[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 50, Issue 14

[John Haber]

I have strong opinions, like everyone else, on software (open code and 
such), and I hope I get brownie points for holding onto a computer for 
six years and burnout of all portable media drives before replacing it.  
But I don't want Empyre to go the way of online forums on which OS you 
use, whether Photoshop is superior, and so on.  Rather, I want to pick 
up on a reference to a kind of parallel to the open-source movement, 
relational esthetics. 

With apologies for the self-promotion, I've a review up on 
theanyspacewhatever:

http://www.haberarts.com/anyspace.htm

My concern there is how a commitment to the viewer's share in creating 
the experience becomes a controlling and limiting artiface.  You could 
say that it's really an old story.  Rebels become establishment, and 
Minimalism's remarkable simultaneous emphasis on art as object and as 
calling the viewer's attention to the space that includes both led to 
museum pieces.  (Fried's description of part of this equation as theater 
is very imprecise, given the structure of a stage and its audience.)  
Artists of that time were actually well aware of the problem and used 
it, as in the threat of Serra's or Naumann's early work.  These days, 
with a still more successful art market, the idea of art after the end 
of art implies that art may coopt anything.  I'm working now on 
describing the Outsider Art Fair last weekend and what all this means 
for the notions of inside and out.  I'm maybe halfway done. 

But I think that the relational esthetics movement was particularly 
"asking for it."  It was way too obsessed with the artist as showman, or 
maybe shaman, with way too bland and conventional a show.  I elaborate 
more in that link.  -- John