Abstract
In this paper we explore the nature of art in the globalised, post-modernist era, an era paradoxically combining unity and fragmentation. In doing so, we postulate a working hypothesis to the effect that a journey involves the potential of an experience that requires some kind of bodily presence, in our case, the ‘body’ of the work of art or/and that of the viewer/interactant, and entails reminiscence bound up with the spatiotemporal coordinates of the experience. Digital art, we argue, globally accessible via the Web and determined by the medium it employs, denies itself this bodily presence and, by annihilating time and space boundaries and allowing its numerous, simultaneous viewers/interactants to engulf it in Benjamin’s (The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In W. Benjamin Illuminations, pp. 217–51, Schocken Books, 1936/1968) terms, marks a radical change in the journey requirements referred to above. In the absence of a body, the distance between the work of art and the viewer is gone and the immersion that follows (see Polimeris, Digital Future and Art: Institutional Management Perspectives (Ψηφιακό Μέλλον και Τέχνη: Προοπτικές θεσμικής διαχείρισης), Unpublished PhD dissertation, Athens, The Panteion University, 2011) results in loss of the spatiotemporal dimension and reminiscence. The digital or digitalized work of art somehow needs to ‘pay’ for its universal accessibility by becoming impossible to pin down and, thus, ever-elusive. Like the globalised era it is mostly a child of, it paradoxically combines immediacy and timelessness, lethe. Yet, as we go on to show, like the globalised era, the phenomenon can trace its roots back in times bygone.
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Notes
- 1.
The idea of cultural products is not new. ‘Romantic’ and ‘mystical’ views of culture as the product of the creator’s imagination (Wolff, 1993, p. 1) are countered by a number of scholars emphasizing the role of institutional forces rather than of the individual perception of cultural products (see, among others, Crane, 1992; Griswold, 1986).
- 2.
Naturally, there is no denying that art has always been a commodity of some kind but this has usually been subordinated to its sense of sublimity (see Benjamin, 1936/1968).
- 3.
- 4.
Not all scholarly work has been positive in relation to this idea of fragmentation in modern art. Manovich (2002), for instance, argues in favour of digital perception and interaction following in the footsteps of the cinema, despite the differences between the two media. Some kind of linearity is still sustained in digital applications.
- 5.
The transformation of space and time perception generally and in art specifically can be seen in diverse developments, as in Einstein’s theory of relativity, the cubist paintings made by Picasso and Braques, the narrative of Marcel Proust and James Joyce or the use of film-editing techniques in the early cinema of Sergei Eisenstein και Tsiga Vertov.
- 6.
This is, no doubt, connected with the non-semantic organizational structure of the Web.
- 7.
Etymologically, lethe (from the Greek ‘λήθη’) is the opposite of non-lethe (α (=without) – λήθεια).
- 8.
- 9.
The decadence of replication is also clear in Benjamin’s (1997) work entitled ‘The Translator’s Task’. It would be particularly interesting to consider how this may transform our perception of digital simulation.
- 10.
According to post-structuralists (see discussion in Polimeris, 2011), the subject is constituted by arbitrary yet all-powerful cultural and historical actions.
- 11.
Involuntary memory.
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Polimeris, S., Calfoglou, C. (2015). Art in the Globalised Era: A Disembodied Journey with Traces in the Past. In: Katsoni, V. (eds) Cultural Tourism in a Digital Era. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15859-4_6
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