February 18, 2002

8:47 PM

validation:(nytimes) the guggenheim has purchased two pieces of online art for its collection for a reported $10-15K each. most interesting to me was that the "valuation of nonphysical art" hoo-ha is surprisingly brief. the art world may finally understand that art concepts, not art objects are valuable.
posted by patricking (23 comments total)

/me waves!

hey! i make stuff like that! send me money!
posted by jcterminal at 8:53 PM on February 18, 2002

How does something that can potentially be easily duplicated and propogated have value?

And if it is not in a somewhat permanent medium, is it at all probable that future generations will enjoy/appreciate this 'art?' (I use quotations because I'm not sure what the term art means anymore)

If the Mona Lisa is considered a great work of art, is it's timelessness one of the reasons for it's greatness, because generation upon generation has come to appreciate it? (Don't misconstrue that as a statement about what makes art good, it's just a question, and I'm curious what people think about this issue and the relative impermanence of internet art)
posted by insomnyuk at 8:55 PM on February 18, 2002

So is Duchamp finally happy in dirt nap land? I'm glad to see this barrier finally fall, but look towards the next one approaching. Joe Taxpayer is now entirely desensitized to all things shocking, and no longer worries about Piss Christ or Mapplethore, but I bet he damn well won't understand paying good money for things with no tangible artifact. The NEA better bunker down for this fight.

To insomnyuk, I can only say that an idea and a process are just as important as what you end up with. At the end of 6 years of art school, I can define the things I did well as those efforts that resulted in a good story, not neccesarily in something that still hangs on my wall.
posted by machaus at 9:03 PM on February 18, 2002

Wow, does this mean Superbad is worth Billions now?
posted by chaz at 9:14 PM on February 18, 2002

art world may finally understand that art concepts, not art objects are valuable

Huh? Finally? I've felt like the "art world" has been shoving this idea down my throat (whether good for me or not is another story) forever. I mean how else do you justify the whole 'found objects' movement? (e.g. A toilet seat is art because it's on display? I don't have the exact statistics but I'm pretty sure a toilet seat has been duplicated lots and lots of times.)
posted by victors at 9:15 PM on February 18, 2002

insomnyuk:
How does something that can potentially be easily duplicated and propogated have value?

And if it is not in a somewhat permanent medium, is it at all probable that future generations will enjoy/appreciate this 'art?'

impermanence isn't really new to art at all...
aeschylus, anyone? or sophocles?
posted by juv3nal at 9:19 PM on February 18, 2002

chaz: i think superbad's in a collection. can't remember which one, though. the whitney, maybe?
posted by patricking at 9:47 PM on February 18, 2002

machaus: that's interesting, but for me the viewer, when it comes to most art, the process means nothing to me, the only important thing is what I experience by viewing the art. I guess to you, on the other hand, the process is equally important.

I don't know if that influences the value of the art in anyway, though.

aeschylus, anyone? or sophocles? - juv3nal

Their 'art' is different. Their words are somehow permanent, whereas the Mona Lisa is the original, physical work of a master. (Which is why the Mona Lisa is priceless, and facsimiles run $10 on the street corner outside the museum). Different arts in different mediums are valuable for different reasons, methinks.
posted by insomnyuk at 10:30 PM on February 18, 2002

i think superbad's in a collection. can't remember which one, though. the whitney, maybe?

It was in a show at the whitney, does that mean it is "sold?" If I've ever had to call one site art, superbad would be it.
posted by mathowie at 11:00 PM on February 18, 2002

How does something that can potentially be easily duplicated and propogated have value?

I think there's precedent for this - maybe felix gonzalez-torres' "stack" pieces where the work of art is a stack of papers, and museum-goers can freely take them. Or how about video art? it might not be quite as easy as a web-based piece, but it's definitely physically possible to get a copy of an artist's video that's indistinguishable from the copy in a museum's collection.

And if it is not in a somewhat permanent medium, is it at all probable that future generations will enjoy/appreciate this 'art?'

