Re: <eyebeam><blast> Internet, modernisation and net.art

[Ellen Fernandez Sacco <esacco@ucla.edu>]

>{ brad brace } <bbrace@wired.com> posted an excerpt from
>http://switch.sjsu.edu:/web/art.online2/brett.links/conjuring.html
>
>"Art as represented on the web, the hundreds of museum, gallery,
>education and working artist sites, serve to conceal that it is art
>practice itself that is dead.
>
>A perhaps more accurate way of positioning art within such an analysis
>is that art is an impotent cultural form living on artificial life
>support through art administration and institutions.
>
>Art in this sense, on the web or in the world, exists to rejuvenate the

>fiction of art. This notion of art as living meaninglessly on
artificial
>life support impacts a variety (perhaps a plurality), of less
>theoretical social perspectives.
>
>It would be sad if artists were the last people to either understand or

>accept that this analysis has both enough theoretical validation and
>public support to undercut the cultural impact of almost anything
called
>art. If this were the case, there would be no time to escape what
>amounts to a burning house."

I think that artists are not among "the last people to either understand
or
accept this analysis" if anything, this viewpoint overlooks community
based
or even individual efforts to use cultural forms to sustain identities
and
expression, in spite of the current structures of art administration and

institutions. The thoughts expressed in Brace's excerpt are reminiscent
of
those variously heralded "end of"s which seem to occur at moments when a

space becomes opened to those usually outside of the system.
(afrika.com's
posting of "e-race" a few days ago, I think relates to this issue)
The US has a long history of non-governmental support and suspicion for
the
arts that goes back to the nation's founding. It also has a history of
resistance and circumvention of strictures across a variety of issues-
the
house has been on fire many many times.   Sondheim's question, >For what

purpose, all of this practice, for whom, for what audiences,within what
political economy? With what histories, for that matter/ gets to the
issues
that will have to be rethought constantly in the face of totalization,
manifesto and foreclosure brought on by the pressures of the global
marketplace that diversifies constantly. The relationship of
artmaking/cultural practices to self determination is only obscured
further
by focusing on too big a picture (art as impotent cultural forms in the
culture warehouses of the world, getting lost in the definition of what
"art" is), but I don't want to wax utopic either. Pathologizing
metaphors
for models of working through culture presents the risk of creating new
binarisms, new us/them models. How time gets represented in regard to
all
of this (the location and positioning of 'art') is important to
consider.







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