CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

Embodying Judgment: New Media and Art Criticism
Daniel Palmer, Monash University, Melbourne Australia

Art criticism is widely held to be in crisis, yet few who make this claim have paid attention to the issues raised by technological changes in art media. Indeed conventional methods of art criticism are poorly equipped to assess new media art – offering confused criteria for judgement – and an accessible critical discourse around this art is largely absent as a result. This paper explores aesthetic theories of new media with a view to rethinking the place of the medium in contemporary art criticism.

The challenges that new media poses for art history have been much discussed. However, aesthetic debate around new media art has largely concentrated on locating the defining qualities of new media art. As many have observed, this focus risks restating an anachronistic modernist paradigm of medium specificity. On the other hand, to merely note that new media entails a shift from object-centred to reception-centred aesthetics fails to discriminate between new media and other contemporary art of the post-Minimalism period.

This paper takes off from two recent and ambitious efforts to theorise the aesthetics of new media by Mark Hansen and Anna Munster. Both locate ‘digitality’ in terms of embodiment and duration, even as they attempt to shift the focus away from the medium or technology. Both, in distinct ways, link bodily effect with an ethical dimension.

How do these theories relate to existing models for contemporary art criticism? How do they recast Michael Fried’s famous dismissal of Minimalism as ‘theatrical’ because temporal and embodied? How can we put these ideas into practice? Is it possible to judge works of new media art by the type of embodied experience they invite?

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