66 MARCH 2016
curate the amateur curators and thereby express their superior taste.
Hence the phenomenon of “surf clubs,” in which artist collectives
mine the Internet for what artist-critic Olia Lialina and artist Dra-
gan Espenschied dub “digital folklore.” Internet users themselves
become the medium, viewed by artists asthe massesand not as so
many individual creators. Not only does this depersonalize online
amateurs and depict their creativity as a kind of nonconscious
emergent phenomena, like the intelligence of bee colonies, it also
suggests that only artists can command the knowing viewers who
are not mindless drones in the massive online hive.
But behind the threat of art amateurs looms the larger,
less easily managed problem of advertising images, often made
with digital tools and techniques, proliferating limitlessly in the
same spaces where all art must now also circulate. Generations
of graphic designers have established a vernacular of images and
effects even more “default” than any popular software’s defaults.
How does art not simply disappear against such a backdrop,
as the homogenizing process of digitization advances? Fetishiz-
ing the awkward and nonprofessional is as much a response to
the omnipresence of consumerism’s stylized visual culture as it is
to everyone’s labor being construed as creative. It allows artists to
associate themselves with a more innocent motive for making art,
a desire to move beyond the calculations and professionalization
demanded by the market.
Art on the Internet no longer counters the dynamics of the
market, if it ever did, but instead articulates them at the speed
of network connectivity. Only now these dynamics play out not
through rarefied objects subject to carefully managed transactions
among elites but through exercises in “artistic” taste influencing
large ad hoc audiences. Whether you valorize amateur creativity
or try the opposite move, preemptively adopting a commercial
slickness, emulating corporate branding strategies and utilitarian
commercial imagery, as with the DIS collective’s stock photogra-
phy, you are still caught within the same parameters.
Given how the Internet saturates us with metrics and strategic
images, one can’t be “artistic” simply by curating that material or mak-
ing more images in essentially the same vein. Instead, artists must try
to continually reassert their artistic identity in a context where image-
making is now as common as seeing, as consuming, as breathing.
If everything one does is recorded, indexed and made
searchable, one can conceive of artistic practice as perpetual
identity construction through any available media chan-This approach proved untenable as the Internet’s degree of
difficulty abated. The virtual world rapidly became a commercial
space rather than an alternative to the market, accommodating
itself to the class dynamics and aspirational envy that fuel not
only the art market but consumerism in general. Gone were the
days when the art world could neglect Net art, and Net artists
could feel automatically oppositional by virtue of their underdog
status. As more conventional studio-made work began to appear
online, digitally native work could no longer be seen as periph-
eral. Both kinds of art became part of a broader circulation of
images of all sorts in social media, where viewership is insepa-
rable from appropriation and reproduction.
The question became, as Cornell and Halter put it, “How can
artists adapt and assimilate to social media and the democratiza-
tion of ‘creativity’?” Similarly, John Kelsey from the Reena Spaul-
ings collective asks, “And what comes after the realization that
contemporary artists no longer hold a monopoly on creativity?”
Of course, artists never did have such a monopoly, but hewing to
parochial art-world spaces and tenets made it easier to think they
did. In the openness of the Post-Internet condition, such myopia
is harder to sustain. The sheer scale of Internet content production
dictates that all your best ideas will have been anticipated. The
“fourteen-year-old-Finnish-kid syndrome,” Arcangel calls it. “All
this stuff out there made by all these people,” heremarks, “is prob-
ably better than the stuff I’m making.”HOW DO ARTISTS remain necessary under these circum-
stances? Artist Seth Price points out that “immersing art in life
runs the risk of seeing the status of art—and with it, the status of
the artist—disperse entirely.” He argues that the artist’s “social role
is somewhat embarrassing” since “the practitioner is dismissed as
either the producer of overvalued decor, or as part of an arrogant,
parasitical, self-styled elite.” But artists have nonetheless taken up
the challenge, trying to find new ways to lay proprietary claim to
the creation of aesthetic value.
This has mainly been a question of repositioning themselves
with respect to “normal people participating in this DIY internet
thing,” as artist Guthrie Lonergan calls them. An intensified com-
mitment to digital craft offers little help. Instead, Lonergan says,
artists could turn away from hacking and toward “defaults” (“the
most widely available software”), cataloguing and then emulating
nonartists’ technically unimpressive use of digital tools. Artists canBOOKS
Excerpt from
Guthrie Lonergan’s
webpage presenta-
tionWe Did It
Ourselvesat Light
Industry, New York,
2009.