Trusting aesthetics to prosthetics - art criticism Internet World Wide Web sites

De gustibus non est disputandum.

(There is no accounting for tastes.)

Criticism as Container: A Leaky Proposition

Chris takes the cup of coffee from Sandy as the ArtSite home-page downloads on her computer screen. A banner at the top of the page reads, "ArtSite: The Best of the Web." Arrayed underneath are buttons labeled Artist Projects, Exhibition Reviews, Critics' Forum, and Art Buzz "I think this is one of the best-curated sites on the Web," Chris says between sips of coffee. "They weed through the garbage and pick out the good stuff - so you don't have to." Sandy nods her head. "Sounds like one-stop shopping for art criticism," she says.

This scenario describes the typical World Wide Web site devoted to art criticism today. Modeled on the table of contents of a magazine or the brochure for a curated exhibition, such a site contains an exclusive selection of artworks that one or more experts have deemed to be instructive to the general public. This approach is familiar. It's convenient. And it's completely at odds with the social and technological underpinnings of the Internet.

To come to terms with a digital culture, an interface to art on the Web cannot merely ape museum brochures and magazines, which rely for their power on self-containment, exclusivity, and instruction by experts. Engaging the Internet on its own terms will require an approach that is radically distributed - one that may threaten to spill beyond the appointed containers of traditional criticism. Crude versions of this distributed criticism are already starting to crop up on the Web, and the future they foretell presents a serious challenge to conventional aesthetic theory.

To begin with, the Web is not about containment. It is easier and faster to jump from a server in Paris to one in Tokyo than it is to download a digitized Poussin at one's present location. For this reason, a typical user is unlikely to spend an afternoon on-line browsing links confined to the Louvre's website, an experience better suited to CD-ROM. Instead, that user will follow a link from the Louvre's lists of other art sites to the Dia Foundation, from Dia to Ping Chong's Web page, from there to La Mama and the Robots Bar and Lounge, then on to the NYC Marathon homepage. The quintessential Web surf does not confine itself to institutional boundaries; it punctures them. This fact robs conventional aesthetic criticism, when applied to the Web, of one of its most valuable tools: artistic intent. Roland Barthes's "death of the author" notwithstanding, most of the vocabulary of critical analysis - plot, closure, tone, point of view, composition - presumes that some author has intentionally crafted the aesthetic experience in question. Even if a novelist's intent is unknown to the reader - which is true in most cases, actually - the reader will try to imagine it in order to understand the work: "Well, I guess Dickens let Little Joe die to underscore the tragic living conditions of the underclass." So what does a critic do when the order of pages is determined not by an author's careful structuring, but by a reader's arbitrary meanderings? On the Web, the user wanders freely out of one artist's intent and into another's.[1] Hence any criticism consistent with a user's experience of the Web must abandon the goal of corraling all the good work into one patch of cyberspace.

From Instruction to Extraction

As the focus of each web surf centers more on the user's intent than on a single author's, so each user is responsible for following the links she or he thinks are most worthwhile. Likewise, most electronic bulletin boards will publish anyone who is diligent enough to post to them. Although there is a high price of admission - buying a computer and modem, investing the hours necessary to learn to ftp files or write html code - by and large the Internet is a nonexclusive arena for discourse, in which everyone who can pay the price of admission can have a voice.

Another arena for discourse - albeit one with a higher price of admission - is the university. The academic equivalent of the website delivering "expert" advice is the tweed-jacketed professor dispensing knowledge to the students:

The professor chalks two words on the blackboard. "Mimesis and rhythm," he says, turning to face the class, "according to Aristotle, are the two properties to which all arts aspire." Definitely a fill-in-the-blank question for the exam, Sandy thinks, as she jots the two words into her notebook.

Fortunately there are other models of teaching besides instruction, the one-way flow of information from professor to student. Instruction is only useful where information is scarce. This is certainly not the case for today's digitally literate aesthetes, who will be rewarded with a daunting 6,000 sites if they perform a Lycos search on the keyword aesthetics. What Internauts need now are not instructors, but listeners who will work with them individually to help them choose what to pay attention to, based on correlations among information with different origins. And there's nothing to say those listeners have to be human? some claim that intelligent software agents will be better suited to the herculean task of sorting the ten useful sites from the 5,990 that are a waste of time. Whether embodied in flesh or silicon, it is intelligence - and not information - that will enable students of on-line art to extract what they need from the flood of words and images streaming into their modems.