Charlotte,
"Arts Future Book" asks a lot of pertinent questions. The text made me think of an effort I curated and organized in collaboration with Dieter Daniels online AND as a book series with two volumes.
http://www.mediaartnet.org
It's still online but at times feels like it's actually ten years old, which it is. The reason I bring this up is that it was our belief that one should create a platform in which the archive AND the discourse is linked and cross-referenced. This was obviously pre-YouTube and pre-social media (published in 2004 and 2005). But it's still a valid platform for precisely the questions you address> the context in which media historians and art historians share space, materials and references. The archival platform was conceived as a broad thematic approach across the 20th century, including a thematic section on Art and Cinematography http://www.mediaartnet.org/themes/art_and_cinematography/ (curated by art historian Gregor Stemmrich) and one on Photography in the Digital Age http://www.mediaartnet.org/themes/photo_byte/ (curated by art historian Susanne Holschbach). the mere inclusion of these two sections specifically demonstrated that kind of crossover of disciplines.
The books, published by Springer Vienna/New York, replicated the commissioned essays (that is a large part of the 55 that were commissioned for the free online platform) and offered "soft links" to jump back and forth between the art historian's mode of reading a book and the searching mode of looking up the references online. The books ended up mostly in libraries and the online materials have since been superseded by richer content elsewhere. But the combination of these elements of archive/discourse still resonates today, at least in my perspective (and the introductory volume is currently being translated into Chinese).

A final point> it was Dieter's and my vision that we would be able to encourage historians to write for a multimedia platform as opposed to the book format, testing a more hyper-textual approach to writing. This was only partly successful.

Best,
Rudolf







________________________________________
From: Curating digital art - www.crumbweb.org [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Charlotte Frost [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 09, 2013 8:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] what's art history got to do with it?

I want to try and get to the question of what all this (amazing discussion
of the early days of online art production and discussion) has to do with
the discipline of art history. And it might be that we decide the answer is
'nothing at all' but let me set out some thoughts first.

In the main, I'd argue that lists and art history are connected simply
because lists were/are primary sources for any art historian wishing to
research and analyze digital and new media art forms. They might have been
set up at least in part to get away from the limiting structures of
institutionalized scholarship, but truly, even with the handful of books
that have been published on art and digital technology, where would you go
to find out more? However, what I am interested in is what all of this
vibrant and prolific online critical appraisal of the arts has done to the
role of the art critic and to the resources art historians aim to work from,
the products they tend to produce and the way they conceptualize their work.
For example, poll a few art historians and you'll find they still expect to
be working with static images (maybe not slides, but often the new digitized
versions of slides) and producing monographs.

I am currently - elsewhere - working on an argument
(http://www.gylphi.co.uk/artsfuturebook/) that art history is in fact
essentially 'bookish'. What I mean by that (and it's a term I've borrowed
from digital humanities scholar Jessica Pressman who analyses the aesthetics
of bookishness, or rather literature which faces the trauma of the death of
the book by developing the codex form as an aesthetic trope) is art
historical knowledge is partly derived from and very much made for books.
Whilst that's not specific to art history - what scholarly discipline hasn't
imagined a print-based output? - I think the concept and indeed concrete
form of the book serve to re-enforce many of the outmoded standards art
historians measure art by. For starters, I'd argue that the literal
combination of words and images bound together on paper pages re-enforces
the idea that an artwork should be readŠrather than danced or re-createdŠ.
It might also contribute to the power of concepts like the single
author/artists or indeed the static artwork. I don't think it's a
coincidence that digital and new media artworks often moved and aren't well
represented in art history. I think there's a direct - but not a
technologically deterministic - link and that link is bookishness.

And then there's the fact - as Diane M Zorich's report on digital
capacity-building in art history departments repeatedly states - that art
history is an extremely technophobic discipline
(http://www.kressfoundation.org/research/Default.aspx?id=35379). Which, when
you think about it, makes very little sense because art history as a
scholarly discipline solidifies around the invention of the camera ­ and
what do art historians do if not make intense studies of the creative use of
communication systems? And yet, where were all the art historians on mailing
lists like Nettime, the Syndicate and Rhizome? Where are all the art
historians using new technologies to ask new questions about the arts? If
the Modern Language Association conference annually hosts upwards of 30
sessions on the digital humanities, why has the College Art Association only
offered one or two over the last four or five years?

Likewise, where are all the art critics? Over recent years we've seen a boom
in online art critical discussion. What art magazine/journal today doesn't
have a website? And sites like We Make Money Not Art, ArtFCity and
Hyperallergic are all very popular. But meanwhile, art critics in regular
employment are in the decline. The art critic for Milwaukee's Journal
Sentinel, Mary-Louise Schumacher, has been closely monitoring this
artpocalypse, mapping the job losses of art critics across America and
recording their stories for an upcoming documentary.

I'm presenting these thoughts in order to usher in a discussion on what
online art discussion has done to the working activities and indeed the very
notion of an art critic or an art historian? Can such practitioners survive
in their traditionally-defined roles? What skill-sets are being developed
and what is being lost through the fast-moving, collaborative world of
online art discussion? I'm hoping to hear from some of the art critics who
have carved a niche for themselves online, how they got started and even how
they make ends meet - do they necessarily have portfolio careers. And what
about art historians working online? There's a small but growing group of
regular art history bloggers so why did they take to the internet and what
has it contributed to the way they work?






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