New Criticals


Our typical response to a disturbing new environment is to re-create the old environment instead of heeding the new opportunities of the new environment. Failure to notice the new opportunities is also failure to understand the new powers (Mcluhan)

Without a hint of irony one can find machine made examples of John Cage's experiments with chance operations in composition, Duchamp's removal of the hand of the artist in his Readymades, the rule-based work of Sol Lewitt or the System art of Bridget Riley. These are artworks that prioritize the process of codifying and executing the artwork through mechanical and logical procedures to make art less about the human and more about the machine. Today's artworks are the opposite, machines making art in some effort to appear as Zizek suggests, more like humans. What does a machine made painting in the style of Jackson Pollock suggest of our society other than that we believe more in our machines than we do in ourselves?