"One of the consequences of the rise of Internet is the possibility to engage in public debates on a wide range of subjects, in open but often structured forums that offer you various protocols for speaking your mind. Far from neutralizing the expression of opinions, the reign of the virtual seems to sharpen the appetite for polemical exchange, which inevitably spills over into physical places: lectures, round tables, philosophical coffee houses, associations, seminars, political formations. The effect is to shake up the consensus of our somnolent societies – to the point where the mass media, and television first of all, begin to worry about losing shares of what had been a captive market. The media then start to simulate an interaction which their conditions of production and distribution do not really allow, and a complex joust emerges between "traditional" channels of distribution and independent actors on the margins, who seek to develop new architectures of debate. The art world, itself divided between well-established distribution systems and particularly imaginative fringes, naturally becomes one of the testing grounds for this larger confrontation, pitting a kind of direct democracy with a more-or-less anarchist spin against every force that would seek to channel the expressions, to restore the audience ratings and the hierarchies....
...Speaking out, the political prise de parole, or what Michel de Certeau called "the constitutive principle of society," is no longer prohibited in any of the contemporary media. But it can be neutralized by fragmentation and blurring. That's exactly what the media have excelled at since the 1980s. Investigating the process, reflecting it, displaying it from every angle, has paradoxically become one of the favorite means for professional artists to maintain their positions in the institutional market. And so one is scarcely surprised, in an exhibition that claims to deal with debate and judgment, when the results are finally described by their authors as "a decor for a televised scene" in which the actor Robert De Niro will be invited to appear and "explain everything"! Is it the ultimate irony, or just an involuntary mimesis of the dominant media? Whatever your answer, the artists have clearly left all the hierarchies in place, like worthy inheritors of the feigned struggles between pop and advertising. The desire for a real debate is channeled into aesthetic forms, and resolves into its opposite..."
Read the rest of this online article by Brian Holmes click here.
Also check out the fantastically rich host site Universite Tangente, with postings of "years of subversive studies that crisscross and contradict each other". Delightful, smart, sassy!
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