Making
Aesthetic Judgments in the Information Age
Americans
for the Arts Conference
Denver,
Colorado
June 6, 1998
Lecture Notes
When did the
"information age" begin in the arts?
What were
the implications/reactions to it?
Walter Benjamin
in his essay "Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction" said
that the image of a work of art was dead, it had no aura.
The invention
of photography
and photo mechanical reproduction began in the late 19th century.
The struggle
for artist became the effort to control the context as well as the content
of art.
The Dream,
1910,
by
Henri
Rousseau
believed that modernism meant that the individual's desire to be an artist
meant more than style. Style for Rousseau was the way one wanted to paint.
Picasso invented context and
painted out from it. Cubism is information seen from all angles simultaneously.
It is cyberspace.
Broadway
Boogie Woogie,1942, by
Mondrian in his essay :The New
Plastic in Painting Mondrian wrote a brilliant manifesto of interior
expression. Art no longer needed to represent the appearance of nature, more
importantly it needed to represent the human spirit in relationship to nature,
"a pure expression of harmony, a pure expression of equilibrated
order." His essay is about being digital in an analog world.
Network of
Standard Stoppages
Bottle Rack:
It has changed its destination by
Duchamp presented us with an
art that is the integration of text, image, and intention. Duchamp was a
curator of mystery. He created context, content, and myth. He showed us the
'readymade' that was constructed of memory. The object could be physical or
not, could be conjured from memory or used as a memory trigger. Objects were
interactive, history was resource, and information was to be acted upon.
Gold Marilyn
Monroe by
Warhol showed us that the
reproduction was real. That high and low culture were integrated. That if you
looked at the thing long enough it would disappear, and reappear an economic
unit, cash. That Marilyn Monroe and Marilyn Monroe's picture were the same
thing and that meaning came from "brushing" the memory slightly,
mechanically.
Michael Lesk: How much information
is there in the world: The Web grows 10 fold year ...by next year it will be
bigger than the Library of Congress. By the year 2000 the production of digital
storage media will out run human production of information to put on them.
World Wide
Web 1997: 2 Terabytes in 63 Inches by
Brewster
Kaele and Alan Rath
The Internet is
a material and a medium for the artist. It is the integration of context,
content, equilibrated order, simultaneity, the desire of individuals, and a
small memory that is now available for molding into a new art. The Internet may
be art, a collective expression of pure harmony. Or it may be just technology.