Response to Bishop’s “The Digital Divide”

“My point is that mainstream contemporary art simultaneously disavows and depends on the digital revolution, even especially when this art declines to speak overtly about the conditions of living in and through new media. But why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our experience of digitized life? After all, photography and film were embraced rapidly and wholeheartedly in the 1920s, as was video in the late 1960s and ’70s. These formats, however, were image based, and their relevance and challenge to visual art were self evident. The digital, by contrast, is code, inherently alien to human perception. It is, at base, a linguistic model. Convert any .jpg file to .txt and you will find its ingredients: a garbled recipe of numbers and letters, meaningless to the average viewer. Is there a sense of fear underlying visual art’s disavowal of new media? Faced with the infinite multiplicity of digital files, the uniqueness of the art object needs to be reasserted in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. If you borrow an artist’s DVD from a gallery, it usually arrives in a white paper slip, with VIEWING COPY ONLY marked clearly on the label; when a collector buys the same DVD in a limited edition, he or she receives a carefully crafted container, signed and numbered by the artist.”

Instead of touching on the ubiquity and popular appeal of digital art, Bishop calls into question the digital everyday in contemporary art. I did not agree with how she dismisses new media art in favor of more traditional art like sculpture, video, and installation. She goes on to state how digital art is not visual but instead is based on code and linguistics. Regardless, the end result is a visual display. I wonder how she would fit typographic design into her discussion. However, I was most interested in her point that mainstream contemporary art is not reacting to the digital age out of fear.

It is well known that “the establishment” fears and rejects what is different, new, and/or may force it to change. Bishop attributes this fear to art’s loss of uniqueness “in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.” This reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” specifically the concept of authenticity in the realm of mechanical reproduction. Even though reproduction weakens the aura of the original, there is really nothing like seeing the one true work of art.

Now mechanical reproduction has been replaced with digital dissemination. While re-posting a work of art on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. may weaken its integrity, it only allows a wider audience to view and comment on art that they would have otherwise never seen. Since Bishop wrote this article in 2012, I believe it is a bit dated in its evaluation of digital art. In the years since, the world of digital art has grown exponentially. The way I see it, the new media art world is niche, the mainstream art world is upper echelon niche, and the real art world is everything all around and in between.