Marisa Olson
Since the beginning
Works in Brooklyn, New York United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
PORTFOLIO (3)
BIO
Marisa Olson is an artist, writer, and media theorist. Her interdisciplinary work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, Tate(s) Modern + Liverpool, the Nam June Paik Art Center, British Film Institute, Sundance Film Festival, PERFORMA Biennial; commissioned and collected by the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Houston Center for Photography, Experimental Television Center, and PS122; and reviewed in Artforum, Art21, the NY Times, Liberation, Folha de Sao Paolo, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.

Olson has served as Editor & Curator at Rhizome, the inaugural curator at Zero1, and Associate Director at SF Camerawork. She's contributed to many major journals & books and this year Cocom Press published Arte Postinternet, a Spanish translation of her texts on Postinternet Art, a movement she framed in 2006. In 2015 LINK Editions will publish a retrospective anthology of over a decade of her writings on contemporary art which have helped establish a vocabulary for the criticism of new media. Meanwhile, she has also curated programs at the Guggenheim, New Museum, SFMOMA, White Columns, Artists Space, and Bitforms Gallery. She has served on Advisory Boards for Ars Electronica, Transmediale, ISEA, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, Creative Capital, the Getty Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the Tribeca Film Festival.

Olson studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths, History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric & Film Studies at UC Berkeley. She has recently been a visiting artist at Yale, SAIC, Oberlin, and VCU; a Visiting Critic at Brown; and Visiting Faculty at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and Ox-Bow. She previously taught at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts' new media graduate program (ITP) and was Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase's School of Film & Media Studies. She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at Eyebeam & is currently Visiting Critic at RISD.

Collectible After All: Christiane Paul on net art at the Whitney Museum


The Whitney Museum artport has been an important institutional presence in net art and new media since its launch in 2002. Created and curated by Christiane Paul, artport features online commissions as well as documentation of new media artworks from the museum's exhibitions and collections. This year, artport as a whole was made an official part of the Whitney Museum collection; to mark this occasion, participating artist Marisa Olson interviewed Paul about the program's history and evolution over thirteen years.

 Douglas Davis, image from The World's First Collaborative Sentence (1994).

Collections like artport are a rare and valuable window onto a field of practice that, in some senses, was borne out of not being taken seriously. From mid-80s Eastern European game crackers to late-90s net artists, the first people working online were often isolated, by default or design, and were certainly marginalized by the art world, where few curators knew of their existence and fewer took them seriously, advocated for them, or worked to theorize and articulate the art historical precedents and currents flowing through the work. Help me fast-forward to the beginning of this century at one of the most important international art museums. Many of the US museums that funded new media projects did so with dot-com infusions that dried-up after 2000. Artport officially launched in 2001; the same year, you curated a section devoted to net art in the Whitney Biennial. What was the behind-the-scenes sequence of events that led to artport's founding?

I think artport's inception was emblematic of a wave of interest in net art in the US around the turn of the century and in the early 2000s. This more committed involvement with the art form interestingly coincided with or came shortly after the dot com bubble, which inflated from 1997–2000, had its climax on March 10, 2000 when NASDAQ peaked, and burst pretty much the next day. Net art, however, remained a very active practice and started appearing on the radar of more US art institutions. To some extent, their interest may have been sparked by European exhibitions that had begun to respond to the effects of the web on artistic practice earlier on. In 1997, Documenta X had already included web projects (that year the Documenta website was also famously "stolen"—that is, copied and archived—by Vuk Cosic in the project Documenta: done) and Net Condition, which took place at ZKM in 1999/2000, further acknowledged the importance of art on the web.

