My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

I ~on't la~e ~oi[e mail
The Object of Art in the Age of
Electronic Technology
Before diagnosing the condition of the art object in an age of electronic
technology, let me first address the question of the object of art in an age
of global commodification. I won't be the last to note that capitalism transcends
the technologies through which it operates. So just as today's art
world is dominated by marketing, sales, and promotion, so the object of
art in the age of electronic technology will continue to be profit; and the
values most typically promoted by the art world will continue to be governed
by market, rather than aesthetic, formal, philosophical, or ethical,
values.
Within the art world, as in the corporate board rooms, the focus of discussion
has been on how to exploit the emerging electronic media, as if
cyberspace were a new wilderness from which to carve your niche-better
get on board, er, on line, first before the prime sites are staked out. For
if the object of art is to sell objects, then the new electronic environment
presents many problems but also many opportunities.
But art, if it could speak, might well object to these assumptions. (If art
could speak we could not understand it-that's one way to put it; perhaps
it's more accurate to say if art could speak it would be poetry and poetry's
got nothing to sell.) Art might speak not of its object but its objects; it
might testily insist that one of its roles is to resist commodification, to use
its materiality to push against the total absorption of meaning into the
market system, and that's why it got one of the first e-mail accounts on
the net-to talk about it. But you can't sell talk, or not for much, and that
can make the net a vexing place for the purveyors of art.
Today's internet-a decentralized, largely text-based, linking of individual
sites or constellations of users-will be superseded by what is aptly
called the information superhighway. Just as the old dirt roads and smaller
rural routes were abandoned by the megatraffic on the interstates, so
much of the present informal, noncapital intensive exchanges on the net
will become marginal back channels in a communications system owned
and controlled by Time & Space, Inc., and other giant telecommunication
conglomerates, proViding new and continually recirculating versions of