[mtp-teoria] echo from lovink's lecture

[dusan]

halo,

few days ago i visited geert lovink's lecture in brussels' argos centre.
lecture was built on a dead end of new media art and on the article
he wrote for fibreculture some time ago. short reporting coming next.

basically lovink chose few paragraphs from the article, read and commented
these. 2005's version of the article is here:
http://laudanum.net/geert/files/1129753681/
speech was rather abstract, since he avoided giving examples because then
the arguments could be easily turned around by contra-examples, making
critique impossible. i assume half of the 50 people present knew lovink
for decades and for others who are familiar with the media art sectarian
context it was still understandable.

besides other things what i found interesting was his definition of new
media art as "form searching for the forms" and the four strategies of
"how to get out of media art misery" he closed the speech with:


1. new media art will consciously transform itself into an autonomous
discipline by avoiding the collaboration with other disciplines (sociology,
art history, linguistics, science, etc), since by the multidisciplinary
approach it undermines itself and this way it only supports other
disciplines and will never create own field with everything the academic
discipline includes.

2. new media art will "transcend" itself and will merge into contemporary
art. this is the case of video art festivals that first needed to
"disappear" in order to allow "reappearance" of video art these years.

3. leave art context altogether and go with science - "art and science
discourse" or other non-art fields, ie. young artists switching to
webdesign, IT, stock market, living from social support or as refugees
at science. approach "i'm a poor artist, maybe i have ideas, please
adopt me".

4. rename new media art with creativity -> "creative industries",
another short-term government policy cycle. CI is widely taken as not
existing and being only a hype in heads of bureaucrats, but still there
is a lot of economic models at CI that answers the question "how to
make money". so this strategy would lead either into private sector
or teaching at art school.


to mention few comments from audience:

A: problem of location - looks like it is only about US, NL, AUS and
western EU.
GL: this is example of falsification of argument by 1 example (all
arguments are refutable).

A: isn't it a crisis of critics, and not of practice?
GL: art needs critique, there are very very few (young) critics,
other fields are usually more appealing for them.

A: 2-way communication between artists and funders is not possible?
GL: not good negotiating position for artists, they're not even on map
for big institutions.


..in a hurry now, more later.

dusan