I'm guessing that part of the process of archiving art that exists solely on a computer would be maintaining backups that won't degrade, and more importantly keeping a system on hand that can display these works in the event that the technology becomes obsolete. So while you can view the pieces online now, maybe in 20 years you'll only be able to view them on a really old system that's kept under careful guard in a gallery at the guggenheim because nobody has a computer that reads HTML anymore.

I think it was the last William Gibson book, All Tomorrow's Parties, where there was a character that kept a bunch of old systems running and charged people for the service of reading their old media? I guess I'm picturing something like that.
posted by chrisege at 11:07 PM on February 18, 2002

insomnyuk: Their words are somehow permanent...

um, so is the code. just print it out and, in a sense, it's no different than the text of a play...
posted by juv3nal at 11:45 PM on February 18, 2002

Ideas and process are not as important as what you end up with, unless you are a philosopher or thinker or prophet. We're talking about visual arts here, a specific vocation devoted to things tangible or visual. The issue here is that the digital/net age has thrown a wrench into the whole operating system pun intended of the museum/art institution: the idea that visual arts are a commodity and unique. The basic purpose of the museum is as a guarded vault for the safe storage and display of objects. The beauty of the net is that it is as truly egalitarian as any media (save television and perhaps films). The net renders the definitions used by the typical institution useless.

This, I believe, can be related to the bottom-out of the dot-com boom: in that case, concept was pitched as an equivalent to product; some websites had nothing to offer except an idea, and often not even a concrete one. Initially, large sums were spent by venture capitalists to further these enterprises. But then reality hit, in one form or other, and the backers backed out. And which sites drained away and closed down? Ones that had truly nothing to offer. Ones that did produce something, be it from a retail angle like Amazon or a discussion angle, like Metafilter, stayed alive. People keep going to Amazon because it offers a remarkable service (in my opinion). People keep visiting MeFi and other sites for their remarkable services. MeFi stays alive because both the creator of it and the readership understand its value, even if it isn't generating much capital.

And so with art forms. Value is not inherent in any object. There is no divine ordination of value in an artwork; a particular work of art is valuable because it is deemed valuable by successive generations. The net works on this system as well, only it cost very little to archive data, compared to the storage and protection of a tangible object. And, because of the net’s egalitarianism, there is no barrier between creator and audience, save an internet connection and a browser. So one of the beauties of the net is that people who create digital works of any kind (visual arts, music, writing, etc.) don’t need the museum. The statements made by Ippolito seem to define the museum as simply a preservation organization. But the museum is much more than that. The are value givers; fiscal value givers in the sense that if a museum collection acquires a work of art by a particular creator, all that creator’s work becomes instantly more valuable. And they are value givers in the sense that, generally, the work they advocate is more respected simply by their ordination.

But the net and digital work do not need this kind of high-elite advocacy. One can reach a far greater number of people on the net as opposed to in a museum or commercial gallery (for instance, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website, "...attendance at the Museum (including the Main Building and The Cloisters) has averaged more than five million." Compare this to a day's worth of MeFi's stats, so I imagine MeFi, in a year's time, might rival the Met for visitors.

So the only purpose I can see to the Guggenheim collecting digital and net based art is that it makes the creator some money and it guarantees some modicum of future preservation. But couldn't those things be acheived in a much more efficient way through the net rather than through a museum? So whose digital art do they deem worthy, and why?

The plastic arts (painting, sculpture) once did not strive to land immediately in a museum. The whole concept of the museum institution is a relatively new one. One problem with the arts in general is that many artist create work with the museum (or other institution) in mind. Work loses its dynamism and relevancy; it is created to go straight to the grave. The museum becomes a mausoleum for things that have outlived the cultures that produced them.

But net based art has not outlived its medium or culture. The net is still here and vibrant. Why entomb it when it has a long life ahead of it here, for free, without the museum's intervention?

