Digitization is the animating force of everyday life. Rather than defining it as a technology or a medium, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life argues that digitization is a socio-historical process that is contributing to the erosion of democracy and an increase in political inequality, specifically along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. Taking a historical approach, Janet Kraynak finds that the seeds of these developments are paradoxically related to the ideology of digital utopianism that emerged in the late 1960s with the rise of a social model of computing, a set of beliefs furthered by the neo-liberal tech ideology in the 1990s, and the popularization of networked computing. The result of this ongoing cultural worldview, which dovetails with the principles of progressive artistic strategies of the past, is a critical blindness in art historical discourse that ultimately compromises art’s historically important role in furthering radical democratic aims.
Janet Kraynak is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where she is Director of the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies program (MODA). She is the author of Nauman Reiterated and editor of Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words.
"Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, Contemporary Art and the Digitization of Everyday Life is a vital text that compellingly argues for a reassessment of digital culture's pervasive impacts. At the heart of Kraynak's investigation is a critique of techno-fetishism and digital utopianism, both of which have failed to acknowledge how new technologies have contributed to the erosion of democracy."—Derek Conrad Murray, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz
"This volume is essential reading for anyone aware of a waning public sphere and diminishing returns for art’s historic institutions and legacy of critique. By astutely unveiling how social exchange online, disguised in the disruptive tropes of the historical avant-garde, uniquely empowered antidemocratic forces, Kraynak underlines how such developments force a reevaluation of participatory and networked artistic practices today."—Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator, The Kitchen
304 pp.7 x 10Illus: 68 color illustrations, 7 b/w illustrations
9780520303911$65.00|£55.00Hardcover
Nov 2020