> From: Heiko Recktenwald
It is incredible, that the ONLY convincing internationally known
political art against Abu Graib etc is by good old Botero, who is
believed to paint for society ladies. Maybe he was never unpolitical
with his fat officers etc.
Net.art seems to be brain.dead,
Why, because it refuses to comment on / be dragged into a bad political
situation? I think most net.artists recognise that even attempting to
comment on politics, war, east /west relations results in more often
than not:
a) clumsy art (usually of the type of personal belief system of one
type or another disguised as art).
b) ends up communicating the wrong message to the wrong people.
net.art is far from brain dead or dead for that matter regardless of
what the majority of contemporary art seems to want to do, push it to
the margins now that they have amused themselves for all of a few years
with it and capitalised on it with publications which seem to replicate
each other in content in the most part. some of the best net.art has
been produced in recent years however we hear less and less about it as
it comes through smaller channels of diffusion - good / bad, yet to be
decided really. but the fact that this exhibition shows all kinds of
work alongside each other is a good thing, it shows that some curators
have a wider vision of contemporary art and are not afraid to reflect
all of its facets. it means we can move beyond this juvenile state of
forever sticking metaphorical fingers up at the rest of the art work -
how many painters or sculptors feel the need to do this to new media
art?
> From: "Armin Medosch"
> abstract --> retreat into 'pure' form instrumentalized by neo-
> conservative government for the construction of nationalist cultural
> identity as export commodity.
absolutely and this is sad to see, particularly since net.art is so
young and really only at just the beginning of what it can achieve but
keep things in perspective, if you look at contemporary art over the
last century you see that this happens in cycles. Duchamp broke aware
from commodity art, it returned and then you had dramatic shifts again
such as land art and conceptual art (I'm sure I'm skipping lots of
others), later video art broke away again but ironically that actually
ended up turning it into even more of a commodity.
net.art and new media being exhibited alongside what they term
'classic' art is a good thing and it will change but change is good.
a+
gar
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