What’s the Use?

What’s the Use? Toahy, in its clumy, hrval, mrious& innocent wq, pbe World W% Web] offers us the oppo&mig to waste time, to wanderaimkw&. -William Gibson [I] I B E G A N T 0 W R I T E T H I S short piece a few weeks back, trying to approach the very daunting question I had posed for myself, “What can one say about art on the Web?’, trying to focus on the notion, to begin with, of our expectations. A few days later, the New York Times ran the Gibson article quoted above. I was very happy to see someone with an influence on popular culture come out in favor of the aesthetic of uselessness that is presumed by most artists. It’s too easy to get caught up in the hype about the great usefulness of the Web, as if that were all it had to offer. What I liked in Gibson’s view was that he extolled the virtues of the Web, not in the hyperbolic terms with which we have become so inundated of late, but in terms of his personal, subjective experience of the pleasure of wandering without a destination. Yes, the Web is a wonderful way to waste time, and its open structure makes it, for many, a more rewarding and democratic waste of time than television. But why is wasting time a pleasure? Is it only because the rest of our time is filled with obligations, and we need a rest? A way to feel like we can break away from the burdens of economic necessity for a while? Or is there something else in this “uselessness” that fulfills a deep need-and thus is not really useless at all? Then, after I had decided to set it aside, think about it for a while, and take a summer vacation (a formalized type of time-wasting), another newspaper article appeared in which I found the following remark by Siah Armajani: Kantian philosophers believed that art was good because it was useless. We believe that art is good because it is useful [z]. I have great respect for Armajani, but I immediately disagreed with this statement. He’s a serious artist, and he has put a lot of thought into what we call public art,which is, in some ways, a relative of art on the Web. Some people will “go to” museum Web sites, or to curated exhibitions like the Digital Salon, but most will encounter art on the Web while wandering in this new form of public space, finding it via a link via a llnk, via a link-like finding public art while wandering the streets of a city [3]. Armajani‘s statement changed my perspective on the earlier train of thought. Not particularly because I think he is right-I don’t think he is, if he means “useful” in any sort of pragmatic way. Music has no use, yet few would say it is bad because of this. But, having placed my conclusions in line with Kantian philosophers, and in the past tense as well, I felt his statement as a serious challenge . Is his an ethical challenge (useless art = bad; useful art = good)? Is it a challenge to find new uses for art? To recover lost uses? I started to think about the uses of Armajani‘s own work How does he see the usefulness of his work? I know that he would not say his works are good simply because one can use them to sit on or to cross the street. I don’t think we should see his “useful” in such an obvious way. It has something to do with where one’s art takes, or doesn’t take, the mind. Artwork made for the Web emerges from Conceptual Art because, as Conceptual Art did, it takes ideas to be of primary importance , and because its makers generally share the express desire of those earlier artists to challenge the public’s notions of what art is and where one finds it. I am not interested in those who use their Web sites as places to “hang pictures.” Digital Salon, Net-Works 459 I asked...