Art and Money Get It On

The Tate's first stab at art on the Net - reviewed by Josephine Berry

‘Art and Money Online’ is Tate Britain’s first attempt to ‘seriously’ address those two monolithic entities ‘art’ and ‘Internet’. The curator is Julian Stallabrass whose book High Art Lite seemed to ring the death knell for Brit Art. Judging by the rather spectacular and too gallery-friendly nature of this show, it’s tempting to ask if he will render the same service to net art. The show takes the Net’s commercialisation as its premise and asks how British artists have responded to the incursion of private interest into the erstwhile public space of the Net.

Lisa Autogena and Joshua Portway use the metaphor of the night sky to represent the bedazzling flow of traded shares across the Net. Reacting to a live info-feed from Reuters, as certain stocks rise a constellation of stars/companies glow brighter. Riding on another corporate info-stream, Alison Craighead and Jon Thomson have augmented the news site CNN.com with a menu of mood music files including ‘contemplative’, ‘melancholy’ and ‘jubilant’ categories. Sticking two fingers up at the companies that offer us ‘free’ software while simultaneously driving up the obsolescence rate of hardware, Redundant Technology Initiative runs their ASCII-fied brand logos across a bank of rehabilitated scrap computers.

Although Stallabrass’ text in the accompanying leaflet warns of the potential ‘domestication of internet art’ by institutions (such as, well, the Tate) this show sadly does nothing to arrest the process. Any non-initiate would be forgiven for thinking that art engaging with the Net is just an online elaboration of installation art. Except for Craighead and Thomson’s piece, the browser interface was entirely absent and the keyboard had been suspiciously purged from this cube of whiteness. Mystificatory, remote and misleading.

Josephine Berry <josie@metamute.com>

‘Art and Money Online’, Tate Britain, 6 March - 3 June 2001 http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnwnet.htm