US museums increasingly began to take notice. Steve Dietz, who had started the Walker Art Center's New Media Initiatives early on, in 1996, was curating the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. Jon Ippolito, in his role as Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim, was commissioning net art in the early 2000s and in 2002, Benjamin Weil, with Joseph Rosa, unveiled a new version of SFMOMA's E-space, which had been created in 2000. This was the institutional netscape in which I created artport in 2001, since I felt that the Whitney, which had for the first time included net art in its 2000 Biennial, also needed a portal to online art. The original artport was much more of a satellite site and less integrated into whitney.org than it is now. Artist Yael Kanarek redesigned the site not too long after its initial launch and created version 1.1. Artport in its early days was sponsored by a backend storage company in New Jersey, which was then bought by HP, so HP appeared as the official sponsor. I think it is notable that sponsorship at that point did not come from a new tech company but a brand name that presumably wanted to appear more cutting edge.


booomerrranganggboobooomerranrang: Nancy Holt's networked video


Nancy Holt, Boomerang (1974), still from video.

In her time on this planet, Nancy Holt came to be known as a great American Land Artist, and certainly her brilliant installations, like Utah's Sun Tunnels and collaborations with her partner Robert Smithson and their peers, are profoundly significant, but it was her work in film & video that has had the greatest personal impact on me.

I somehow didn't see Boomerang, her 1974 video performance usually credited to her collaborator Richard Serra, until I was a Ph.D. student in Linda Williams's Phenomenology of Film seminar at UC Berkeley's Rhetoric program, but the time delay was more than made up for by the work's formative resonance. In the video, made during Serra's residency at a Texas television station, a young Holt is seen sitting in an anchor's chair before a staid blue background. Despite brief station ID graphic overlays and one minute of silence in the midst of the ten-minute piece (announced as audio trouble and reminding viewers of the work's live TV origin), the work is in many ways sound-centric.


Sound and Image in Electronic Harmony


semiconductor_nanowebbers.jpg
Image: Semiconductor: Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt, 200 Nanowebbers, 2005

On Saturday, April 11th, New York's School of Visual Arts will co-present the 2009 Visual Music Marathon with the New York Digital Salon and Northeastern University. Promising genre-bending work from fifteen countries, the lineup crams 120 works by new media artists and digital composers into 12 hours. If it's true, as is often said, that MTV killed the attention spans of Generations X and Y, this six-minute-per-piece average ought to suit most festivalgoers' minds, and the resultant shuffling on and off stage will surely be a spectacle in its own rite. In all seriousness, this annual event is a highlight of New York's already thriving electronic music scene and promises many a treat for your eyes and ears. The illustrious organizers behind the marathon know their visual music history and want to remind readers that, "The roots of the genre date back more than two hundred years to the ocular harpsichords and color-music scales of the 18th century," and "the current art form came to fruition following the emergence of film and video in the 20th century." The remarkable ten dozen artists participating in this one-day event will bring us work incorporating such diverse materials as hand-processed film, algorithmically-generated video, visual interpretations of music, and some good old fashioned music-music. From luminaries like Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Steina Vasulka to emerging artists Joe Tekippe and Chiaki Watanabe, the program will be another star on the map that claims NYC as fertile territory for sonic exploration. - Marisa Olson

READ ON »


Tagalicious


Picture-1.jpg

The National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens, Greece, has committed itself to curating a number of recent exhibitions of internet art. Their current show, "Tag Ties and Affective Spies," features contributions from both net vets and emerging surfers, including Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, JODI, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema and The Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, and Wayne Clements. The online exhibition takes an antagonistic approach to Web 2.0, citing a constant balance "between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy." Curator Daphne Dragona raises the question of whether the social web is a preexisting platform on which people connect, or whether it is indeed constructed in the act of uploading, tagging, and disclosing previously private information about ourselves on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. Dragona asks whether we are truly connecting and interacting, or merely broadcasting. While her curatorial statement doesn't address the issue directly, the show's title hints at the level of self-surveillance in play on these sites. Accordingly, many of the selected works take a critical, if not DIY, approach to the internet. The collective Les Liens Invisibles tends to create works that make an ironic mash-up of the often divergent mantras of tactical media, culture jamming, surrealism, and situationism. In their Subvertr, they encourage Flickr users to "subverTag" their posted images, creating an intentional disassociation between an image's content and its interpretion, with the aim of "breaking the strict rules of significance that characterize the mainstream collective imaginary..." JODI's work, Del.icio.us/ winning information (2008) exploits the limited stylistic parameters of the social bookmarking site. Using ASCII and Unicode page titles to form visual marks, a cryptic tag vocabulary, and a recursive taxonomy, their fun-to-follow site critiques the broader content of the web ...

