From: "Andy Best" <best-AT-meetfactory.com>
Subject: Re: News: WebArt Manifesto
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 01:05:15 +0200



A lot of Gerald O'Connell's pompous waffle cut out (unfortunately a lot
still left in):
>
>All of this suggests to me that 'WebArt' as a term satisfactorily
>catches 99% of what is new, unique, vital and full of future potential
>for the development of art via the Internet. I would submit that
>attention should not be focused on the actuality of transmission, but
>rather, perhaps, on the potential for transmission as an important
>sociogical factor in the mechanics of the social construction of public
>taste. Work encapsulated within HTML has an inbuilt flexibility that
>enables it to be networked, broadcast or narrowcast. That is all new and
>exciting and important, but it is not an essential criterion for the
>content: the art can be encapsulated within HTML, put on a hard drive
>and seen only in a gallery or a museum. It is still the same art, the
>same WebArt. The mere vehicle is ultimately irrelevant: if one gallery
>could only be reached by train and another could only be reached by
>boat, would the same painting, when moved from one to the other, stop
>being 'RailArt' and start being 'BoatArt' ?

Hey, Gerald, you just don't seem to get it! If you take a work off the Net
it ISN'T Net or Web art any more - it's just art made using a particular
medium. And that seems to be what you're about. I've checked out your
"WebArt" site and well, it looks pretty much like painting and drawing to
me, yes, scanned and put into digital form, but all the works I saw by
different artists NO WAY use the intrinsic nature of the web as a
communication media! Some html trickery, but NOTHING dealing conceptually
with the medium itself.

If you've actually seen any of the net.art and web art projects done by
artists over the last few years that actually use communication and
interaction through the net or web as part of the work you'd know what I was
talking about, but it doesn't sound like you know much at all. What get's me
most about your "manifesto" is that a) you think you're so original - well
artists have been working with the net for a good many years now and they
don't need you to give them a word for it and b) most of us want to get away
from definitions of what can be art, is art, isn't art, and trying to
promote some "official" term is swimming in the other direction.
>
>Moreover, Damon, I must say that I find your comments anything but
>'bickering about semantics' - they are a valuable part of the process
>whereby some artists (like me) who produce WebArt gain a better
>understanding of what they are doing and why. For that reason I am
>grateful for your assistance in clarifying my ideas.
>
>Finally, you may be amused to learn that while Aleksi Aaltonen and I
>were working on the draft for the WebArt Manifesto, we considered this
>point about narrowness and breadth of the definition, only to conclude
>that there is probably room for another term: 'NetArt', of which WebArt
>would form a natural subset !
>
>Gerald O'Connell
>
>http://www.gacoc.demon.co.uk/
>
I nearly choked on my astonishment.

Andy Best

http://meetfactory.com




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