"This may mean either that Net Art, along the last 15 years, didn't 
produced anything noteworthy or that Net Art, after roughly 15 years of 
existence, still challenges the evaluation criteria and critical tools 
available for a mid-career, traditionally trained contemporary art critic."

Thank you Domenico, this is a really useful post. In regard the 2 
possible reasons why contemporary art critics don't "get net art" its 
probably really a mixture of the 2.

I do however find it worrying that intelligent cultural commentators 
like Hal Foster don't really engage the net art phenomena. It's not 
enough to dismiss this as conservatism or technophobia which are the 
normal responses. Some productive soul searching on theses issues would 
be a useful outcome of Gompertz's blog.


Domenico Quaranta wrote:
> Hi crumbers,
>
> I just posted this on Will Gompertz blog...
>
> I had some funny time reading this article and all the reactions it 
> produced, on this blog and around the Web (check out, among other 
> things, Lauren Cornell's contribution on Rhizome - 
> http://rhizome.org/editorial/3282 – and the CRUMB thread 
> onhttp://www.crumbweb.org/). Personally, as an art critic strongly 
> interested in Net Art, I don't think that Mr. Will Gompertz just needs 
> some links to "hot" web projects, neither informations of any kind. He 
> doesn't write "I can't find any net-based art", but "I can't find any 
> net-based art of note". As the following statement suggests, Mr. 
> Gompertz knows very well what Net Art is: "Duchamp and the Dadaists 
> would have had hours of artistic amusement creating spoof websites, 
> unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status 
> quo." Well, at least 50% of the best Net Art is "spoof websites, 
> unintelligible Wiki entries and general questioning of the status quo."
>
> So, if I see a problem here, it isn't a problem of ignorance, but of 
> critical judgement. What we have here is a mid-career art critic - one 
> who wrote for the Times and the Guardian and who ran Tate Online 
> before joining the BBC as arts editor - who claims that, among the 
> many net art projects he came in touch with along his brilliant 
> career, he didn't find anything that can be described as "a 
> significant artwork". This may mean either that Net Art, along the 
> last 15 years, didn't produced anything noteworthy or that Net Art, 
> after roughly 15 years of existence, still challenges the evaluation 
> criteria and critical tools available for a mid-career, traditionally 
> trained contemporary art critic.
>
> Both the options above can be right of course. My little experience in 
> the field makes me believe in the last one. It may help us to 
> understand why, among other things, important art critics not strictly 
> connected with the art market (and thus potentially interested in 
> critical practices), such as Hal Foster or Rosalind Krauss, were never 
> able to get it. And I think that, if we'll be able to focus the 
> discussion on these topics - how Net Art challenges traditional 
> criticism? do we really need "other criteria" in order to understand 
> it and its positioning in the contemporary art field? - Mr. Gompertz's 
> remarks will turn out to be really useful.
>
> My bests,
> Domenico
>
> ---
>
> Domenico Quaranta
>
> web. http://domenicoquaranta.com/
> email. [log in to unmask]
> mob. +39 340 2392478
> skype. dom_40
>