The Digital Mystique: Video Art, Aura and Access

Inhaltliche Beschreibung

Since its emergence as an art medium and practice in the 1960s, video - and the electronic technologies that constitute its various new forms - has presented a unique set of challenges. The very conditions that proved so theoretically and conceptually stimulating to artists working in the emergent video movement, particularly its reproducibility, have proved problematic in issues of distribution, the art market, and access.
Although video has held a significant position in contemporary art for over four decades, for many years video art functioned as a kind of enfant terrible, an outsider on the fringes of the art world, supported within an alternative network of production, distribution and exhibition. Since the 1990s, however, video art - and related digital or interactive art forms - has become a seemingly ubiquitous presence in the mainstream visual art world.
Electronic media art is often shrouded in a kind of technological or digital mystique, caught between utopian notions of access and the aura of the unique art object. Media art today is faced with two seemingly irreconcilable histories, models, and economies. The reality is that these two models do, and must, co-exist; the public requires educational and cultural access to these works, and the artists require a viable market. It is instructive to note that these dichotomies were present from video art's beginnings. Media art's ability to transcend forms, to move in and around and between contexts is precisely what makes it so powerful and provocative.