My own view, having
> recently spent ten quid to look at Cy Twombly's infantile rubbish, is
> that the kind of Art shown at Tate etc... is hopelessly bankrupt as a
> form of cultural endeavour, not least because of its metaphysical
> disavowal of its own technicity, and that if there is to be a form of
> art (lower case 'a') that might be fit for the new rhythms of our
> digital culture then it is new media art.

I find this take on Cy Twombly astonishing! How is it possible to have 
become so reductive about the medium in which an art work is made? 
Surely, if anything, Twombly's exploration of minimal, primitive 
markings - the relationship between mark and sign, scribbling and 
writing, meaning and noise, that goes 'back' to the very origins of the 
human need to mediate his/her relationship with the world symbolically - 
foregrounds the the crisis of art/painting in the age of technical 
reproduction. How is this need for symbolic mediation given form in the 
aftermath of two world wars, mass mechanical extermination, the space 
race, you name it. Do you really think that in the absence of 
photography, an artist would have arrived at this degree of painterly 
self-reflexivity and deconstruction? The irony is of course that the 
advent of mechanical reproduction freed art (albeit already moving into 
its role as 'autonomous' activity) from the last vestiges of its use 
value - the work of representation - forcing or allowing it to enter 
into the phase of its existential self-interrogation (one that presumes 
a consciousness of its conditions of technicity, and which therefore 
should please you!!, and one that shows no signs of coming to an end). 
Twombly's work registers this loss of social function whilst at the same 
time giving the uncertainty and doubt brought on by it an exquisite and 
tentative beauty - turning it into great art. Something that few new 
media artists seem to be able to achieve at the current impasse of the 
'whatever art' and the 'whatever subject'. When I contemplate this 
particular piece of new media art - http://dogsears.ica.org.uk/ - I find 
your unconditional championing of new media art even more perplexing, 
and even begin to sympathise with Eshun's decision.

J