The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Ryan Egel-Andrews (London, UK)
Is You Tube good for art history? The potential and threat of remix culture
You Tube is perhaps the most ubiquitous visual resource in the Western world. Taking inspiration from Lawrence Lessig’s notion that remix and mash-up culture is an important development in the articulation of contemporary culture this paper considers whether this idea is an opportunity or a threat to art history. Lessig has argued that a remix, when deployed effectively, can be an actively critical enterprise and it is therefore worth considering whether edited video footage might enrich art history as a discipline.
In 2009 I edited together You Tube clips of Damien Hirst interviews to produce a mash-up that de-contextualized the interview footage, transforming it into a comical, rapidly edited sequence of Hirst appearing to criticize himself and his art. Analysis of the video alongside Julian Stallabrass’s polemic ‘High Art Lite: The Rise and fall of Young British Art’ shows the two to critically approach Hirst’s art in similar (negative) ways.
Piet Mondrian’s work has been subject to seemingly endless digital reworkings.
Typically these involve the ‘3D-ization’ of his canvas paintings into motion graphics that explode out the flat colour panels and lines into animated ‘explorations’ of three dimensional space. Analysis of a typical example shows it to fundamentally misunderstand Mondrian’s work as he described it in his theoretical writings.These two examples, one tentatively encouraging and one extremely discouraging point to both the potential and threat the remix poses to the history of art. It is tentatively encouraging because whilst there is clearly scope for effective, critical remixes in an art context this form of creativity currently lacks the intellectual structure of referenced text to support active and continuing discourse. The question is whether such a framework might exist in the future.
The Mondrian example points to something more troublesome. The ubiquity of cheap digital editing tools, combined with Hal Foster’s notion that contemporary creative output is typified by an obsession with design, leads to a seemingly endless steam of videos that fail to engage critically with their subject matter. If we agree with Lessig that remix is a valid and ever growing force then its unchecked development runs the risk of eroding, or even reimagining, our knowledge of art.