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Reappearance of the Undead


agatha_appears_lialina.gif

In 1997, internet art hall-of-famer Olia Lialina made a "net drama" called Agatha Appears that was written for Netscape 3 and 4 in HTML 3.2. One of the main features of the interactive narrative was the travel of the eponymous avatar across the internet. Let's just say the girl got around. But the magical illusion of the piece was that she appeared to stay still, even when links in the narrative were clicked and the viewer's address bar indicated movement to another server. But in time, both the browser and code in which the story was written became defunct and the piece unraveled as the sites previously hosting the links and files upon which Agatha was dependent disappeared or cleaned house. Such a scenario is common to early internet art (and will no doubt continue to plague the field), as ours is an upgrade culture constantly driving towards new tools, platforms, and codes. Many have debated whether to let older works whither or how it might be possible to update these works, making them compatible with new systems. For those who are interested, some of the best research on the subject has been performed by the folks affiliated with the Variable Media Initiative. Meanwhile, luddites and neophiles alike are now in luck because Agatha Appears has just undergone rejuvenation. Ela Wysocka, a restorer working at Budapest's Center for Culture & Communication Foundation has worked to overcome the sound problems, code incompatibilities, and file corruption and disappearance issues, and she's written a fascinating report about the process, here. And new collaborating hosts have jumped in line to bring the piece back to life, so that like a black and white boyfriend coming home from war, Agatha now offers us a shiny new webring as a token of ...

READ ON »



Discussions (281) Opportunities (10) Events (4) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Re: NYT review of ArtBase 101


Aw, shucks, Jason... that's sweet of you. And I think that you do make
a good point. I've always resented art that seemed to be made only for
other artists or for certain critics, etc, and felt that it should be
able to speak to anyone, whether or not they liked it.

Lewis asked "If the art can't engage a casual user, what's the point?"
I tend to agree. The question is whether Sarah Boxer is a casual user,
or whether she should be, as a New York Times Art Critic. This is part
of the reason that I made the aside about whether she's writing for
the art section or the lifestyle section. Try comparing Boxer's
average level of engagement with the art she writes about to Roberta
Smith's (another NYT critic) with what she's writing about. There's no
comparison. Boxer seems to have finagled a position as the house
expert on new media, which as others pointed out means that hers is
the lone non-critical voice coming through. When she shows up and
barely/badly reiterates the press release, misspelling artists' names
and missing the forest for the trees on the surface level/descriptive
(let alone interpretive) details of the work, I have no more hifalutin
word for her than Lame.

I'm sorry, but since when is the critic supposed to be a casual user?
Since things went digital? Since art had URLs? Since we could look at
it from home in our pajamas? To downgrade your expectations of the
critic--whose job it has been, historically, to unpack and dig
deeper--is to downgrade your expectations of the art. You are saying
that this art is somehow less worthy of true criticism than art in
another medium.

I'd prefer to leave the flippant taste-making commentary to the
lifestylers and to open a section of reviews and actually find some
true criticism. This may sound harsh, but where is our field going to
go, how is it going to develop, if the few people assigned to write
about it do so in such a non-critical way and then the artists stand
back and say "I'm just happy someone wrote about it"? Remember, we're
talking about a review of a ten year survey. Net art has ben made for
at least ten years, and it has developed into its own genres,
different stylistic modes; it has taken up a diverse range of tools to
address a diverse range of topics. The whole point of the show is to
say that net art is a rich art form worthy of being taken just as
seriously as photography or painting, or any other rich, diverse
medium or genre. Why should we not have a critical vocabulary for
this, by now? Why should we not expect serious engagement from
critics, ten years (or more) later? Frankly, I would not be satisfied
with this type of non-criticism after late 1997 or early 1998.

