Posted by Steve Dietz on September 5, 2006 7:49 PM
Charlie Gere posted this to Rhizome today. For the longest time I have resisted the call to "too early" (and too easily) define what is new media art, but I totally agree that this need for openess and even open-endedness cannot be a "defensive refusal to be properly critical about uninteresting or pointless work."
I've just stumbled across the debate about Grayson Perry's article on new media art, in which I am heavily quoted, and I am sad and slightly dismayed at the hostility it seems to have engendered. My first reaction is that some of the responses seem extremely defensive. Also almost everybody seems to lack the will to deal with the fact that a lot of new media art is not that great or that interesting and that some other stuff involving new media that isn't *art* is, frankly, more interesting. I strongly believe that until new media art or whatever it's called is prepared to face up to the need to engage in proper critical discussion about what it actually is or could be, it is doomed to be a ghettoised activity which enjoys its marginalised status, because, frankly, it's warmer snuggling together making snide comments about people being in Murdoch newspapers, than dealing with engaging with such discussion.
In case this sounds overly irritated just to point out that I have been working in, thinking about and supporting this area of practice for nearly two decades, and have also been involved in a number of historical and other projects which have allowed me to see exactly how the same syndromes repeat themselves (including the defensive refusal to be properly critical about uninteresting or pointless work, and the failure to engage in the greater speed of technological over cultural development). If this makes me the Brian Sewell of New Media Art, so be it.
