Exhibiting New Media: Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook.<\/p>\n
This article was commissioned by Art Monthly for their November 2002 issue. This online version includes links to the exhibitions and quotes referred to.
\n
\n‘But if people only dance the novelty hustle, then that’s a problem. You’ve got to see works more than once to understand a context. It takes reflection to figure out what something is.’<\/i> Barbara London, MoMA, New York <\/p>\n
When it comes to exhibiting new media art, some arts organisations are still cautious wallflowers at the dance, some have thrown themselves into a new-age freak-out, whilst others have learnt some lessons, done some reflection and are busy inventing their own hybrid stylings. Creative Time in New York, for example, seems comfortable that its hybrid groove includes both the physical challenges of showing digital video in the moist brickwork of their venue under a bridge, and the conceptual challenges of ‘Massless Media’ such as audio, net art or skywriting.<\/p>\n
Current reflection on the state of media art acknowledges that we are over the novelty utopian period. Granted, there is still the problem of a lack of agreement on categories within new media, apart from a rough bifurcation into ‘Net’ and ‘Not Net’, which is sometimes understood as a split between the purely internet-based (sexy, mobile, consumable) and the ‘physical objects’ of new media (touchable, located, art\/science). The former have been taken relatively quickly into art institutions, despite (or because of) net art’s conceptual and activist lineage; after all, museums have dealt with ‘the end of objecthood’ once already. There is, however, a whole range of new media artwork and curating that is sited at the boundary between the physical and the online.<\/p>\n