“We now call it the community industry. The history of the web went as follows: at first it was military, then education and now commerce oriented. What are the possibilities of artists in the confrontation with these three systems? All of the time you can notice the anti-authoritarian spirit that changes flavour. At one stage it is simply pacifist. At another time, when it comes to education, it deals with intellectual independence. As Twain once said: “I’ve never let my school interfere with my education”.
Right now, we live in a corporate atmosphere. The dominant frame in the artistic field is decorative art, but I cannot waste my time discussing it. In new media art, the radical and experimental artists always confront the dominant frame. And right now, it is the community industry that provides the most useful grip that the corporate world can possibly have on the online population. You have all these various dimensions of self-‐disclosure, and when you disclose things about yourself you share parts of your privacy that feed the system. And I think this is a good topic for artists. I am currently working on a project with Heath Bunting. I think this is a good topic because people are blind, they behave as sheep.” — Vuk Ćosić
Vuk Ćosić Deep ASCII 2021 Token ID: 0 Contract Address: 0x2C3c…dfFc Non-Fungible Token: ERC-1155 MP4: 46.1 MB (48,440,942 bytes), 742x1034px, 00:01:19 From the 1998 full length video Deep ASCII, running time 59 minutes Estimate £40,000 – 50,000
“Art for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It’s really not about other people’s needs and assumptions. I’m not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.”
“Everything I do is about self-presentation and empowerment. You know why it’s so important? Because even people who have very little can control how they present themselves to the world. If you have no money, no nothing, you can throw on a scarf, put your hat to the side and walk out in to the street and feel good. It’s style. Diana Vreeland said if you’re not born with it I feel sorry for your ass.” — Coreen Simpson
“The problem with art is, it’s not like the game of golf where you put the ball in the hole. There’s no umpire; there’s no judge. There are no rules. It’s one of its problems. But it’s also one of the great things about art. It becomes a question of what lasts.” — Richard Prince
Richard Prince Entertainers 1982-83 Chromogenic print 61 ½ × 46 1/2” MoMA collections
Ian Burn began investigating the act of looking in the mid 1960s. In this work, text across a standard framed mirror quotes from the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. The original quote continues, ‘if we consider these objects in themselves, and never look beyond the ideas which we form of them’.
The viewer is asked to consider this specific work of art without considering his or her accumulated knowledge and assumptions about either ‘mirrors’ or ‘works of art’ (or the person ‘in’ the mirror). The impossibility of isolating any one thing from all others is emphasised in this conceptual artwork by our reflection in the mirror and that of the space in which it hangs and other art nearby.
Ian Burn Two glass/Mirror piece 1968 mirror, glass, wood 93.7 × 63.2 cm National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
“I have found that in accepting and immersing myself in subject matter I paint with more intensity and that the ‘hows’ of painting are more inevitably determined by the ‘whats’.” — David Park
David Park (1911-1960) Two People in White 1957 oil on canvas 24 x 32 in. Price realised USD 378,000
