Contemporary Art and Digital Culture

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon contemporary art in last fifteen years. Art production from the mid-2000s to the present has been, and continues to be, deeply inflected by social media and the rise of the internet as a mass medium, as well as by economic and political factors such as the financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

This book is the first to provide a thorough historicisation of the current interest in networks and digitality, and takes stock both of canonical twentieth-century art history and technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art. It shows how art addresses identity, circulation, privacy, and globalization newly in the digital age, and how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new conceptions of identity. It also looks at the art market and art scholarship to show how the internet’s promises of democratization have been absorbed by the art world infrastructure.

This book will be of interest to students, undergraduate and postgraduate, in contemporary art, especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory. It will also be of interest to students of film and media as well those working in curation or art education.

Contemporary Art and Digital Culture analyses the impact of the internet and digital technologies upon art today. Art over the last fifteen years has been deeply inflected by the rise of the internet as a mass cultural and socio-political medium, while also responding to urgent economic and political events, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.

This book looks at how contemporary art addresses digitality, circulation, privacy, and globalisation, and suggests how feminism and gender binaries have been shifted by new mediations of identity. It situates current artistic practice both in canonical art history and in technological predecessors such as cybernetics and net.art, and takes stock of how the art-world infrastructure has reacted to the internet’s promises of democratisation.

An invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary art – especially those studying history of art and art practice and theory – as well as those working in film, media, curation, or art education.

Melissa Gronlund is a writer and lecturer on contemporary art, specialising in the moving image. From 2007–2015, she was co-editor of the journal Afterall, and her writing has appeared there and in Artforum, e-flux journal, frieze, the NewYorker.com, and many other places.