KVT on Flickers

Musings and meanderings in a new media art sort of way

New Media Art has certainly come a long way since Fluxus and Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono and so on. With the development of new media technologies it’s hard understand the persistence of today’s contemporary artists sticking to the old mediums. I guess it’s because the buying public is still hooked on the stuff that easily hangs on a wall or sits on a white plinth in white cube galleries. And if you want to make money or a name in conventional circles you stick with the stuff that had its revolutionary genesis centuries ago. Photography fits its bottom comfortably into the old mould and most of that is better off in a book format anyway.

Like a lot of “old media art”, most new stuff is pretty awful but with any art it’s only the stars and sometimes the sensational that survive and become collectable or part of a Museum of Modern Art catalogue.

When I first started to delve into video forms of art I wondered about their collectability quotient but suddenly realized that the solution is the household TV screen, now that these are almost art forms themselves as they sit pitch black and flat on walls or suspended from ceilings, or even become the walls, ceilings and floors in architectural scenarios that not so long ago were sci-fi fantasies.

If you caught, or are going to, the Flickers installations by Japanese new media artist, Minami Takao, and sit and watch his rather beautiful video and sound piece Fat Shades you’ll see what I mean. I can imagine entering ‘Fat Shades’ info into your control panel and a wall, ceiling floor (or all…) screen would come up with that piece in a passageway in your home, in a bedroom……You’d have examples of this new art stuff at your fingertips. I suspect that a canny entrepreneur will buy the originals and art lovers will be able to pay for downloads. Just imagine! If we want conservative we can have Takao on one screen, Pippiltti Rist on another, Shirin Neshit elsewhere and Gillian Wearing standing by while the adolescents and twenty-somethings would be honing in on the more underground stuff. The culturally disenfranchised will have their own cheap glitz on demand and, as so often happens, some of that will become to be called high art just as graffiti pieces have hit appreciative nerves outside the tag and run and hip hop brigades.

It’s definitely the new art of the near new future and I think we’ve had to wait for far too long (for new media art that is, not necessarily graffiti).

The Japanese pioneer a lot of the really cutting edge new media art but I think that the young Viets with their ability to adopt and adapt new technologies could one day give them a run for their money. Mind you, there’ll be an awful lot of YouTube style guff to sort through before the occasional jewels emerge.

But that’s art! A bit like the ceramics on the dyke.