The Clark discussion brought up many individual practices as a way to share in our working methodology. Issues such as funding, editorial and critical oversight, the interactive nature of the web and distribution came up, and of course, the notion of accessibility was broached. All of these issues point to a yet-unfulfilled promise of the internet and art (art history, criticism, journals, publishing, community, etc) that somehow this would change things, that things would open up and be more democratic, in some sense.

Haven’t we heard this before somehow? This seems to have been one of the conclusions. Well, no one will disagree with that statement, but then again it seems that it’s always the same kind of critic who seems to be saying it. The promise of interactivity, community, accessibility, a peer-to-peer network of critically engaged thinkers requires a different kind of actor. One who is less based one the age-old tenets of solitary art historical and critical distance and one who is more interested in collaboration.

Now I say collaboration as a mode of working, not describing. Collaboration requires less of the sort of criticality that keeps the public and its access to art at arms-length and is more comfortable in freely sharing information and research. It also implies that art is not the self-contained autonomous carrier of meaning. That meaning in art is about the dialogue generated. Collaboration is a verb not an adjective.

Now the question of what role can the internet play in art history discussions. If it means that it allows information to go out that helps someone in understanding a work in a museum, that’s already a major accomplishment. But as was pointed out when Professor Christopher Witcombe of Sweet Briar College screened his entertaining made-for-beginners educational video on Leonardo, art history has not taken advantage of new technologies. The fact is, it never has. The internet as a site for accessibility has been mitigated by the inaccessibility of the field of art studies in general. When participants at the conference pointed out that art can be accessible and to look no further than the success of the Da Vinci Code they were, in their own way, lamenting the monumental disconnect between the public and what we, the conference panelists considered "art".

This boils down to very hard questions about the distinction between art and life. The rules and privileges of aesthetic principles and the very role of the art historian/curator/critic itself. The arms-distance maintained by contemporary Modernist discourses on art and politics is a direct mirror of the solitary thinker plodding along Babel’s Library.

The fear/distrust of the internet by art historians, I believe, has less to do with the its relationship to paper based journals than it does to its relationship to art. Art as a one-on-one form of inquiry: one person and one object. The practice has always dreamed of, but never actually practiced, collectivity in any sustainable way.

Modernist art based on punishing a viewer’s subjectivity through density and inaccessibility generates, not only the public’s mistrust, but mirrors the critical distance the art historian or contemporary curator must maintain in order to participate. Art making, it seems, has become such an exclusive endeavor that its no wonder that any democracy or interactivity the internet might promise is better exercised on other more populist endeavors.

How can one discuss using a media designed and built on open source exchange to share our ideas on art when these terms are foreign to the field of art iteself. Collectivity, interactivity and exchange are practiced on a purely theoretical level at this point. Web 2.0 offers some models, but again, the field of art history or criticism has no use for them at this point. Until this happens I guess that what we are left with is simply another, possibly less expensive way to practice the business of art writing as usual.

Question that I would like to bring up is the issue of how art writing and publishing can actually move off the page/screen by generating offline forms of collaboration that somehow re-situates text. Can we think of panels like these as formats that generate better text, more generous and interactive relationships, that consequently move us panelists closer to being participants rather than critics? Could we feel comfortable doing such a thing? That’s a question I’d like to ask...

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Autres Aperçus Singuliers :
> Introduction
> K. Deepwell
> C. Kuan
> M. Ledbury
> M. Marmor
> W. Tronzo
> C. Welger-Barboza