Ten Reasons Why the Art World Hates Digital Art

Ewan Morrison

Vol 1 #11, Autumn 1998

The art world hates digital art. The ICA’s show, Imaginaria, which sets out to showcase the best of digital art from 1997–8, has helped to clarify the reasons why digital art is shunned by the art world, and why it will never be accepted into the canon of high art. The following is a list of reasons why ‘digital art’ will not be accepted as fine art.

1. A new art form – give it up! Art is dead. There is nothing more futile than aspiring to the condition of art at a time when giving up art is the only legitimate art form.

Since Jean Baudrillard claimed that art is dead and continues to exist only as a simulation of its former self, the only way to make art has been to endlessly replay the death of art – to take ‘the authentic’ and show that it is a simulation. Digital art seems to start from a misreading of Baudrillard: it attempts to make art out of simulacra and then claim authenticity for its own products.

Within Imaginaria, there is one work which seems to stand as a metaphor for the status of digital art within the art world: Anabiosis, by Simon Tegala, monitors the heart rate of the artist through a screen display. ‘Anabiosis’ is the medical term for ‘revival after apparent death’. Could it be that digital art sees itself as a new lease on life within an art world obsessed with death, obsolescence and redundancy? Perhaps suicide could be suggested as a way for this artist to be accepted into the canon of contemporary art.

2. ‘Digital art’ does not exist. In proclaiming itself as a new medium, digital art has failed to recognise that art is no longer medium-specific. Artists now operate across disciplines – text, image, moving image, event – and use whatever tools are at their disposal.

Digital artists are mistaken in thinking that a medium can have inherent properties and that the realisation of such can be called art. As such, it shares a common history with photography. Photography struggled throughout the century to become realised as an art form in its own right. It experienced a period of fine art credibility in the mid-’80s with Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine, all of whom were ‘artists who used photography’, but none of whom could call themselves ‘photographers’. The recent retreat of photography into ‘specialist’ galleries is a testament to its failure to become an art form ‘in itself’.

Digital technology exists. Art exists. Art which uses technology exists. Digital art does not exist ‘in its own right’.

3. Deconstruction. Ever since Jacques Derrida pronounced that the frame (and possibly even the wall) were part of the artwork, art has been emptied of content and been transformed into a self-conscious deconstruction of the history and context of art.

Artists no longer make statements; instead, they ‘critique the medium of representation itself’. To actually communicate, without deconstructing the mode of communication that one uses, shows a failure to understand the importance of the deconstructive method in contemporary art.

So-called digital artists are just too damned excited by the medium’s infinite potential for new representation to engage in any meaningful discourse on the subject of its own limits. Digital art does not start from the premise that language has to be taken apart; instead it is at the relatively unsophisticated stage of ‘inventing’ its own language. Digital art has got to reach the limits of its own potential, roll over and die before the post-mortem can begin.

4. Anti-teleology. The future is not a better place, as Hegel, Marx and Darwin claimed. There is a strong anti-Hegelian thrust in postmodern art, which mani fests itself as a distrust of the idea of ‘progress’ and a belief that ‘the new’ has positive value in itself. The notion that the future is leading us somewhere, and that technology is the tool for the emancipation of society, has been abandoned due to the failure of the modernist technological utopia and its inversion in the Holocaust, to colonialism and to the failure of teleological projects such as communism, humanism and feminism. This is why digital artists are often accused of ‘techno-fascism’ by their critics. The inherent technological utopian ism of digital art is irresponsible, naïve and dangerous. Contemporary art, in contrast, is going nowhere – and proud of it. It is, after all, safer to mull over the shadows of the past than to be blinded by the brightness of a new future.

5. Foucault’s critique of technology. The myth that technology is a ‘tool’. Technology always serves the interests of power. Artists get used by technology. Not the other way around.

The horror of the artist/reviewer meeting, Imaginaria, is that it is technology and science that sets the agenda. Thus, artists fall prey to an agenda which is not theirs, to a set of concerns that they cannot control or limit and to a set of outcomes (since many works are set up as ‘experiments’) which are predeter mined and not as ‘open ended’ as the artists would like to think.

6. Heidegger’s opposition between art and technology. The debate on art and technology is always prefaced by some reference to Heidegger. For Heidegger, technology keeps humanity from recognising ‘being’: we deny ourselves when we see the world ‘technologically’ – that is, as a tool for our own use. Against the evils of technology, Heidegger set the virtues of art, through which ‘being’ expresses itself to us. Heidegger’s views on art were dominant in the ’50s and have had a lasting impact.

