Re: <nettime> Discordia Concors: www.jodi.org

[ryan.whyte@utoronto.ca]

The 'classic' art references here don't seem to jive? I wonder if much of
the anxiety in the criticism is unresolved fear of _not_ being canonized,
hence the frequent, forced recourse to Cage, Fluxus, mail art, Arp. It's
like October magazine were pretending it was the cutting edge of
techno-criticism! I mean, why is chance hauled out over and over? Is Cage
really the alpha and omega of 21st-century art?

The criticism doesn't recognize on the one hand that net art represents a
great rupture with most 20th-c art in terms of distribution, content,
technology, language, accessibility, politics, and on the other a
continuity with forms of bureaucracy becoming entrenched in the art world
in the late 20th-c in terms of collective production, the levelling and
academicization of discourse, the blurring of critic/artist/curators'
roles, the speed of response times. So if criticism is to address
something like jodi it should probably do better in its analysis of
artworld politics and positioning, just at it should try to address the
phenomenology and structures of all levels of the machines and languages
at issue here. The problem with jodi is that it casts its innumerable
ghosts in the machine under the aegis of art -- there's always an escape
hatch from the real, into where the art takes place. So there lies the
continuity with the museum pieces of the 60s, but the intellectual
heritage isn't there -- it's rather in the deep structures of the
machines, the internet itself. 

Ryan

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