melon'n lemon : entry for 02/03/2003 at 20:35

¶ first dropped lines about the conference entitled 'what contemporary art demands from its institutions?'
_i was missing more people. but it was a weekend and the missing ones choosed either sun or a mask. and i was missing more radical ideas deriving from paradigm shifts that occured after web and digital 'revolution'. as luka said: it seems they can see but they are unable to act and properly connect what they see. we were talking about redefinitions but there were almost none (except nicholas bourriaud) who actually uses them in all its sense. everyone at the end ended in classical insufficient terminology frame and they couldn't even see that tate modern is commissioning web art projects because they 'understand' they can't represent web art in the same way as object art. to commision the webart work is to get exclusive position of a web work being on your server as well as on a webpage of a museum (online) which is its only 'natural space'. commision is also the new way to buy it, in terms of buying something virtual which is quite different from buying already existing web art work as it would be an object art. but we that are living and feeling this shift are young and we will have to wait to get old. :-)
_there were four extensive panels in two days and few questions afterwards. the discussion time was mostly too short while the individual presentations were sometimes too long. as far as i know, since i was also part of organisatorial team, the idea for the conference came from ministry of culture and was delivered in cooperation with the museum of modern art. it was expected that the 'future makers' from ministry will be present all the time, but the actual case turned out different. they left everytime after their representation was over - so they weren't there most of the time, although the time-case is just few weeks before new status for art and culture institutions will be written down and eternilized.
_the confernce extensively cleared out the difference between modern and contemporary art. it was obvious that a new institution for representing contemporary art is needed. at that point i was asking does contemporary art includes also techno art (digital art, after lev manovich), which is actually much more modernistic than contemporary (in terms of style descriptive mechanisms) and if yes how than can we be sure that in an institution for contemporary art digital art wont be marginalised, as it is happening now in the relation of modern art to contemporary. in the museum of modern art the contemporary art is definitivly marginalised in terms of archiving and also presenting, since the place itself is already not proper.
_and than there was way too much said about the relation of artists, art production and institutions but almost not a word about the role of the visitor, viewer, how to get them more massivly in.
(20:35)

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