Marisa

On 6/29/05, Jason Van Anden <jason@smileproject.com> wrote:
> Hi Marisa,
>
> Awesome critique critique. You have an amazing ability to communicate this art form's intentions to those of us without a new media MFA. Randall Packer closed his post with the question "Why doesn't the NY Times hire a (new?) media critic?" If the New York Times was a democracy, I would campaign for your election to that position. Perhaps the DAT should create posts for "Net Art Educator" and "Net Art Champion".
>
> Then again, I would not want to lose Sarah Boxer. As an artist, it is important for me to communicate to as broad an audience as possible.
> In this regard, Ms. Boxer's last three articles on new media art have provided me with invaluable feedback. She is a mirror of how this art form is perceived by the (fledglingly interested) general public. In the process she is bound to expose some of its blemishes.
>
> Jason Van Anden
> www.smileproject.com
> +
> -> post: list@rhizome.org
> -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>

DISCUSSION

Interview with Nat Muller


Interview with Nat Muller, by Marisa S. Olson
Nat Muller is a Venezuela-born Dutch curator and writer living inRotterdam and working internationally. She went to High SchoolinBelgium before earning a BA in English Lit from Tel-AvivUniversityand an MA in Lit at Sussex, in the Sexual Dissidence andCultural Change program. She continues to work on a global scale,organizing exhibitions, performances, talks, and publications on arange ofthemes related to media activism and electronic art. She'sworked quite a bit with V2, where she was formerly project manager andcurator. Amongst others she co-curated the Dutch Electronic ArtFestival (DEAF) in 2004, and has participated and organized programsfor Transmediale 2005, ISEA 2002, and many other major festivals. Nathas also collaborated on projects in Eastern Europe, such as"TheTrans_European Picnic: The Art and Media of Accession", and otherfestivals across Europe. All of this made for a very interestingconversation.
I flew from New York to Amsterdam and took a train straight toRotterdam, where I was to spend the evening at Nat's in a sort ofblind date interview scenario. I woke up from a jetlagger's nap tofind that she'd cooked me an amazing meal and after several glasses ofwine we started recording our conversation about her work and aboutnew media, in general. We discussed the relationship of food tocurating, the status of cyberfeminism, the status of Holland and ofindependent curators in Europe, the hidden dangers of databaseaesthetics, the unusually vibrant sound art scene in Jerusalem, andthe challenges of curating and collaborating in the Middle East

DISCUSSION

Interview with Nat Muller


Interview with Nat Muller, by Marisa S. Olson
Nat Muller is a Venezuela-born Dutch curator and writer living inRotterdam and working internationally. She went to High School inBelgium before earning a BA in English Lit from Tel-Aviv Universityand an MA in Lit at Sussex, in the Sexual Dissidence and CulturalChange program. She continues to work on a global scale, organizingexhibitions, performances, talks, and publications on a range ofthemes related to media activism and electronic art. She's workedquite a bit with V2, where she was formerly project manager andcurator. Amongst others she co-curated the Dutch Electronic ArtFestival (DEAF) in 2004, and has participated and organized programsfor Transmediale 2005, ISEA 2002, and many other major festivals. Nathas also collaborated on projects in Eastern Europe, such as "TheTrans_European Picnic: The Art and Media of Accession", and otherfestivals across Europe. All of this made for a very interestingconversation.
I flew from New York to Amsterdam and took a train straight toRotterdam, where I was to spend the evening at Nat's in a sort ofblind date interview scenario. I woke up from a jetlagger's nap tofind that she'd cooked me an amazing meal and after several glasses ofwine we started recording our conversation about her work and aboutnew media, in general. We discussed the relationship of food tocurating, the status of cyberfeminism, the status of Holland and ofindependent curators in Europe, the hidden dangers of databaseaesthetics, the unusually vibrant sound art scene in Jerusalem, andthe challenges of curating and collaborating in the Middle East

DISCUSSION

Re: NYT review of ArtBase 101


Hi, all. I thought I'd chip-in, here, as one of those artists for whom
Ms. Boxer didn't have time (maybe because I fell into that "just
entertainment" category, though I wanted to fall into the works that
"try to make you politically aware, or at least wary" niche)--or as
someone interested in the evolution of [media] art criticism....

