Will Gompertz and Net Art
I just posted the comment below on Gomp /arts, Will Gompertz’s blog on the BBC website. Three days ago Mr. Gompertz, currently the BBC arts editor, posted an article where he claims that he “can’t find any net-based art of note”. No surprise that this article produced a lot of rumor on new media art magazines and mailing lists…
I had some funny time reading this article and all the reactions it produced, on this blog and around the Web (check out, among other things, Lauren Cornell’s contribution on Rhizome and the CRUMB thread). Personally, as an art critic strongly interested in Net Art, I don’t think that Mr. Will Gompertz just needs some links to “hot” web projects, neither informations of any kind. He doesn’t write “I can’t find any net-based art”, but “I can’t find any net-based art of note”. As the following statement suggests, Mr. Gompertz knows very well what Net Art is: “Duchamp and the Dadaists would have had hours of artistic amusement creating spoof websites, unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status quo.” Well, at least 50% of the best Net Art is “spoof websites, unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status quo.”
So, if I see a problem here, it isn’t a problem of ignorance, but of critical judgement. What we have here is a mid-career art critic – one who wrote for the Times and the Guardian and who ran Tate Online before joining the BBC as arts editor – who claims that, among the many net art projects he came in touch with along his brilliant career, he didn’t find anything that can be described as “a significant artwork”. This may mean either that Net Art, along the last 15 years, didn’t produced anything noteworthy or that Net Art, after roughly 15 years of existence, still challenges the evaluation criteria and critical tools available for a mid-career, traditionally trained contemporary art critic.
Both the options above can be right of course. My little experience in the field makes me believe in the last one. It may help us to understand why, among other things, important art critics not strictly connected with the art market (and thus potentially interested in critical practices), such as Hal Foster or Rosalind Krauss, were never able to get it. And I think that, if we’ll be able to focus the discussion on these topics – how Net Art challenges traditional criticism? do we really need “other criteria” in order to understand it and its positioning in the contemporary art field? – Mr. Gompertz’s remarks will turn out to be really useful.
