Page 36 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

36Contemporary art and digital cultureSocial media expert Clay Shirky (2008) states that ‘communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. [...] It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and nally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen’ (p. 105). Ever since personal computers started to become popular in the 1980s, followed by the so-called ‘digital revolution’ of the 1990s, the digital media and particularly the Internet have been increasingly pervading all areas of industrialised societies. Machines that were formerly only found in costly research laboratories or in science- ction novels are now part of everyday life. The adoption of new technologies has wrought deep changes in the ways much of the population nds information, communicates, has fun or works. As Shirky suggests, technology progressively goes from being interesting for its own sake, as an experiment whose possibilities fascinate specialists, to being used by an increasingly large sector of the population and nally to becoming everyday [Fig. 1] . The Internet is a good example of this.to friction and distancing, as well as occasional and enthusiastic recognition. The rst computer- generated artworks of the 1960s were spurned by the artistic community (Nake, 1971, p. 18),to the extent that, as gallery owner WolfLieser states (2010), for years artists regardedart produced with a computer as somethingthat was ‘almost degrading’ (p. 25). Backthen computers were weird, bulky machinesto which only a few specialists had access. Incomprehensible and distant, they conjuredup the possibility of a dystopic future in which they would replace man and, therefore, the notion that they might generate somethingas speci cally human as a work of art seemed abhorrent. As technology has grown closer to the general public, so has new media art, though the contemporary art world has been particularly loath to accept it, partly because it is heavily geared to technological advances and partly because it is developing in an environment of its own, in thematic festivals and exhibitions.Closer to the academic environment than theart market, artistic practices linked to the new media did not succeed in making an appearance on the mainstream contemporary art sceneuntil the mid-2000s, by which time digital technologies were more widely embraced in all areas of society, beginning with the development of Web 2.0. platforms and, especially, the social media. According to curator and theoretician Peter Weibel (2006), new media art has struggled to achieve the same degree of recognition as painting and sculpture and has nally succeeded in doing so in what he describes as the ‘post- media’ age when all the artistic disciplines have been transformed by the digital media (p. 96). Nowadays practically all artists use digital tools in some stage of producing their works or are in uenced in some way by the culture they generate, particularly in relation to the content circulating on the Internet. But this does not mean to say that new media art is fully accepted in the art world, or that it is commonly sold in galleries, art fairs or auctions, just as the useof Internet platforms for selling art was notFIG.1: Daniel Canogar, Storming Times Square (2014). Site-speci c installation in Times Square, New York. Photo: Sofía Montenegro. Courtesy of the artist.In the art world, the relationship with new technologies over the past ve decades has ledTHE ART MARKET IN THE AGE OF ACCESS · PAU WAELDER