Capitalism and Claire Bishop’s “Digital Divide”

Although Claire Bishop’s “Digital Divide” is an interesting interpretation of Contemporary Art’s interaction (or for her argument’s sake: disavowal) of the digitization of the human existence, I do not wholeheartedly agree with it. I agree with her claim that the sudden attraction of “old media” for contemporary artists in the late 1990s coincided with the rise of “new media,” particularly the introduction of the DVD in 1997. But to be honest, this constant “return” to analog ways of doing things as a sort of “nostalgia” has happened constantly with the introduction of new technology. She claims that the art world has not really interacted with the issues that the new digital world has created. However, I believe that this digitized experience is so ubiquitous, so ingrained in us now that the need to explicitly reference this existence in every work would be unnecessary.

Instead, what I found most interesting about her argument was her connection of the art world’s resistance to truly grappling with the digitization of the human experience with its need to uphold principles of capitalism in order to be profitable. If the art world rejects the notion of what she dubs “the precious one-off,” would art institutions and individual artists even exist in the same way that they do now? Her argument suggests that the “face of [the digital’s] infinite, uncontrollable dissemination” is what keeps it from being truly assessed in the art world. It was interesting to me how she likened the “digital” to an almost utopian ideal.


***FUN FACT: I had the opportunity to see the Kader Attia work that was featured in this article and  to sum up the experience with a Claire Bishop quote: “A tiny gallery can contain days of art. The result is that we filter and graze, skim and forward.” (Savage, I know.)