Presentation: ENSAD, Paris

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On Wednesday, March 23, at 2.30 PM Domenico Quaranta will present the book Media, New Media, Postmedia at the prestigious ENSAD, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

Au cours des dernières décennies, un corpus étendu et complexes de pratiques s’est développé, à la croisée de l’art, la science et les technologies.
Dans les années 1990, avec l’accès grandissante aux technologies et le développement de la culture numérique, cette recherche a explosé et conquis un grand nombre d’artistes: le New Media Art (dit aussi “art numérique”) est né. Pourtant, malgré cette diffusion exponentielle, l’art numérique n’a pas été capable de conquérir le monde de l’art contemporain. Quelles sont les causes de cette exclusion? Un contraste de traditions? Le refus obstiné de la part de la critique officielle à intégrer ces pratiques dans l’histoire de l’art? à l’incompatibilité entre ces formes de création et le marché de l’art?
Le critique et commissaire d’exposition italien Domenico Quaranta accepte le défi et, dans son livre Media, New Media, Postmedia, qui vient de paraitre en Italie, il esquisse une série de réponses à ces interrogations. En critiquant une définition de l’art basée sur la nature technologique des oeuvres, il présente une panoramique international de ce débat actuel et discute les enjeux de l’art à l’âge de l’information.

Review: Flaminio Gualdoni

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Flaminio Gualdoni, “Domenico Quaranta, Media, New Media, Postmedia“, March 2011.

Guardando agli ultimi due decenni, si può ben dire che una parte assai significativa, forse la più importante, della ricerca è estranea al sistema di istituzionalizzazione dell’arte: perché disconosciuta, ma soprattutto perché ha scelto una programmatica estraneità.

Muove da queste considerazioni il ragionamento lucido di Quaranta, l’unico studioso oggi in grado di muoversi lucidamente sul confine tra pratiche canonizzate e pratiche variamente escluse o autoescluse: e s’interroga proprio sul perché questo confine sia stato tracciato, e su chi lo presidii.

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The Future of Art

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What are the defining aesthetics of art in the networked era? How is mass collaboration changing notions of ownership in art? How does micropatronage change the way artists produce and distribute artwork? The Future of Art begins a conversation on these topics and invites your participation.

The Future of Art. An immediated autodocumentary was shot, edited and screened at the Transmediale festival 2011 in Berlin, Germany. More info here.

Notes on the VIP Art Fair

Debate

As it often happens to me, I was late at the VIP Art Fair; and, of course, I forgot the closing time. Yesterday night I thought: «Ok, let’s leave now – I will check some few details tomorrow morning.» I forgot what the organizers said somewhere in their massive pr campaign: «it’s not a website; it is an event.» And this morning I was welcome by a sad message: «Welcome, Domenico Quaranta. Thank you for visiting VIP Art Fair. The 2011 fair has closed. See you again next year.» Too bad.
Actually, I didn’t have so many expectations. And no expectations also means no disappointment. Using the internet as a marketplace is not a new idea. And the fact that we had to wait 2011 to see an online art fair is, to me, just a proof of how much conservative the contemporary art world is. An online art fair would have been a surprise ten years ago. Today, it’s just a puer senex – just born, already obsolete. Today, a Facebook page can provide any of its users with much more than what the VIP Art Fair provided to sellers, collectors and the broader audience. And it never crashes, as Mark Zuckerberg says in The Social Network, and as VIP eventually did.

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Review: Exibart

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Marco Enrico Giacomelli, “Per un pugno di pixel”, in Exibart Onpaper, n° 71, gennaio – febbraio 2011, p. 65. Downloadable pdf here

Una adeguata e intelligente discussione preliminare su terminologia e differenti punti di vista; una rosa limitata di nomi e di esempi, utilizzati quando necessario per illustrare tesi e ipotesi, o dare avvio a ulteriori ragionamenti; sicurezza e chiarezza nel “maneggiare” vecchi e nuovi orientamenti critici; e infine, un numero limitato di proposte teoriche e pratiche per far proseguire il discorso. Pare il decalogo del buon scrittore di saggi, ed è rispettato in toto da Domenico Quaranta in questo suo nuovo libro, il primo dal respiro teorico ampio. Se poi si va a guardare il soggetto dell’analisi, il fatto è ancora più encomiabile, poiché si tratta di quella nebulosa costellazione che è la cosiddetta New Media Art.
Invitando caldamente a leggere il libro – un invito rivolto sia ai “frequentatori” dell’ambiente che ai profani più o meno supponenti – proponiamo una breve sintesi delle posizioni di Quaranta. Cominciando dall’esortazione iniziale a considerare la NMA in chiave sociologica e non tecnologica: “L’espressione NMA descrive l’arte che viene prodotta, discussa, criticata, consumata all’interno di uno specifico ‘mondo dell’arte’”; e ancora: “L’unicità della NMA nell’orizzonte contemporaneo risiede […] nella sua familiarità con le conseguenze culturali che l’avvento di questi media ha prodotto”.

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Edward Shanken

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Edward Shanken just posted on Rhizome some thoughtful side comments to my text “The Postmedia Perspective” (see the previous post). I collected them below. Thanks Eddie!

There are many keen insights in this excerpt from Media, New Media, Postmedia. I hope that Domenico’s whole book will be translated into English, as this teaser demonstrates that it will make a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate that appears to be building significant steam.

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The Postmedia Perspective

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I post hereby the last chapter of the book in English, as it has been published on Rhizome on January 12, 2011. The text is also available in pdf and mobi format (yes, I’m totally into Kindle now 🙂

The following excerpt comes from the final chapter of my book Media, New Media, Postmedia, recently published in Italian by Postmediabooks, who kindly gave Rhizome permission to republish it in English. The book is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called “New Media Art” in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history.

The starting point of the book is that the label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed – as it usually is – as a simple medium-based definition. On the contrary, a work of art – whether based on technology or not – is usually classed as New Media Art when it is produced, exhibited and discussed in a specific “art world,” the world of New Media Art. This art world came into being as a cultural niche in the Sixties and Seventies, and became a bona fide art world in the Eighties and Nineties, developing its own means of production and distribution, and cultivating an idea of “art” that is completely different from that entertained by the contemporary art world. If you are familiar with Lev Manovich’s distinction between “Duchamp Land” and “Turing Land” (1996), you already get the point. According to Manovich, Duchamp Land (the contemporary art world) requires art objects that are “oriented towards the ‘content’”, “complicated” and that share an “ironic, self-referential, and often literally destructive attitude towards its material”; on the other hand, Turing Land (the New Media Art world) is oriented “towards new, state-of-the-art computer technology,” and produces artworks that are “simple and usually lacking irony” and that “take technology which they use always seriously.” 1 Both art worlds have changed a lot over the last decade, but the distinction is still valid to a point.

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Catherine David

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“I have frequently been asked about my relationship to the New Media. My answer has always been: New technologies are nothing other than new means to an end. Alone they are of significance; it always depends upon how they are applied. I am against naive faith in progress, glorification of the possibilities of technological developments. Much of what today´s artists produce with New Media is very boring. But I am just as opposed to the deuncination of technology. For me technology in itself is not a category according to which I judge works. This type of categorization is just as outmoded as division into classical art genres (painting, sculpture…). I am interested in the idea of a project; ideally the means of realizing the project should arise from the idea itself.”

Catherine David, “dx and new media“, June 20, 1997