Art and the Internet are hardly strangers. In the last decade-plus we’ve already cycled through net art, new media art, post-Internet art, and frantically onward, with each new movement and manifesto trying to formulate aesthetic principles and create works that respond to the dominance of networked computing over modern life.

Even when released onto the web, though, these have mostly been creations of the artworld. In Magic and Loss, Virginia Heffernan hopes to reorient the discussion by construing our everyday use of the Internet as a kind of art-making. “The Internet,” she proposes, “is a massive and collaborative work of realist art,” an idea she tentatively fleshes out by analogy with participatory games such as MMORPGs. As a vehicle for its own distinctive forms of aesthetic experience, it constitutes “the great masterpiece of human civilization.” Continue reading →

There is a minor genre of books bemoaning the state of contemporary criticism. According to most of them, the “crisis” in criticism is internal or self-inflicted: it comes from critics who have lost interest in making judgments, or perhaps who only know how to make the wrong kinds of judgments. A. O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism is a departure from this narrative, but a vexing one. As a guide to understanding the material conditions behind criticism’s present woes, it falls short. But his positive vision of criticism opens up some interesting and neglected theoretical avenues. Continue reading →

The attraction of art criticism as a form of writing is that no one agrees on exactly what it is. My own image of the critical landscape resembles an unruly, half-mapped wilderness. A place to get lost in, dotted with alien vistas and odd flora that defy easy naming and classification. Academic writing, by contrast, is as dull as a suburban neighborhood governed by a strict and watchful homeowners’ association. Everything is tightly prescribed, down to the color of your mailbox; there is little room for the singularity of an authorial voice, or for developing much of an individual style, and this near-total repression causes academics’ expressive desires to seep into their texts in strange ways.

Art also poses a unique challenge as a subject. The philosopher and critic Arthur Danto pithily defined artworks as “embodied meanings,” by which he meant, roughly, that they are material things (paint, pixels, thread, clay) that somehow convey or express richly specific thoughts and emotions. At the same time, though, artworks are also obstinate, mute objects. They simply sit there, refusing to respond to pleas, curses, and queries, no matter how fervent. Whatever they mean isn’t anything that they can say.

Continue reading →