In Saper's analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures-networks, publications, and collective works-give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus's Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. Networked Art is an essential guide to the digital artists and networks of the emerging future.
Craig J. Saper is associate professor of multimedia at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and is the author of Artificial Mythologies (Minnesota, 1997).
