Abstract
How has the advent and widespread use of digital media affected our understanding of kitsch its relationship to art? Along this chapter, the author introduces the term “digital kitsch” not to describe specific, conventionally “kitschy” manifestations of digital aesthetics, but to identify the default mode for all creative endeavors with digital media: tools that have made visual literacy accessible to all, turning the strategies and languages of the avant-garde banal and commonplace; tools that elicit technophilia, rather than critical, informed use, and whose built-in limitations and ideologies condition their creative outputs. Digital kitsch takes in everything from amateur internet creations to professional content, from low-res “poor images” to mainstream media productions, from pixel graphics to hi-res CGI, and more. By no means exhaustively, this chapter looks at how art might exist in this arena, in relation to digital kitsch, but without identifying with it.
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Notes
- 1.
Jon Rafman, “Conversation with Nicholas O’Brien, Kool-Aid Man in Second Life,” 2009. Video, 18:01, https://vimeo.com/11689565.
- 2.
“Petra Cortright,” MoMA, New York, accessed April 12, 2022, www.moma.org/collection/works/401436.
- 3.
A restoration/reconstruction of the piece in its original appearance has been produced by Rhizome, New York for its online exhibition Net Art Anthology (2016–2019), and is available online at this link: http://archive.rhizome.org/anthology/vvebcam/. See also: “Net Art Anthology,” Rhizome, accessed April 12, 2022, https://anthology.rhizome.org/. Cortright never uploaded the video on YouTube again, although it has subsequently been shared by other users on the platform.
- 4.
Not So Work Friendly.
- 5.
Gene McHugh, Post Internet (Brescia: Link Editions, 2011), 5.
- 6.
Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, eds., Mass Effect. Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012), XV.
- 7.
“Pro-Am: Art and Culture on the Internet” was the title of a series of conferences organized by Western Front, Vancouver in September 2012. Video documentation is available online at: “Pro-Am: Art and Culture on the Internet,” Western Front, accessed April 12, 2022, https://legacywebsite.front.bc.ca/events/pro-am-art-and-culture-on-the-internet/.
- 8.
Introduced by Ed Halter in: Ed Halter, “After the Amateur: Notes,” Rhizome, April 29, 2009, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2009/apr/29/after-the-amateur-notes/.
- 9.
The vast bibliography on Post Internet is beyond the scope of this piece. For this author’s take on the subject, and more bibliographical references, see Domenico Quaranta, “Situating Post Internet,” in Renewable Futures. Art, Science and Society in the Post-Media Age, eds. Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits and Armin Medosch (Riga: RIXC Center for New Media Culture, 2017), 81–92.
- 10.
Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, eds., Digital Folklore (Stuttgart: merz & solitude, 2009).
- 11.
The concept was introduced by the artist Brad Troemel in 2013 to describe online audiences that “share images and videos initially conceived as artworks without any concern for authorship, context, or property—without any particular awareness that they are engaging with ‘art’ at all.” See Brad Troemel, “The Accidental Audience,” The New Inquiry, March 14, 2013, https://thenewinquiry.com/the-accidental-audience/.
- 12.
“Petra Cortright,” YouTube, accessed April 12, 2022, www.youtube.com/user/petracortright.
- 13.
Inspired by Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “milieu,” the term “informational milieu” was introduced by Tiziana Terranova in 2004, and adopted by Ceci Moss in 2019 to describe the environment in which most digital media art takes place. See Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (New York: Pluto Press, 2004) and Ceci Moss, Expanded Internet Art. Twenty-First-Century Artistic Practice and the Informational Milieu (New York and London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).
- 14.
Gillo Dorfles, Le oscillazioni del gusto. L’arte d’oggi tra tecnocrazia e consumismo (Torino: Einaudi, 1970).
- 15.
Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 571–584, https://doi.org/10.2307/2022937. 580.
- 16.
Hermann Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” 1950–1951, in Kitsch. An Anthology of Bad Taste, ed. Gillo Dorfles (London: Studio Vista, 1969), 49–76. 61.
- 17.
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1953, in Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture. Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989 [1961]), 3–33.
- 18.
Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati. Comunicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura di massa (Milano: Bompiani, 1977 [1964]), 112 (author’s translation).
- 19.
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
- 20.
Terranova, Network Culture, 8.
- 21.
Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media,” Computer 10(3) (March 1977): 31–41. Republished in The New Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge—London: The MIT Press, 2003), 393–404.
- 22.
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 9.
- 23.