Let's start with the good... Boxer gives nice props to Rhizome and she
seems to be calling someone charming, which is always flattering (?).
She also seems to imply that these works are demanding of time and are
worthy of the same--though she doesn't respond to that call...

She acknowledges that it's a big challenge to curate a retrospective
survey of something that (to some extent) is still happening and that
it's hard to mount a physical show of "web work," which is (I'm sure)
what we are all calling our work... This is an area in which Lauren
and Rachel (and Kevin and the crew) really succeeded with the show.
They also managed to show people the diverse ways in which artists are
using the internet. It's not only that artists are using it in
different thematic ways (ie according to their schema of e-commerce,
online celebrity, etc.), but also in different formal ways. I love
that someone who sees this show will realize that Paperrad's
sculptural installation is net art because it uses a Google image
search, or that the 01's photos are net art in the sense that they
document a project realized on the internet. Yes, we are all short on
time, but I think this is less a determinant in [making or viewing]
the work than the fact that we are all unique creatures who use the
internet in different ways, after the ten years surveyed in the show.

But let me get at the review more directly because I take issue with
the points made (or implied) as much as the manner in which they were
made. I totally agreed with Palli's witty review of the review. That's
exactly how it reads to me. Jason said he found Boxer's description of
MTAA's 1YPV spot-on, but to me it missed the boat. Or, rather, it
ignored the elephant in the room--despite the fact that it related
directly to the theme she seemed to have picked for her missive. The
"year" that MTAA suggests viewers devote to their performance video is
not a normal year. It can be experienced in increments of real or
artificial time. My computer could "watch" the video when I do not,
whereas I can watch it without being credited with such watching
(since I never login when I look at it). The piece puts an onus on the
viewer to do all the "work," since it sews together clips of a shorter
duration--ie we are supposed to watch them in the room for one year,
but they are not in the room for that year. (Or are they, this is a
more existential question.) Boxer acknowledges the former but not the
latter point, which is exactly what defines the piece. In fact, 1YPV
is not only time-based because of the year in its title or the fact
that it requires extended, and possibly clocked, viewing, but because
it is an *update* from a date/era in which time is measured,
experienced, and faked differently.

Similar points apply to Simon's "Every Icon," which underscores the
mortality of the viewer, and perhaps even of art, by making us realize
that we will never see every icon, but also that image-making (despite
its historical, formal, or critical constitution as "simply" a
process[es] of mimesis and recombinance, which E.I. also makes clear),
is a job that's never complete, though intellectually it is possible
at the point of near-infinity (or is it entropy?). Simon's piece is
predicated on its status as an installation. Its end-date is in
question, but it is always defined by its start-date, which changes in
various iterations that are human-defined. This means that it's
different when it starts at X-date at the Guggenheim, vs Y-date in
Alex Galloway's office (actually, there it seems to be turned off), or
at Z-date in the home of Jill Schmo art collector.

What does this have to do with Boxer's review? Simon banked on the
fact that she wouldn't have time for it. That, like the time-faking in
MTAA's peice, is worth mentioning.

Now I don't want to personally attack Sarah Boxer (though she is very
much worth taking the time to Google!), but I know that she has a
background in psychoanalytic theory and I find it unfortunate that her
reading in a science of interpretation has not parlayed into
interpretations of art. As is true of her other articles recently
discussed here, I think that this was, ultimately, a missive rather
than a review. (Again, Palli said it all.) She doesn't adequately
discuss the experience of the pieces, though the intended experiences
were, in many senses, constitutive of the works. She says, simply,
that she doesn't have time for them. (I wonder what her editor thinks
of this, especially as she's writing for an art section and not a
lifestyle section--the two are still separate, right?--but
anyway.....)

