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When we think about the future of something as amorphous as art, we have to acknowledge the inexorability of the new-media paradigm shift and the vast, chaotic power of globalization. But this has a corollary. As an artist who was formed by the early 1970s, and who has since also worked as a critic and curator, I have watched the disappearance of an attentive (if often imaginary) public willing to conceive of art's agency as potentially political, despite the increasing and enthusiastically large audience for art. Within this ecology, the art world and its artists comprise a privileged and potentially diminishing micro-system - despite the expansion of museums - that is not identical with the emerging audiences for new media. We now know, from indexical events like the Whitney Biennial, that the art world has been slow to take up technological innovation except in marginal and cosmetic ways.
Of course, the question - what IS the future of art? - is also necessarily academic. Young people, like sub-cultural groups everywhere, form coalitions and shift ground in large groups even though they occupy non-contiguous geographic niches. Their coalitions are enabled by several factors, not least the rhizomatic immediacy of networking through the internet and the appearance of a relatively lavish if fragile infrastructure that supports these new networks, and by this I mean important organizations like Melbourne's Center for the Moving Image and the Z.K.M. Though they are scattered across vast distances, new media workers' ability to trade places has never been greater.
The decentralized and highly mobile nature of this network has been immensely attractive to many slightly older artists, but I think the need for art is perhaps generational. So what do we have here? We articulate and re-articulate, in catalogue after art magazine, a superficially political vision falsely predicated on the efficacy of visual communication and argument as if art could be an agent of change and redemption. The crux of this is a belief in art. This "art" inevitably obscures information, occluding any archival function in terms of information storage, even as it insists on a memorializing and educational function (which is not at all the same as an artistic one). Why make art when you can take a photograph, write an e-mail or make a film?
Last decade, art's significance was eventually obscured by an initially empowering and vital argument (based on postcolonial theory and experience) about identity and marginality, in which birth is conflated with biography through the over-determining lens of inheritance. This view conflated memory - and especially the recovery of the past - with deep truth. But the past is not necessarily true, as an amnesic killer, Lenny, understands in a recent film noir classic, "Memento". The art-world result is that sentimental arguments about indexicality, memory and recollection have tended to eclipse any sustained interest other than the amateur in globalization, even though this has been the real environment of younger artists and this, especially after September 11, is the future. We have also belittled the cosmopolitan elitism inherent in great art of the later 20th century without comprehending its value or stakes.
Let's reflect for a moment, then, on what we - as artists and critics - can make of the new spaces that we know are emerging. Artists are interested in the connection between the natural and social aspects of the human body, and they optimistically assume that interactivity is a property of this connection, even if the underpinnings of such relationships are being quickly re-thought, reflecting unexpectedly bleak social and cultural changes in the early 21st century. Peter Lunenfeld's book, "Snap to Grid", explains such issues painstakingly: the artistic debates surrounding the impact of new media are one of his examples; another is the increasing interest in new media installations with an interactive element. But it is incorrect to simply assume a great divide between old and new, and Lunenfeld is careful to point this out.
The future may not be true, and we cannot separate it from the past, but the separation is increased by curatorial structures and over-hasty processes that rarely bring art historians into productive contact with contemporary curators. My reluctant conclusion is that the much-vaunted interdisciplinarity of art theory since the early 1980s has turned out to be almost all one-way, and that the amateur but authoritative art-critical interventions of experts from other fields predicated dilettante opinions about art.
By 2001, DVD, immersive cinema and the WWW were all relegating innumerable essays on photography to the bottom of the filing cabinet, just as many artists were turning to new media, taking advantage of the constant evolution of powerful desktop computers and the World Wide Web. With amazing rapidity, artists' works have sprung up on the Internet with a speed that we did not expect even five years ago, still less ten, when "Mosaic" was the internet interface and most computers used DOS. Edward Said rightly observed at the end of Culture and Imperialism that what had been so exciting for a century - the elaborate self-consciousness of modern art - now seemed almost quaintly abstract and desperately centered on one small corner of the world. More reliable, he felt, were the reports from the front line: hybrid combinations of realism and fantasy, or artistic explorations in mixed-up forms. I think Said underestimated the velocity and geography of change, for the activity of cutting-edge art may not have a future. If it does, it will almost certainly be culturally affectless. I agree with my friend, the Melbourne critic Ted Colless when he observed during a 2000 lecture at the Australian Center for Contemporary Art that "All of those values we have so diligently insisted on in contemporary art - its innovative power, its theoretical excitement, its critical edge - these are all more evident in the technological and commercial domains of culture." Further, to insist that these values - let alone memorialization and education - exhaust the list of the possibilities of a work of art is to underestimate artists. By invoking this quotation I am saying that we can now admit art's almost total loss of a vanguard cultural position. If we accept this point, we will have to either mourn the loss of art as a locus of valuable intellectual activity, or reinvent both past and future.
Charles Green
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