One winter evening in early 2014, I was at dinner in the East Village with the owner of a blue-chip London gallery, some museum curators, and a well-known video artist. The subject of conversation eventually came around to the ever-loved communal activity of therapeutic post- internet art bashing. “Who coined that word, anyway?” a curator asked. “Who knows,” the dealer said, “but whoever did should be shot.” I then announced the title of my upcoming exhibition, “Art Post-Internet,” and was awarded apologetic looks. It was an awkward dinner.
This is but one of dozens of instances I have experienced in which the topic of post-internet art came up in a social setting and I was treated with exasperation or secondhand embarrassment for being part of a post-internet project. It’s as if everyone knows, except for me and a handful of artists, that the post-internet ship is sinking and that only the desperate and ignorant haven’t jumped off.
Post-internet art bashing became such an omnipresent activity that frieze magazine included “the ‘post- internet art’ backlash” as a hot topic in their “What’s Hot What’s Not” editorial in May 2014. (Meanwhile, “no-one having a clue what ‘post-internet art’ means” was filed under “holding steady.”) While it’s normal for overexposed bright young things to withstand some scrutiny, post-internet has weathered a seemingly unprecedented amount of animosity. Why do we hate post- internet art so much? What about it makes it such a universally reviled topic?
I would argue that post-internet art bears a crisis of contradiction in form and content. As evidenced by our questionnaire, post-internet purports to address the changes in society when ever-present advanced technology is so banal it becomes invisible. Thus, it is the calling of a post-internet artist to reveal the invisible, and to teach us about oft-overlooked aspects of society. Such an artwork could take the form of a sculpture, collage, or video and is sold within the art market at galleries, or even directly at auction, as in the recent case of the PADDLES ON! at Phillips. Perhaps, like the example above, the artist and some collectors and curators will go out for dinner after an exhibition opening and it will be paid for by the dealer. So marches on life in the art world.
I must emphatically state that these traditional modes of artistic production, professional comportment and artwork sale are conventional, outdated, and at odds with the internet-age democratization of culture that post-internet art seeks to address. Moreover, with growing income inequality, art collection is becoming an increasingly popular hobby amongst the wealthy—and we, post-internet artists, writers and curators, have given them a shiny new liquid asset to hide their cash.
Perhaps it is because post-internet was catalyzed by artists, writers and curators who sought to combat a lack of internet awareness within artistic discourse and through a rhetoric tied to art history and gallery practice that it became subsumed by the market. By not challenging art at its most basic principles and social constructs, we have changed little.
If we learned anything from the popularity and diversity of members in Occupy Wall Street and its art world offshoots, it’s that we’re not happy with the art world as it exists today, and that we’re all pretty much broke. Perhaps it is the pervasiveness of income inequality and this new politic of desperation that must be our next subject.