Excerpts from the Art in America article “The Perils of Post-Internet Art,” by Brian Droitcour:
Photo from DIS’s online project “Competing Images: Art vs. People,” 2012.
Most people I know think “Post-Internet” is embarrassing to say out loud. But so is most of the language that’s used to write about contemporary art, and “Post-Internet” does the job of artspeak so efficiently that people keep saying it, embarrassment be damned. The “Post-” part conjures an aura of historical significance, the mantle of the avant-garde; “Internet” supplies social relevance. Together they lacquer art with an intellectual finish as thin as it is opaque.
The term has recently appeared in a variety of far-flung contexts: a talk at Frieze Art Fair, a forum at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a panel at the College Art Association conference. Unlike “Neo-Expressionism” or “Neo-Geo,” “Post-Internet” avoids anything resembling a formal description of the work it refers to, alluding only to a hazy contemporary condition and the idea of art being made in the context of digital technology.
Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem to know what “Post-Internet” means today but are unable to articulate it with much precision. “I know it when I see it”—like porn, right? It’s not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex—renders it lurid. The definition I’d like to propose underscores this transactional sensibility: I know Post-Internet art when I see art made for its own installation shots, or installation shots presented as art. Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online: photographed under bright lights in the gallery’s purifying white cube (a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop.
…Post-Internet art is in love with advertising, like a lot of art since Warhol, but it’s the obsession with art-world power systems—as represented by the installation shot—that irks me the most about it. After a century that has witnessed art in newspapers, art on the radio, art in the mail, art on television and art on the Internet, here’s a self-styled avant-garde that’s all about putting art back in the rarefied space of the gallery, even as it purports to offer profound insights about how a vast, non-hierarchical communications network is altering our lives.
**To learn more about Post-Internet art read Brian Droitcour’s full article on Art in America at: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/