"New Internationalism" and the Information Aesthetic

Throughout the year, my programme offers guest lectures by various artists and academics that deal with contemporary art practice and thought. Yesterday we had our first visiting lecturer, Neil Mulholland. He introduced himself with this Powerpoint presentation he made originally for a panel discussion at the Frieze Art Fair 2005 on New Internationalism which asked:

Does the rapid development of new art centres encourage greater cultural diversity, or has it resulted in a new international orthodoxy? How can discourse keep up with information?

This was his response:



The context he presented it in for yesterday's talk, however, was not New Internationalism, but for the potential of Art Writing as an alternative to traditional criticism and art historical texts. He argued that Art Writing, as a mise-en-scène, can offer information and criticism without necessarily being mimetic, allowing for greater freedom in the act of writing.

In this context the video (the format we're seeing it in now - as Powerpoint it embodies the tone of the presentation a lot more authentically) is not only an ironic answer to the panel's question, but an exploration of language as well. This typically American style of corporate speak or legalese is used to poke fun at the corporatisation of contemporary art through art fairs and biennales (it also reflects artspeak's own obtuseness) but also looks to it as a new development in language with its own value and merit. It's a linguistic turn with a similar aesthetic value as the images he chose to illustrate his presentation, and one that reminded me a lot of the image bookmarking and surf club scenes.

I guess you could say it's the information aesthetic, but a kind of nostalgic information aesthetic - one that hearkens back to a more innocent time when artificial visual and linguistic representations of utopia had a nice plastic, almost Orwellian, quality, and computers were a pleasant shade of pale taupe.