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| Tyler Shields. Cigar, 2016. |
My personal archive as an online art gallery. Why not?
I'm not a gallery man, but a critical artist and a writer. I'm a viewer. I am an active as well as a passive agent. I'm a voyeur (aren't we all?). To think and write about art means having a lot of time to see a lot of it, visiting museums and galleries, reading and viewing books and catalogs, looking for meaningful stuff to feed my thoughts. Thanks to my computer, to my smartphone and thanks to the World Wide Web I can do all this moving my legs and consuming carbon a lot less. And this is a sustainable practice, isn't it?
For instance, it is more interesting to study visual art thru the Internet than going to big art fairs, and blockbuster festivals. In a way, visual art, either iconic or aniconic, is becoming a kind of literature or better said an interface, or index (Gell, A.), to access the art form, and to abduct the art meaning. Most people are going blind on texture and timeless (real generative) space. Fewer people than ever can get in touch with qualia. Everything seems to exist only on techno screens, processors, and servers. Men, women, and children, by the billions, are obsessed with their digital selfies, with transient portraits. Can't see reality anymore, as if it was only a kind of resistance to their will to ephemeral representation loopholes.
Nature is what we are made of, but we think about ourselves as mini Gods, as virtual beings running like video game characters, that is like rats, to nowhere. As interface technology (language in a broad sense) grows to infinity we become less than switches of the new technosphere, totally lost in a new artificial ecology.
For some reason, art museums and art galleries (not to say broadcast television) are losing their people. They seem less real when confronted with the big data stream. So-called artworks are made for no-one, and can only survive if they become synonymous of financial speculation. This dramatic turn, this post-contemporary condition of culture (postmodern in Lyotard's terms), will enhance cognitive machines and post-human fabrics and networks (actor-networks as Bruno Latour names the new thing) on the detriment of modern humans and their rapidly declining middle classes.
Even when walking on the beach, looking the horizon and the clouds, or sensing the strong northwest winds, or smelling rarefied sea perfumes, the digital contamination is overwhelming. It seems that nothing escapes the world data mining, run by a few global companies to whom we bow as happy slaves.
The real world is vanishing into the garbage. Only electronic languages and virtual worlds seem to obliterate our will to a more than ever necessary knowledge.
Yes, we need to go back to reality, but it is not an easy task.
Meanwhile, my Post Art Gallery is a modest way of delivering public thoughts and feelings on what might help us to avoid the perils of banality: the battle for the life and beauty on Earth.
Link to Post Art Gallery