So here is my theory, or what I feel is happening... (And Boxer's
writings are simply a good example of this problem, but not the only
example.) I think that we are seeing a contemporary redux of what used
to be called "criticism by beauty." This mode of "critique" was
popularized in the era of French New Wave filmmaking. In short, it was
characterized by reviews in which the writers seemed to have said to
themselves, "If I don't understand it, it must be brilliant." This led
to a lack of true engagement with works and an overstatement of films'
brilliance, but without justification or explanation--judgement
without interpretation. I see the same happening in contemporary
criticism of media art (which may, in a material sense, be the root of
Boxer's distillation of the pieces she mentioned to one-liners),
except that, rather than deem the work brilliant, the under-informed
or under-engaged "critic" deems it awful. If the earlier era was one
of "critcism by beauty," I'd call the era entrenched by Boxer that of
"criticism by repulsion." (Though we could have a fun
naming-contest--is it crit by repulsion, abjection, negligence,
nausea, intimidation, boredom, etc...) Goodness knows I am not denying
the culpability of the artist for their relationship to their audience
(which shouldn't be mutually exclusive from the critic--all of this we
began to discuss in this earlier thread:
http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread407&text3154), but I think
in the ten years surveyed by this show, we've come to a point when it
no longer suffices to criticize something by saying "I don't get it"
and/or "I don't have time for this."

For now the writings we're seeing entrench the fallacy that much of
the early academic writing promoted vis a vis new media: that it is
without indexicality. This criticism by repulsion, this reduction of
Cory Arcangel's (whose name has no "h" in it) or Amy Alexander's, or
anyone else's work to one-liners, implies that net art is incapable of
having a semiotic function, or employing shades of meaning, of
symbolism, or of implication. This gives the work the short life-span
of the viewers' attention-span. I can't help but believe that this
truncation is media-specific--that this perceived lack of polyvalence
is not only pinned upon the work by the perceiver, but that it is
specific to their assessment of "web work." I want to say, in
explaining this point, that the critic (nay, writer) assumes that net
art has all the depth of other silly net memes, but this would be to
indulge the idea that things on the internet are somehow inherently
shallow, which I just can't manage to believe. (It would be like
assuming that TV commercials are shallow because they are short,
mainstream, and entertainment-oriented. Not all things on the internet
can be described in those terms, but neither net art nor memes nor ads
operate without metaphor and metonymy, to put it in psychoanalytic
terms.)

I do believe that good art work is aware of its contemporary political
economy and that our contemporary political economy is one defined by
attention spans. This, however, does not mean, categorically, that all
net work (or all art work) should or should not be expecte to have the
effects of ritalin...

I don't know if Boxer subscribes to the 20-second rule of
art-observation (the average time someone determined people spend
looking at paintings), or if she thinks things in different spaces (ie
movie theatres vs galleries vs on the WWW) deserve different amounts
of time. I would assume that she had a limited word count, in which
case us under-reviewed media artists are lucky that her brevity led to
more of our names finding their way into the NYT, despite a lack of
engagement. The truth is, it's great that Rhizome & the New Museum
would mount a show like this and that the New York Times would send
someone to review it. No doubt it gives a bit more cultural "value" to
what we're all doing. One of these days (at least before "Every Icon"
is finished somewhere, if not before someone officially logs a year in
front of 1YPV), I'd like to see shows like these get real
criticism--by which I mean true reviews that engage in a process of
interpretation.

Marisa

DISCUSSION

Re: Critical condition (LA Times)


Jim, thanks for your comments.

