1.2. Lead-in Discussion. Answer the following questions.

1. Which countries have produced the greatest painters?

2. How popular is classical music in this country? Do you listen to it?

3. What is the difference between classical and pop music? Is it possible to like both?

4. Would you say that reading is an important part of your national culture?

5. Does TV have a serious role to play, or is it just entertainment?

FOCUS 2

2.1. Scan the text below and say what its essence is.

Infinite editions

It isn’t everyday you get to see major work of art – historical importance, one that helped spawn an artistic movement. Actually, it is. All you have to do is go online and visit www.jodi.org.

Created in 1995 by Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans – who collaborated under the moniker Jodi – these works represent one of the earliest instances of Internet art. The idea of Internet art or net art is easiest to explain by stating what net art absolutely isn’t: online renditions of offline works. Instead, it is art made for the online environment, able to exploit the Internet’s participatory, dynamic capabilities. Most works are websites, but they can take the form of downloadable software, e-mails or data files.

Jodi.org became the archetypal Internet art project. Its cyberpunk aesthetic of scrambled pixilation and appropriated digital detritus showed that the Internet could be something beyond a medium for information. But the homepage was different, a witty, formalist experiment with the operations of the Internet.

The work can also be read as a metaphor for the explosion in Internet art. Cheap to make and capable of reaching a global audience, in a few years Internet art developed into a big artistic movement – a phenomenon of the early Internet age, manifested not only in works of art but also in online forums, offline publications, commissioning sites, digital media festivals and net art hubs.

“It is important to distinguish between net art as a genre of artistic practice and net art as a historical art movement,” says Mark Tribe, founder of Rhizome.org, a hub site now marking its tenth anniversary with a series of retrospective exhibitions. “As a movement, net art was assimilated into the artistic mainstream early on in the new millennium. But, defined simply as art that happens online, it is thriving – in terms of the amount of work being produced, the artistic merit of that work, the geographic diversity of artists, and institutional support.”

If you surf the web today, you can find a heterogeneous assortment of works created over the past 15 years.

Some newer work confounds the very idea of traditional art, and simply subverts and works within existing virtual spaces.

Computer-game imagery is a common motif in Internet art. That’s not surprising – the rise of gaming culture is a manifestation of the digital revolution. Indeed, if Internet art has a dominant theme, it’s that of digital culture. Unfortunately, what this often means is work based on such academic notions as “data mapping” or “locational media”, which will excite few but the most technologically savvy.

Works about technology and media don’t have to be dull. Internet art is also a low-cost way for institutions to appear avant-garde. And while the best places to go for Internet art are still specialist art hubs such as turbulence.org or rhizome.org, it’s worth exploring such museum websites as those of the Whitney and Tate.

The art-world’s public sector has embraced Internet art but the relationship with the private economy is less amicable. “The net artists of the 1990s espoused an anti-market ideology,” says Pauline van Mourik Broekman, founder of Mute, a magazine dedicated to Internet art and culture. “They saw the Internet in utopian terns, as an unincorporated, open territory: a space for collaboration, where the market could be bypassed and ideas freely distributed. This anti-commercial ethos persists. Many artists come from a background of “hacktivism” – a mixture of hacking culture and political activism.

Internet art’s resistance to the art market isn’t just ideological. What would it mean to own or purchase such a work?

The art market relies on buyers’ desire to own a unique work, or a limited edition, but works of Internet art are, effectively, infinite editions.

In theory, anyone can be a collector by downloading the files. As Helen Cadwallader, the Art Council’s national officer for visual and media art, explains: “There are many artists who would like to make money from selling their work. But the biggest hurdle to developing a viable market for Internet art has been the response from collectors of, “Why should I buy it, if it’s anyway free and accessible to everyone?”

There is a second obstacle: obsolescence. The furious pace of technological evolution means that works made for older systems will, eventually, not be seen again.

Currently, then, Internet art exists almost totally outside the commercial mainstream. For a brief period – before the dotcom crash and the ensuing skepticism – it began appearing in commercial galleries. But a bewildering variety of selling models were used, including software, hardware, a simple document of ownership and a legal stipulation that the artist maintains a website. The difficult of finding appropriate commercial formats reflected uncertainty as to what a work of Internet art consisted of.

And anyway, who wants to sit at a computer in a gallery? The point of Internet art is that it offers a new way of relating to, and thinking about, art: art that isn’t a commodity; that is part of continuous, networked experience; something you can dip into between e-mails, before going to YouTube. In this context, the notion of ownership seems obsolete.

The best works of Internet art – as with any genre of art – communicate such nuanced and abstract ideas at both an intellectual and intuitive level.

Source: FT Magazine, January, 2007

Size: 5,409 characters with spaces