DOMENICO QUARANTA

Today, The Washington Post features a wonderful piece of art criticism. Written by Blake Gopnik, the article was occasioned by the unveiling – at Postmasters Gallery in New York – of Eva and Franco Mattes‘ first artwork ever, Stolen Pieces (1995 – 1997): «a piece of contemporary art that consists of fragments stolen from priceless major modern works», Gopnik writes. The reason I’m pointing to the article (and not to the work) is because the work is not online yet, and because the review is really able to bring you into the piece and its complexity.

If you want to know more, please read Fabio Cavallucci‘s gorgeous essay on Stolen Pieces in the Mattes’ recently published catalogue. The essay is available as a pdf download on Postmasters’ website.

NOW IN BOOKSTORES / DOUBLE EDITION ITALIAN ENGLISH:

Valerio Terraroli (ed), Tendenze della contemporaneità, 2000 e oltre – L’arte del XX secolo Vol. V, Milano, Skira 2010.

Valerio Terraroli (ed), Contemporary Tendencies, 2000 and beyond – Art of the Twentieth Century Vol. V, Milan, Skira 2010.

Essays by Lea Vergine, Nicolas Bourriaud, Angela Vettese, Klaus Honnef, Gabriella Belli, Luca Molinari, Paco Barragán, Walter Guadagnini, Marco Scotini, Filippo Maggia, Domenico Quaranta, Valerio Terraroli.

Download a low-res pdf preview (English version: cover, back cover, index, sample essay page, sample artist page)

Download the cover (English version)

Buy on Amazon.com (English version)

Buy on Skira.net (Italian version)

A late, but nice, review of Gamescenes. Art in the Age of Videogames, the book I edited in 2006 together with Matteo Bittanti. On Nextgame.it, by Lorenzo Antonelli (via Gamescenes.org).

Domenico Quaranta (ed), Mediateca Expandida – Playlist, exhibition catalogue, Gijon (Asturias, Spain), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creaciòn Industrial, December 2009.

The second issue of “Mediateca Expandida”, the magazine published in conjunction with the exhibitions in LABoral’s mediateque, is out. It features texts by Matteo Bittanti, Ed Halter, Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz and myself, plus about 30 artists and a music CD. You can download the full pdf from here.

Tom Jennings, Alan Turing Made Flat, 2000

D. Quaranta, “Once Upon a Time in the West”, in Pixxelpoint – Once Upon a Time in the West, exhibition catalogue, Nova Gorica 2009.

I

Although the term “new media” is one of today’s great buzzwords, in actual fact these media are anything but new. The Net is twenty years old, if we start counting from the advent of the Web, forty if we start from Arpanet. Spacewar!, the first videogame ever, is more or less the same age. Virtual worlds are the updated, more streamlined versions of technology acclaimed as “the future” when Second Life programmers were still in diapers; social networks are the bastard sons of Fidonet. As for the computer, it is younger than Lord Byron, but certainly not than his daughter Ada.

Once upon a time there was the electronic frontier, an abandonware myth which drew life from the continuous advance of the frontier itself. Like in space, in technological progress there’s no ocean at the end of the trip. But, unlike the space race, the race to the next technology is endless, and endlessness is boring.

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