Art in America May 2003
Digital Video, 720p 7min
This body of digital work uses the magazine Art in America as its starting point. This publication was the definitive guide to contemporary art in America in its time. It could make or break an emerging artist’s career with just a few words. The writers, curators, academics, and editors who wrote for this publication were the gatekeepers of the art world.
They would attempt to translate the rich and diverse works made by artists into a string of words that would often obscure, obfuscate, and sometimes completely miss the universal meaning in the works they were expounding upon. More often than not, an article would weave together muddled thoughts based on the critic’s past experiences with a resulting article that was intentionally convoluted and mind-numbingly indirect. This product narcissistically showcased the writer’s ability to turn the act of writing into a new form of “art” (or some type of word salad).
This series uses the magazine itself as the foundation for a new digital work of art. The pages are systematically scanned at a very high resolution and cropped. The tens of thousands of images are then sequenced in series and played back in time at 24 frames per second.
Every single inch of the magazine is put on display during the ~7 minute video, so the essence of the publication persists while its writing is no longer legible.
This work calls attention to the unfair power structures in the world of contemporary art and shows that even the most powerful of gatekeepers will eventually lose their grasp on power given enough time.
Those purchasing the NFT will also get a signed copy of the actual magazine used to create the work along with a link to a full-sized high resolution digital file of the work.
