The Future of Art? How does one respond to queries about the prospects of an idea, an activity, a thing that has been systematically and cross-culturally exploited, idealized, and transgressed without daring to sound philosophically presumptuous, without a motive toward ontological insistence and teleological enthusiasm? Aren't most predictive interrogations rooted in an epistemic fear of the indeterminate here and now? Still, futurism as a prophetic, picture-making project does have its seductive, programmatic aspects, rendering paradise in stimulating new visual and psychological terms, giving hope and reason to those otherwise prepared to fill their hearts with doubt and fatigue. That is to say, playing sibyl to collective evolution, enables one to time travel between ancient and modern zones of gesture that energize the predictive theatres of astrological, market and sports forecasting.

For example, in 1999 I was invited to deliver another address on the future of art to the 3rd Asia Pacific Trienniel forum. I took my clairvoyant role in stride and pictured a globalist folly that accounted for the world cultural investment in visuality, imagination, invention, design and critique as a multi-culti experiment in competitive, transgenic mutations of "humanness." Today, it is nearly 2002 and my futurist intuitions have not wavered much, though globalism, as a developing biotech economy and ideology, has, of late, felt the intense white heat of what financial analyst Tom Friedman calls the "lexus and the olive tree" argument over programs of market and ethical culture. I will not rehearse Friedman's economic analysis in terms of world art movements, though I do think his reading of electronic vs agricultural herd values and economies of trade sheds light on the question posed regarding the perpetuation of what we affectionately and satirically regard as "art". (For our purpose, we must complicate his globalist dialectic with tourist economies - e.g., Fijian art - and the financial implications of a bioelectronic revolution.)

We see, for instance, an uneven divide of artistic practices emerging from an inter- and supra- national shift toward a bioelectronic market of data collection, data analysis, data synthesis (production), and data trade. Remembering the range of curatorial choices orchestrating the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, the 2000 Havana Biennale, and the 010101 exhibition mounted online and at the San Francisco MOMA, we are obviously in congress with two groups of artists: Those who have theoretically and practically embraced the technological prowess of new hardware and software design, and those who rigorously read and deconstruct the Western semiotics of, and modernist romance with the speed and efficiency of information processing.

That is to say, painting has vampirically arisen from its coffin (once again) to expose us to the eternal life of ecstasy and social alienation wrought this time by the Nosferatu kiss of profit achieved by a bioelectronic vision of survival – human, cultural, collective, environmental. Likewise, site-specific installation now pivots between random avatar flights within cyberspace and ritual distributions of silica, dirt, string, cardboard, silk and stone. The fiduciary outlook of aesthetic choice is clear: If there is to be a tomorrowland wherein self-designated subjects speculate and manifest opportunities for perceptual and symbolic concentration, transmission, interception and wonder - the panorama of possibility is now being reoriented along lines of immediate biospheric resource values challenged by open, available portholes of communication, education and travel.

In other words, if we have learned anything from the last twenty or so years of international fairs, from fledgling online and biotech "art" exhibitions, and from art journal photo ops, it is that the new futurism of art is no longer solely pressured by a 19th century European colonial, industrial obsession with "speed" and "appropriation", nor, as John Clark reminds us, by post-colonial nationalisms reasserting recidivist signs of the feminine or of ethnic hegemony. We have entered a new era inundated by powerful tropes of hybridity and the clone. Who then will be the artist amongst us? The mestizo superhero? The bricolage cyborg? The grotesque android? Who or what will force open the geopolitical borders of markets to sell visions conjured by yakshi statisticians' joined forces with shamanic hackers?

The medium is, indeed, a message – not simply McLuhan's subtle code of electronic culture, but a booming loudspeaker announcing thoroughgoing cross-cultural upheaval - from the inquiry we make, the food we eat and the work we perform, to the entities we sleep with, pray to, and enslave (or by whom we are enslaved). The other question before us, to paraphrase Los Angeles architect Michael Rotundi, is this: Will the message be decoded by a culture of greed or a culture of generosity? Bio-electronic, agricultural, and tourist economies are all being forced to consider the survival question anew and in relation to each other.

There are those, like myself, who consequently regard the term "art" as a dusty, time encrusted category perpetuated by both imperial and revolutionary canons (e.g., Platonic, Bauhusian, Mughal, Sung, Maoist), by culturally corrective, museological mission statements, by international auction blocks and by students who dare to avoid the corporate implications of a digital design diploma. Today, mouse-clicking away in Bangalore, Kansas City, San Juan and Wollangong, the next generation of the aesthetically gifted prepares to infiltrate the burgeoning, dynamic global matrix of reality-testing. Nurtured on the fat networked cyberbosoms of Demi-Gods, X-men, Overfiends, and Coyotes, they will bring with them mutant sensibilities that allow them to transit through multiple dimensions and worlds of timespace intuition. Playful, lustful, nimble and programmed to address narcissistic and transcendental fear, the future prototypes of - what shall we call them? - will help shape our understanding and desire for difference detecting (taste), entertainment, narrative, collective transformation, collective annihilation and marvel.

Let those who resist the present be given the opportunity to inspect contemporary art institutes and university programs from L. A. to Tainan to see if "fine art" studio holds its "numbers" with digital design, robotic design, product design, toy design, environmental design, fashion design, transportation design, cinema, performance, and communication studies. Encourage the recalcitrant to interview the civil and curatorial forces producing Triennales and Biennales in Brisbane, Dakar and Guangju to project the financial futures of international exhibitions. Ask the directorial heads of the Pompidou and NYMOMA if their board of trustees and patrons are ready to foot the bill for multi-tasking, multi-screened, advanced cd-rom technology. Startled, bemused, exhilarated, let us all be on the lookout for the new betazoids, replicants and spawns that have penetrated the medieval fortress of "art culture". The future of art is here and it is a science fiction.*


*Special thanks to Art Center College of Design graduates Christina Valentine and Kurt Forman for helping me to rethink the grotesque value of comic book archetypes.

M. A. Greenstein
Los Angeles, December 2001