of trends in

contemporary digital art and more generally, the convergence of art and technology, I looked to

this essay as a source of research. Apart from the obvious plug, (although the talk is now entirely

booked :D) its worth mentioning to point out the relevancy of the subject, under discussion in

large, public, art institutions. Unfortunately, there is an overbearing sense throughout Claires text

that it was written at a very great distance from any real understanding of how practices engaged

with technology have proliferated and developed since the 1990s or of contemporary practices

that are engaged with technology or harness and deploy digital technologies in a critical way. I

thought this was exemplified by almost all of the examples given and in particular by statements

such as While many artists use digital technology, how many really confront the question of what

it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect

deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence? I find it

strange that I can count on one hand the works of art that do.... I think if this statement can

actually be taken seriously, then the reason Claire finds it strange she can count examples on

one hand is because she hasnt done any thorough research, isnt at all engaged with the subject

generally and apparently seems experienced in only a very narrow field of artistic production,

which incidentally is also the most visible sphere of production, only surfacing at the core of the

contemporary art-world. I think these oversights say more about the target readership of Artforum

(biblical for the worlds art elite) and by extension, assumptions Claire seems to be making about

who she thinks her audience is and what they think...

There has been such a significant and major shift toward artistic practices which deal with

technoculture and the digital revolution (yuk) that, to me at least, three of the worlds major art

scenes, namely London, New York and Berlin (Im tempted to throw in L.A and Amsterdam as

well) are so heavily dominated by this production at their cutting edge, I feel confident in

generalizing like that (and yes, geographical boundaries do still exist). How this seems to have

totally escaped Claires radar, or indeed how it could pass by anyone engaged with contemporary

art, is beyond me! Yes, the market takes a very long time to catch up at the high end...look at

painting sales on the secondary market, or similar figures from any major auction house etc

etc...but that bears little relevance to Claires text.

These fundamental problems crop up in the first two paragraphs and run throughout... However

the core failure of the essay, which I find simply bonkers, comes in the third with the dismissivestatement (ringing true through the entire text): There is, of course, an entire sphere of new

media art, but this is a specialized field of its own.... The title of this essay, if Im not mistaken, is

Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media. When it comes to this divide, I think there is a

fairly strong case for suggesting Claire and her essay are part of the problem... Theres a fairly

good, critical response to the essay here: honorharger.wordpress.com/

Documents

Bishop Claire Digital Divide on Contemporary Art and New Media