Thomson & Craighead - Altitude, 1996
Art institutes try to co-opt and support online activist culture elevating and branding it as art and thus limiting its scope and character.
The artworld is archaic and elite whereas the net stands for somehting hypermodern and democratic
The statement above is taken from the intoduction to the book Internet Art, The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce by Julian Stallabrass. The internet is a platform for sharing information and data. It does not grade it’s data. Thus, every piece of data is treated equally. This is a fundamental structure of the internet that has been so since its beginning (only now slowly changing with giving different priorities to high-bandwidth sites such as for video-streaming). Many of the active users of the internet strongly believe in this. Open-source software is very popular and website such as wikipedia demonstrate that the collaborative effort of volunteers all over the world can create something grand and usefull to everyone. For free.
This stands in contrast to the artworld which is believed to be a closed, elite, archiac circle in which art is institutionalised and deemed good or bad by the top of this organ. That which is not approved or supported by the museums, galleries, curators and collectors is not considered art.
In this sense, with the internet, anyone can publish their own personal art and make it immediatly visible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. This way, an individual could possibly be an artist, well known around the world, without ever having come in contact with any form of institution to support the art.
The internet now covers a wide variety of art forms, from the amateur and menial to elaborate and earnest narratives in words and pictures.