I think there are a few other/additional points to make. They all sort
of revolve around the fact that the relationship between the critic
and the audience is often polarized. This, to me, is unfortunate,
becomes it places the critic in the position of being expected to
"bring something" to the work that the "audience" does not. It also
not only unfairly deitizes the critic, but it leaves artists making
work for critics and not for audiences. I agree that the critic should
be more involved in an unpacking of poetics than a passsing of
judgement (though many of us have to cop to passing judgement as a
result of a work's poetics, or lack thereof). But I think that a
reading of the rhetoric of a work (in any medium) has to consider how
the work positions itself in relation to its audience. When the critic
is divorced from the audience, no such reading can occur.

There's come to be an interesting situation vis a vis the criticism of
media art, under the influence of a number of factors... In general,
there is a lack of viable arts publications as sustaining one in this
economic climate is difficult. Media arts publications are even harder
to come by, and most of those pay poorly if at all. For these reasons
and others (not the least of which is the perceived novelty of the
field and resultant dissonance), there is a lack of seasoned, educated
media arts critics. A look at recent NY Times pieces on new media art
(or the lack thereof) will provide a good example. The few good
writers do not seem to be getting assignments and one less-good writer
has unfortunately been given more there, lately, but all in all,
coverage is minimal. We've thrown ourselves into a self-critiquing
system which is wildly disproportionate in relation to, well, all
kinds of things... Some of us are over-educated and under-informed,
some of us look at a lot of work and can't find a means of critiquing
it, others of us are daunted by the technical and philosophical
vocabularies that pervade our field. The many processes of
appropriation, sampling, and reiteration that have come to make so
many great media artworks great does not make the system of critique
any more cohesive, wherein those who don't know their art history are
doomed to misrepeat it. There are, particularly on this list, a
handful of seriously talented, intelligent, and well-versed critics,
and so many of them are struggling against production barriers and
within faulty communication channels, so that the flow of ideas and
meaningful exchanges all to often becomes buried under other forms of
labor, if not under animosity and competition within the pecking order
of a rank struggling for classification.

My hope is that this will just get better with time, with pedagogy,
with the long view, etc.

Marisa

On 5/22/05, Jim Andrews <jim@vispo.com> wrote:
> Thanks for Scott Timberg's "Critical Condition" at
> http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-ca-critics22may22,0,42636
> 05.story?coll=cl-home-
>
> The relation between artist and critic has always been tense.
>
> But what is at stake? What's a critic good for besides pr and trading in the
> market of reputation?
>
> Walt Whitman said "great art demands a great audience".
>
> There's something at stake to a great audience in what art does. Besides
> entertainment. What is it? Ezra Pound said that "art is news that stays
> news." Note how that idea references both the contemporary and beyond the
> contemporary. Contemporary art can be intensely relevant to what's happening
> now, but it's aware of the larger contexts of the events that continue to
> reverberate through the corridors of eternal existence. Whether you think of
> the corridors as in The Shining or Myst or whatever.
>
> A great audience is involved in the construction of the meaning of a work of
> art. There's the obelisk. And then there's the story it is part of. Works of
> art may tell stories, but they're also involved with everyone in the culture
> doing their bit to impart insight and meaning to contemporary life.
>
> It isn't that the critic is irrelevant. It's that the culture cannot bear to
> look.
>
> The below quote from Timberg's article (he is quoting Andras Szanto) misses
> the enduring point of criticism.
>
> "In fact, anything now can be art, from a ray of light to a bit of feces in
> a plastic box. But it has ultimately enfeebled the critic in that
> traditional chest-thumping, oracular way, where he or she can prescribe or
> pass judgment. If the very premise of the art world is that anything goes,
> what do you base judgments on?"
>
> Criticism isn't just about judgements on the value of art. It's also about
> taking the poetics further, unfolding it, engaging with it, seeing where it
> works as an instrument of thought and feeling and insight and where it
> doesn't. Seeing what the poetics implies.
>
> Thanks for pointing out the article, Marisa. Very interesting and worth
> reading!
>
> ja
> http://vispo.com
>
>
>
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