SHAME blog entry week 1

While it is true that our definitions of art, media and our categorizations thereof have changed, Weibel fails to recognize that, firstly, these class-based value judgements on various disciplines and mediums are still unmistakably present. While media art may have been elevated to the status of fine arts in some domains, it is undeniable that certain types of art are devalued and considered “lesser”, and this distinction is, as with Aristotle’s contempt for labourers, usually motivated by class, gender, or race (which Weibel fails to state explicitly). Secondly, Weibel does not seem to recognize that art (or any specific discipline within it) has no inherent moral slant. This type of bias is dangerous, because it leads to unwarranted optimism about new forms of media; Weibel believes the internet is a newly democratic space, stating that it has “no guardians” and therefore ignoring the very real power wielded by owners of online spaces over the content that is or isn’t seen (consider here recent Facebook controversies over fake news, invasive advertising, and blocked content). We must remain vigilant about both the positive and negative potential of new media.

Similarly, Kittler’s conception of a future where individual mediums no longer exist and everything is subsumed by the digital reflects early fears that the photograph would render painting irrelevant, which as we know, and as described by Weibel, failed to account for the growth and change of painting in response to the photograph. A digital image of a painting will always remain distinct from the painting itself, in the same way a photograph retains different properties than a painting of the same scene; we will never truly lose these distinctions, and, after all, all this data is converted to the common language of electrical signals in the brain.