Sorry for the long post, but as an artist still interested in making and looking at things, and also one who enjoys creating on the net as well, this topic sparked an interest. And it brings up many important questions, among which is: do things created on the internet need or benefit from the intervention of institutions? And do net creations need to be put under the rubrick of 'art' to make them viable and valuable?

I don't think so. I think the art rubrick is stretched to it's limit. A great painting is a great painting. A snow shovel is a snow shovel. A beautiful website is a beautiful website. Each is perfectly suited to its purpose and medium. Why stuff them into the same category? They're all fine without equivocation.
posted by evanizer at 12:00 AM on February 19, 2002

:::swoon:::
posted by patricking at 12:17 AM on February 19, 2002

Insomnyuk: Regarding duplication and whatnot, you do realize that nobody is sure that the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa, right? And the case is easily the same for several other great, timeless, blahblah pieces of art.
posted by Su at 12:21 AM on February 19, 2002

insomnyuk: Their words are somehow permanent...

juv3nal: um, so is the code. just print it out and, in a sense, it's no different than the text of a play...

There is an important difference. The words of a play make up a template that is up for interpretation. The code is going to yield the exact same result, every time you run it. I guess you could argue that the result may show up differently on Windows than on a Mac, but I don't think that's really comparable to the variety of interpretation that a play gives the director/adaptor/performers/what have you.

evanizer: There is no divine ordination of value in an artwork; a particular work of art is valuable because it is deemed valuable by successive generations.

I believe the reason successive generations value a particular work is that there is a divine (or at least, objective) ordination of value in art.

However, I agree with most of what evanizer said anyway (if I understood it correctly); I just have different reasons. A good painting has artistic value that is not affected by the monetary or prestige value imbued in it by a museum. Such value can either reflect the inherent quality of the art, or not; not everyone may recognize the quality, but it's there.
posted by bingo at 1:29 AM on February 19, 2002

bingo:
i do agree with you, which is why i said "in a sense."
my point was only that the net.art project has the potential for being "permanent" in the way that insomnyuk talks about the text of a play.
if anything, the fact that code is less open to interpretation makes it more permanent if we associate permanence with the capacity to reproduce the same experience;
eg:

if we say that an analog sound recording decays because after time it no longer reproduces the original sound with the same degree of fidelity, then it follows that code has more "lasting power" (assuming we preserve the hardware/os to run it) than the script for a play because, after an extended period of time, the code is likely to produce something more similar to the original than a re-enactment of a play would.

Even if we could gather together the same actors/director/stage crew, they would age (decay) much more quickly than the hardware and software needed to run a web site.
posted by juv3nal at 1:47 AM on February 19, 2002

How does something that can potentially be easily duplicated and propogated have value? [insomnyuk]

I think they said the same thing about photographs, way back when. And CDs. And software. And, well, you get the picture.
posted by ook at 7:41 AM on February 19, 2002

The creator of one of these works, John F. Simon Jr., has been doing some really fascinating things with online art over the past several years. His Every Icon applet is one of my favorite works of art in any media. I bought one a few years ago after being introduced to it on Stating the Obvious.

Every Icon cycles through every icon that's possible to display in a 24-by-24 pixel grid. There are 4.29 billion variations possible on the top line of the grid, and it takes 16 months to display them all. Displaying all the variations on the top two lines would take 16 billion years.
posted by rcade at 10:32 AM on February 19, 2002

Superbad was part of a collection of net artworks exhibited at the Whitney for their biennial show. (and deservingly so, as it's been around, for what, forever? well. 1995.)

EV: Briefly: as far as the reason behind having museums preserve net artworks: the internet, actually, has proven a poor preservationist -- many "old" (read: '95-'97) works are either incomplete or broken (due to, from what I understand, changing standards for HTML and Java. Or even the unavailability of plug-ins.). People not dedicated to the business of preservation cannot always adequately house these works. Every Icon, which rcade mentions above, is a great example of the fantastic commitment to preservation that can be required of these works. Sure, there's probably no museum that can preserve it for 16 billion years, but shouldn't we at least shoot for 100? 200? The internet *already* is comprised of an incredibly different landscape than a few years ago, and data, assuredly, has been lost. Furthermore, it's still questionable what ways are best to ideally preserve a work -- for example, you'd want to preserve a piece that is primarily static in a much different manner than one that is based around audience interventions. An unguided internet is not going to always make the best choices about what happens to these works. Museums (mostly the larger ones concerned with contemporary art) have already made provisions to hire people to make decisions about how to preserve digital artworks.

