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What is Art?

“The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art is art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.”

-Ad Reinhardt

“Art is the definition of Art.”
-Joseph Kosuth

Art is art. What makes art what it is cannot be contained through criteria. We cannot divide the whole (art) into separate measurable values that make up the whole. We cannot divide the whole into separate, measurable qualities. So we have nothing else to say about what makes up the meaning of the general.

3.4.2009

On Stuart Moulthrop’s “Radio Salience”: Unknown Potentials

I highly recommend looking at Moulthrop’s work here: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/rs/

On Stuart Moulthrop’s “Radio Salience”: Unknown Potentials

Amber O’Hara

May 2010

The development and success of hypertext and electronic literature has advanced greatly with the introduction of electronic encyclopedias, personal computers, the internet, and World Wide Web. This proliferation of works happens to coincide with a supposed decline in the reading of literature (Moulthrop, “What the Geeks Know”). In 2004 the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a report titled “Reading at Risk,” which is a sum of information collected by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, over 20 years of polling in a Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. This report articulated despair over the “cultural transformation” taking place where literary reading is on the decline, and society instead turns to electronic media as a source of information and entertainment. Not only did the NEA exclude electronic literature from the survey as a form of literature, but it distinctly separates the two, to the extent of devaluing electronic media. In the report, Chairman Dana Gioia, declared that:

“reading itself is a progressive skill that depends on years of education and practice. By contrast, most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio make fewer demands on their audiences, and indeed often require no more than passive participation. Even interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification.”

This separation is stimulated by a fear that without conventional book literature, we, as a society, will lose our intellectual capabilities for focused attention and contemplation, and thusly, our ability to have complex communications and insights (NEA). Certainly conventional printed media does foster deep attention, but it is also linear, fixed, immutable, stiff and hierarchical, and the proposal that this might be our only means of achieving particular intellectual capabilities is an antiquated one. It is an echo of a similar cry let out by painters during photography’s inception, who declared that it was not an art form. This was echoed again when traditional ‘analog’ photographers opposed and made the same declarations in regards to digital photography.

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