Although very few contemporary artists would support Heidegger’s philosophy and its endorsement of the notion of the autonomous individual, the ethically existing subject and the expression of inner truth, the art world continues to distrust technology.

The postmodern rejection of Heidegger should have seen an abandonment of the old opposition between art and technology and paved the way for a reconciliation of the old opposites. However, the result has not been a new belief in the compatibility of art and technology, but, instead, the belief that both art and technology are equally lacking in an ultimate justification. In this way, Heidegger’s split is reconciled – through mutual failure.

7. Post-Duchampian hatred of technique. Since the revival of Duchamp and the death of painting, art which requires any form of technical skill has been devalued to the lowly status of mere craft. The ready-made has taken the place of the well-designed or expressive object. Anything can be a ready-made: a feature film by someone else or an ashtray teaming with cigarette butts. The intention behind the ready-made is not just to reject technical skills but to insult the notion of committed endeavour, purposeful action or virtuosity.

Thus, a work like Technosphere V2 by Jane Prophet – in which a graphically designed world is undoubtedly the product of immense technical mastery and several years of committed hard graft – can, to a follower of Duchamp, seem like a complete waste of time.

8. The cult of failure. Once the future has been abandoned and belief in the expressive function of art has been rejected, once artists have come to hate the market which supports them, there is one last petty act of rebellion which can keep the artist going: making art which is deliberately banal.

Thus, we have seen, over the last ten years, the growth of the cult of contemporary artist as heroic failure. Technical inadequacy has been elevated to a virtue. This is not technical naïveté but deliberate and self-conscious faux naïveté.

The justification for this is clear and has a history dating back from performance art to Dada. Against the mantle of artist as genius, the heroically failing artist says quite simply: ‘No I will not stand up as a spokesman for humanity – I will, instead, be deliberately pathetic and banal.’

The complexity of these spiralling circles of self-loathing nihilism seems lost on digital artists, who somehow want to aspire to technical virtuosity, style and belief in their own work.

9. Gimmickry. Nothing offends the sensibilities of those who have been raised on a diet of conceptualism and minimalism more than gimmicks and theatricality. There is a good reason for this. Gimmickry always hides something, usually a lack of content or an inability on behalf of the artist to deal with the meaning of their work. Digital art seems to present the artist with an infinite variety of technical gimmicks. As such, it should be viewed with suspicion.

Take, for example, Simon Robertshaw’s The Order of Things. Eliminate the reference to Foucault, the spooky theatrical lighting and the trip switch, which activates the video signal when you get close to the viewing surface, and look what you are left with: archival footage of a patient receiving ECT. In its original context, the footage was viewed for medical reasons. In a gallery, we are being asked to deal with it in terms of visual pleasure – the thrill of the peep show. Such treatment of this type of material is in poor taste and is an example of an artist becoming seduced by technical gimmicks and being inevitably unaware of the other meanings they are putting out.

10. Distance. Interactive art destroys the objective distance that, since Kant, has been the basic premise for the contemplation of aesthetic experience. In more contemporary terms, Baudrillard has repeatedly discussed the diminishing of objective distance through digital technology and described the horror that this presents to the Western philosophical tradition – the terrible immediacy, the obscene reciprocity of the virtual experience, the closing down of the gap between observer and object. This, he claims, in Kantian style, is the death of aesthetics.

Without objective distance, there is no contemplation; without contempla tion, there is no metaphysics. Virtuality and interactivity are the death not only of art but also of culture itself. Interactivity is a vacuum, a self-perpetuating, self-referring closed circle that coils in on itself. We do not need ‘digital interactivity’ to see this; it is displayed well enough in ‘live TV’. The messages of ‘interactive art’ and live TV are the same: each is itself. In Imaginaria, Sera Ferneaux’s work, Kissing, is an example of the vacuousness of instantaneous interactive experience.

Ironically, such a work claims to be social – and sociable – but only further opens up the vacuum that exists in social experience. This is the perverse state that Baudrillard predicted: when we are no longer alienated by technology but share our alienation as a form of pleasure. As Baudrillard pointed out, the horror vacui of this death of the social is invariably presented to us in the guise of a smiling face. In this instance, the face is not smiling but kissing, and it is your own face staring back at you. The artwork is no more than an image of the viewer. You are being invited to participate in the collapse of your own culture.