Articles Available Online

Claire Bishop Everywhere I go, some curator or artist wants to be rid of this turbulent critic   In 2006 Claire Bishop tolled the death knell for participatory art [1]; now, in a recent Artforumpiece [2], she upbraids contemporary art for its categorical failure to respond to the all-pervasive digital revolution of the last twenty years While many artists use digital media – take Christian Marclay’s video The Clock (2010) – Bishop is adamant that this merely cashes in on the digital aesthetic and fails to address the issues of the emergent digital world in any meaningful way If contemporary art can’t even keep up with the internet, it can have no claim on its definitional adjective   http://vimeocom/28702716   It is not Bishop’s criticism of the Biennale crowd-pleasers like Marclay that is particularly inflammatory, but the exclusion of an entire sphere of new media art from her inquiry She writes, ‘There is, of course, an entire sphere of ‘new media’ art, but this is a specialised field of its own: it rarely overlaps with the mainstream art world [commercial galleries, the Turner Prize, national pavilions at Venice] While this split is itself undoubtedly symptomatic, the mainstream art world and its response to the digital are the focus of this essay’   Perhaps Bishop’s sweeping decision to sideline all ‘new media’ production might be attributed to more localised issues concerning arts funding – in Europe where art is supported by public funding, digital art is certainly more mainstream than in the gallery-driven USA or UK But still, Bishop’s decision is paradoxical: she complains that contemporary art does not address the digital, and then passes over precisely that which aims to do so Therefore Bishop’s strange omission made me look forward to transmediale 2013 with a renewed interest If the digital revolution, as Bishop implies, is indeed the defining feature of our times, then might the creative production on the digital periphery redefine our basic terms of reference for thinking about contemporary art?   transmediale, the younger sibling of the more famous Berlinale, started off as a video art festival in 1988 It