Panel Intro: The Art Mainstream as the Enemy

Symposium:

• ISEA98: Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art

• The Art Mainstream as the Enemy

• Panel Intro: The Art Mainstream as the Enemy

• Paul Brown

• The art mainstream (academies, commercial and state galleies) ígnored the field of art & technology for almost 30 years. After it had become fashionable in the early 1990s they did adopt it but did it so in a way that ignored or undermined the ‘significant’ agenda and served only to perpetuate their own outmoded paradigm.

  In particular the art mainstream promote work where the value (whether aesthetic or monetary) is intrinsic to the work. This places the mainstream’s adoption of art & technology as an extension of modernism (and of the concept of the avant garde) rather than a change to an extrinsic value system (in the context of postmodernism).

  The panellists will address this theme from the point of view of: the academy, (Paul Brown); the museum (John Conomos); the practitioner as a subversive (Vuk Cosic and ®™ark) and the art & technology field as an establishment in its own right (Matthew Fuller).

Category:

• Panel