“Everyday objects produced by our society may be turned into objects of
desire more than one time. I am trying [in purchasing objects and installing
them in a gallery] to demonstrate that an object may be consumed more than
one time and desired in more than one way.”^81
All of these varying practices of art–primitivist moves“beyond human
time,” the recovery of vernacular traditions, aesthetic distancing, art as
construction, art as performance, and art as social critique–are sometimes
taken up not only in interaction with one another and with the traditional
media of art, but also in engagement with developments in the technologies
of images and texts. Video installations have become staples of the Whitney
and Venice biennial exhibitions of new art. Nam June Paik’s video instal-
lation art was the subject of a major retrospective show at the Guggenheim
Museum in New York in 2000. Computer art, investigating the possibilities of
the digital manipulation of images, flourishes as both a form of art and a
form of commercial practice. The internet Museum of Computer Art spon-
sors online exhibitions and offers“Donnie Awards”each year in the categor-
ies of “open all digital art, fractal and algorithmic art, and enhanced
photography.”82,83Computer graphic designers produce visually striking
web pages and special effects for movies. Artists undertake to document
their lives with daily online postings of near stream-of-consciousness narra-
tives of their experiences, or they present large chunks of their lives directly
with 24-hour webcams. Music videos combine art direction and set design
with fashion, threads of plot, dance, image manipulation, and music. Photo-
copy art appropriates images, often from the mass media, and recombines
them to form new ones, presenting these new images both for visual pleasure
and as social commentary.^84
Surrounding and to some extent permeating all these practices of other
than“high”traditional art is popular culture. Images, music, and text for the(^81) Haim Steinbach,“Inteview”(by Joshua Decter),Journal of Contemporary Art 5 (fall 1992),
p. 117, quoted in Weintaub,Art on the Edge and Over, p. 137.
(^82) See http://www.museumofcomputerart.com
(^83) Dominic McIver Lopes insightfully surveys a number of works that essentially involve
displays generated by users interacting with computational processes, noting that such
displays must constitute“an appreciative art kind”–that is, the sorts of things that
invite and sustain“repeat encounters”with the details and organization of the presenta-
tion (A Philosophy of Computer Art[Milton Park: Routledge, 2010], p. 60).
(^84) See the history of photocopy art archived at http://www.artfocus.com/copyart.htm
280 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art