Customer Reviews

Internet Art (World of Art)

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I read an article about this book/author in a recent issue of Time Out New York. At first I didn't think I would be remotely interested in the subject matter. It seemed pretty random. But the article really piqued my interest in the field. After reading the book INTERNET ART, I think internet art might be the most intriguing contemporary art practice out there. This book has a great balance of insider experience, 20th century art history, and handholding for novices (which I am). A really good resource.

This book offers the very best of the World of Art Series' reference-based scholarship. Parallelled in the series only by the contributions of Hans Richter and Roselee Goldberg (most likely because Greene shares with these scholars the distinction of being a firsthand participant-observer in the phenomena she describes), this book is a wonderfully comprehensive and readable introduction to an arcane, subterranean art history. This will surely be considered the guidebook for a largely uncharted territory in contemporary art.

I am an avid reader about contemporary art and I found this book pushed buttons and raised questions I had never even thought of... it's clear that the internet is a defining medium, especially for younger generations, and this book helped me think about the net in a more critical and expansive way. I love the World of Art series and recommend its titles to those trying to get their minds around art and art history. This book was great and I especially liked author's use of the non-net art examples including Tiravanija, Valie Export, and Cindy Sherman.

In the end, for all its fury (and New Mediasts and Anarchists worked side-by-side in the 1990s) revolutionary art was caught in contradictions. It could not or would not break free of the forms of bourgeois media culture as a whole. Its content and method could become transformations of the hierarchial media but, while net art remained imprisoned within the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather than enter into direct social conflict with the old media it criticized, it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere where it functioned objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted to destroy. Revolt against push media became the evasion of push media. Marx's original critique of the genesis of religious myth and ideology applies word-for-word to the rebellion of bourgeois network art: it too "is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people" [Marx, Contribution to the critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"].