The plastic arts (painting, sculpture) once did not strive to land immediately in a museum. The whole concept of the museum institution is a relatively new one. One problem with the arts in general is that many artist create work with the museum (or other institution) in mind. Work loses its dynamism and relevancy; it is created to go straight to the grave. The museum becomes a mausoleum for things that have outlived the cultures that produced them.

this is a really really interesting assertion, which i've never thought about. Hopefully later today I will have time to clarify some of the above thoughts and write to your statement. Somewhere around here I have a great list of articles to share on this matter as well...
posted by fishfucker at 11:12 AM on February 19, 2002

Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" would probably interest posters and readers of this thread.


Personally, I thought the Guggenheimers showed poor taste. I don't know Simon's work but I know and love Napier: FEED and RIOT are more conceptually provocative and visually interesting than what the Gug bought.
posted by ludicdruid at 12:50 PM on February 19, 2002

juv3nal: ...if anything, the fact that code [for a digital work of art] is less open to interpretation [than the text of a stage play] makes it more permanent if we associate permanence with the capacity to reproduce the same experience...

Yes, though I see you have left room for my disagreement on the question of how important an exact reproduction of the experience is, in terms of the continuance of the qualities that make the work great to begin with. If we say, Hamlet is a great play, we are not saying that the first performance was great, and everything since is a pale shadow as an unfortunate result of the "decay" of the physical elements that made up the original production. Rather, the greatness is in the text itself, and part of its enduring power is that it can be re-created over a spectrum of variation that at once makes the work fresh and new, while still preserving (even celebrating) the qualities that made it so good to begin with. In other words, the play itself is not a tangible thing; it is a map of an aesthetic pattern, like a mathematical formula (or, like a musical composition). The only way humanity can lose it is to forget about it.

We could then argue that a play's impermanent aspect is also its flexibility, which is also what keeps its artistic ideas accessible to new generations, which is part of what will make it last.
posted by bingo at 4:00 PM on February 19, 2002

(in Philadelphia for a few days, now using a Kinko's computer for 25 cents a minute, so writing fast)

fishfucker (I never thought I'd type that): Thanks for your response to my post. I have thought about this archiving problem, and indeed it is a pretty daunting one. Artists usually have to do their own preservation/archiving until they attain some degree of sucess. After that, it is a good question as to who would do it. I sucked a few of the World Trade Center tourist sites off the net on the night of 9/11 because I realized that they would disappear soon. It was a way of saving some remnant of the past in the midst of that destruction. I wonder if things like sitesrelated to the WTC will be archived like some of the memorial materials around New York. I think they are interesting documents of a culture that has changed.

I wish there were a seperate institution that was dedicated solely to the preservation, collection and promotion of digital/net artwork. I think such an institution would be viable and important, and would better serve the medium than a Guggenheim afterthought.

I know there are institutions like this for video/film arts. I have made several feature-length video pieces, all made in analog, edited on 3/4 umatic tapes. The life span of magnetic media is a short one, so I'm now involved in trying to transfer my videos to digital files and DVD (a difficult process to say the least). Hopefully a larger interest in the same sort of preservation will develop for dig media.

(since i'm out of town, sans computer, I may not be able to respond to anything soon, but I would be interested in hearing your thoughts, fishfucker, so please post!)
posted by evanizer at 4:06 PM on February 19, 2002

ludicdruid: Thanks for the timely Walter Benjamin reference and link.

This seems like an appropriate place to link to Digital Art Source.
posted by liam at 5:42 PM on February 19, 2002