The Internet vs. The Art Gallery
I visited the Tate Modern museum last week in London, and left very annoyed. It’s not that this isn’t one of the finest art galleries anywhere in the world. The building, a converted power station in central London next to the Thames, is spectacular. The collection is excellent, including works by Dali, Rothko, Magritte, Picasso, Pollack, Warhol, and other luminaries. No, I think I have another problem entirely, and maybe it’s my problem, and maybe it’s a problem with Art, capital A, and the way that Art is handled by contemporary Western society, at least at the above-ground, publicly-funded, landmark-building level.
The Tate is a big building full of often inscrutable paintings by mostly dead or aging artists who are, we are told, famous. Next to each piece is a little description that uses big words to tell you what to think of it. In the bookstore are titles such as Louise Bourgeoise: Deconstructing the Father, Reconstructing the Father.
I’m being mean.
Actually, I like Pollock and Magritte and Dali, and though I know little about Ms. Bourgeoise, the work on display seems interesting enough. This is not the problem.
According to the Tate Modern web site, “international modern art .. is defined as art since 1900.” Fair enough. My first concrete criticism, then, is where is the technology? Aside from a couple film loops — one of which actually appeared to be playing back from an aging tape — the gallery contained nothing more sophisticated than a light bulb. This is astonishing, given the degree to which technology transformed every aspect of the 20th century, including art. While it is instructive to note that movements such as Cubism contained responses to the rapid progress of science and technology in the early 20th century, this completely misses the fact that technology did far more than merely influence the subjects of art: it utterly changed the media of art. Correspondingly, where in the Tate’s collection are the photographs, the films, the electronic installations? Where is the engagement with the insane new visual capabilities of digital image-making, and yes, where is the internet? It’s a cop-out to say that no credible or significant tech art exists; I might mention SF MOMA’s fabulous 2001 exhibition Art In Technological Times, or Ben Rubin’s incredible Listening Post, and that’s without even touching such louche topics as video games and Burning Man.
It’s true that I am a fan of tech art, perhaps over-zealously so. Yes, paintings are good. Yes, people are still painting. But the kids today are doing strange things with laptops, microcontrollers, cheap digital video cameras, cheap image processing software, cheap everything. They have ubiquitous net access, computer-controlled fire, stepper motors, ferromagnetic fluid and Web 2.0. And they’re playing with all this tech in huge numbers, across the entire span of (industrialized) civilization. In some very real way, the Tate Modern collection shows us a world that never got past 1975.
However, I think that all of this is really the symptom of another, deeper problem, and I will certainly not be the first to say this. The Art World is out of touch.
Where does art come from and how is it represented within a society? That is the crusade I’m on about. Really. Oh, I know damn well that others have gone down this road; Dada, Derrida, and Duchamp come to mind. But they seem to have been concerned mostly with what art is. Personally, I don’t really care to answer that question; I think both Brian Eno’s definition of culture as “everything humans don’t have to do” and the classic “I know it when I see it” are practical enough yardsticks. In the smallest possible soundbite, my question is more about who makes art. Or, what is the distinction between audience and artist?
Galley space is hard to come by, doubly so if the art on its walls has to sell to pay rent. Art collectors are, let’s face it, subject to the influence of fads, marketing, and hype just like everyone else. And as artists throughout history know well, money and art are hard to mix. This is not to say that it is impossible for an artist to maintain both integrity and solvency, but the physical constraints of the art market do have their effect. In this economic model of art creation, there are certain power structures that control what gets shown, what gets sold, and ultimately what gets created. I’m not saying anyone involved in the Art World is malevolent, greedy, or (even worse) has bad taste, but I do wonder — what is the essential functional difference between a museum and a record company?
Enter the internet.
Enter YouTube. Enter MySpace, Facebook, and all the others. Enter blogs, cheap DV cameras, cheap professional-grade software, and accessible technology of all kinds. If the point of Web 2.0 is to blur the distinction between information producer and consumer, then surely that shift applies also to any art-form that can be represented digitally. The obvious corollary is this: there is no logistical or economic reason why anyone who wishes should not be an artist, and have their art just as accessible as anyone else’s. Just as the journalism establishment has been forced to rethink itself after the advent of blogs, the Art Establishment may very soon find itself forced to reconsider all aspects of not only the creation and distribution of art, but what it means to be an artist.
This is not to say that every kid with iMovie is suddenly a cinematic auteur; most of the videos on YouTube, most of the literary blogs, most of the laptop-and-headphones tracks being composed and shared are, quite frankly, crap. Nor am I suggesting that random strangers should be allowed to walk in off the street and nail something to the gallery wall (but then again, that would also be an interesting experiment, being more or less the real-world version of the Wikipedia model.) Yet new forces have been unleashed by cheap creation and communication technology, and suddenly the classic models by which Art is mediated within a society look very old-fashioned. The museums of tomorrow must open, or democratize if you like, the process by which art arrives on its walls. Or plugs into its network. This is especially true of public galleries, that is to say publicly-funded galleries.
I will offer a few examples of concrete possibilities.
First of all, why is there no space dedicated to the creation of art within an art gallery? There could be seminars by visiting or resident artists. There could be classes, computer labs, a tool library. Many of the most prestigious hospitals are also universities; why are not our major public galleries also, to some degree, public art schools? The tools for very sophisticated art are now ridiculously cheap and available, but what is still lacking is a demystification of the process of art creation. The people who make art are just people: that is the missing message of our high gallery walls.
Second, who decides what goes on those walls? There are, right now, a number of very interesting social models for content selection. These include Wikipedia, various rating approaches such as YouTube’s voting and Slashdot’s moderation system, Amazon’s recommendation engine, Google News’ story selection algorithm, and for that matter Google’s web search itself, which gains most of its effectiveness by interpreting the hyperlinks to a page as implicit endorsements of its contents. None of these are perfect systems, or perfectly applicable to the problem of selecting what art gets to go in a public gallery. However, they point to a fundamental conceptual shift: the “curator” might think of themselves less as the arbiter of an exhibit and more of its moderator — a term which has acquired, in recent decades, a new and very internet-specific meaning.
Ultimately, my primary goal here is to soften up the distinction between artist and audience, just as the invention of the printing press created the social category of “author”. Yes, there needs to be some structure to this: by now it is obvious that ten million uneducated consumers with DV cameras have yet to produce a fresh new cinema. Nor is the entire history of art suddenly irrelevant. We are in dire need of teachers, advisers, guidance. We need social structures — both human and software — that support and channel this sudden outpouring of technology-enabled creation and communication. We need those who actually know something about art to engage, to lead, to teach. In my view, this was always the true role of the art expert.
Technology has, as usual, changed everything. This is includes art, and not just its technical aspects but the social aspects as well. The dialog of art-in-culture is suddenly bigger, much bigger than it ever could have been imagined to become. Academics, curators, and others currently in power in the art establishment have the option of participating in this larger dialog, or not. What they cannot do — if they truly believe that art is in some way relevant to society — is ignore it. If our contemporary museums do not choose to engage the astonishing possibilities of modern art-culture and art-making, they will quickly cease to be contemporary.
November 12th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
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