hello Johannes,


>
> Josephine Bosma correctly raises questions about the "historiography" or method used, if I understand her. Josephine could you please elaborate on your recent comment:
>>> For me it is important to move beyond simple preconceptions about art and the Internet. I am not entirely sure whether the subject 'art history online' covers this topic.>.
>
> I am also suspicious of the notion of an "art history online", but I think the discussion about the archive and the repertoire has already begun here, and from just today's host of postings (still opening some of them), this promises to be a redhot October.

I wanted to leave this for later, because it takes some work, and I have other things to do. But a quick note:

The titles 'Art History Online' seems confusing because it could mean at least two things: how art historians have used the Internet, and how art has developed online.

Both do not really seem to be the issue here, or at least they are not for me. To discuss art and the Internet from some sort of 'digital born' perspective alone is very limiting in my point of view. That tends to leave us with discussions of Web art and maybe some software art (browsers mainly) alone.

Online cultures are important to analyze and discuss though. For this we do need those archives. What the Internet brings to art is not just a big, relatively open network structure, a publishing space, or a dematerialization of objects and bodies. It (more or less) does these things while allowing for or enabling a transformation of art discourses. The Internet is a politically charged space, something which not only unfolds in NSA spying. Politics also come into play in who is taken seriously, whose voices are heard, whose opinions are recorded, where they end up and how they are presented and contextualized there.


For sure there is more to say about this, please feel free to comment, also you, lurkers. ;-)




J
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