See Anne Collins Goodyear, “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology,’” Leonardo, Vol. 41, No. 2 (2008), 169–173.
- 24.
On the biases of Artificial Intelligence training systems, see: Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI. The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets,” September 19, 2019, https://excavating.ai.
- 25.
Adrian Ward, Geoff Cox, “How I Drew One of My Pictures: * or, The Authorship of Generative Art,” 1999. Paper presented at the Generative Art international conference, Politecnico di Milano, www.generativeart.com/on/cic/99/0399.htm.
- 26.
“Photoshop. The first demo,” Adobe Photoshop YouTube channel, accessed April 12, 2022, https://youtu.be/Tda7jCwvSzg. See also: Gordon Comstock, “Jennifer in paradise: The story of the first Photoshopped image,” The Guardian, June 13, 2014, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2014/jun/13/photoshop-first-image-jennifer-in-paradise-photography-artefact-knoll-dullaart.
- 27.
The project started with an open letter to Jennifer: Constant Dullaart, “A Letter to Jennifer Knoll,” Rhizome, September 05, 2013. https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/sep/05/letter-jennifer-knoll/.
- 28.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001), 306–307.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 11.
- 31.
Eco, Apocalittici e integrati, 76 (author’s translation).
- 32.
I wrote extensively about this in: Domenico Quaranta, “Response. Contemporary Art and Online Popular Culture.” Artpulse, Issue 20, December 2014, 34–37.
- 33.
Borrowing the term from Mark Fisher, I call this form of accelerated incorporation into the mainstream “precorporation.” See Domenico Quaranta, “Between Hype Cycles and the Present Shock,” Docs #06, NERO Editions, Rome 2020, www.neroeditions.com/docs/between-hype-cycles-and-the-present-shock/.
- 34.
“Drei Klavierstücke op. 11,” accessed April 12, 2022, https://coryarcangel.com/things-i-made/2009-003-dreiklavierstucke-op-11. I offered an overview of these kind of practices in my touring exhibition Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (2011–2012). See Domenico Quaranta, ed., Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age (Brescia: Link Editions, 2011).
- 35.
See Matteo Bittanti and Domenico Quaranta, eds., GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2006).
- 36.
Domenico Quaranta, “My Life Without Technoviking: An Interview with Matthias Fritsch,” Rhizome, December 5, 2013, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/05/interview-matthias-fritsch/.
- 37.
An archival copy of the project is available: “Dis Images,” Rhizome, accessed April 12, 2022, https://anthology.rhizome.org/dis-images.
- 38.
“Three D Scans,” accessed April 12, 2022, https://threedscans.com/.
- 39.
Broch, “Notes on the Problem of Kitsch,” 49.
- 40.
For a more extensive discussion of this topic, see Domenico Quaranta, Surfing with Satoshi. Art, blockchain and NFTs (Milano: Postmedia Books—Ljubljana: Aksioma, 2022).
- 41.
See Martin O’Leary, “The Case Against Crypto,” Watershed, December 3, 2021, www.watershed.co.uk/studio/news/2021/12/03/case-against-crypto; and David Gerard, “NFTs: crypto grifters try to scam artists, again,” Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, March 11, 2021, http://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/03/11/nfts-crypto-grifters-try-to-scam-artists-again/.
- 42.
See The Museum of Crypto Art, founded by investor Colborn Bell, which could be described as a great inventory of digital kitsch. “The Museum of Crypto Art,” accessed April 12, 2022, https://museumofcryptoart.com/; and Ben Davis, “Colborn Bell, Founder of the First Museum of Crypto Art, Isn’t Worried About Wooing the Traditional Art World: A Q&A,” Artnet News, December 17, 2021, https://news.artnet.com/market/interview-colborn-bell-museum-of-crypto-art-2049578.
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Quaranta, Domenico. “Response. Contemporary Art and Online Popular Culture.” Artpulse, Issue 20 (December 2014): 34–37.
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Troemel, Brad. “The Accidental Audience.” The New Inquiry, March 14, 2013. https://thenewinquiry.com/the-accidental-audience/.
Ward, Adrian and Geoff Cox. “How I Drew One of My Pictures: * or, The Authorship of Generative Art.” 1999. Paper presented at the Generative Art international conference, Politecnico di Milano. www.generativeart.com/on/cic/99/0399.htm.
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Quaranta, D. (2023). Digital Kitsch: Art and Kitsch in the Informational Milieu. In: Ryynänen, M., Barragán, P. (eds) The Changing Meaning of Kitsch. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16632-7_8
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