May 03, 2007
THURSDAYS@ARGOS
Jon Ippolito: Art After Institutions
argos, centre for art & media in Brussels, presents: THURSDAYS@ARGOS LECTURE: Jon Ippolito: Art After Institutions.
Participatory media like Flickr and YouTube have given ordinary netizens a chance to shine as media creators, but this fact hasn't gone over well with "serious" artists and their curatorial counterparts. Seemingly bereft of the social status, economic privilege, and institutional recognition of mainstream art stars, some new media artists wonder what role, if any, remains for them to play in the the Web 2.0 age of peer-filtered creativity. As Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito argue in the 2006 book 'At the Edge of Art', new media art's dependence on institutions is indeed in crisis, but this is more of a loss for galleries and museums than for the artists themselves. For participatory media are on the verge of enabling creators to regain the power they once held before the era of commodity speculation and the art market: the ability to reconnect people in new forms of creative kinship, whereby artworks facilitate social transactions rather than financial ones. To accept this new role, however, artists, curators, and critics may have to renounce the pyramid scheme offered by the brick-and-mortar art world, replacing the monolithic canon of Great Artists with a dense network of creative participants.
The recipient of Tiffany, Lannan, and American Foundation awards, Jon Ippolito exhibited artwork with collaborative teammates Janet Cohen and Keith Frank at the Walker Art Center, ZKM/Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and WNET's ReelNewYork Web site. As Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum, he curated Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium and, with John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik. Ippolito's critical writing has appeared in periodicals ranging from Flash Art and the Art Journal to the Washington Post. At the Still Water lab co-founded with Joline Blais, Ippolito is at work on three projects--the Variable Media Network, the Open Art Network, and their 2006 book 'At the Edge of Art'--that aim to expand the art world beyond its traditional confines.
In cooperation with the International Visitors Program for Media Arts organised by Digitaal Platform IAK/IBK and Flanders Image.
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Posted by jo at May 3, 2007 12:08 PM
