re: review: "written in stone"

I just read the digest and what is surely one of the most embarrassing
instances of so called net.art, and net.art crticism, ever encountered. The
one exhibition liner about archeology that brings material and metaphoric
dots to rest on pedestals and the sweaty paraphernalia of masters to be
framed has been stated so many times already, as self-reflexive
institutional criticism in the pomo period, that it surely must have been
engraved in stone, as it is in books, by now. But apparently not. The only
thing remarkable about this show (and its write up) is not the introvert
tongue-in-cheek that is exponentially more boring than it's studiously
clever; it's the old trope of internalizing critique to defuse it. Sure,
net.art thus conceived (in exemplary works and masters) was always
absolutely ridiculous because it was so hard to frame, so Bosma even heads
up the kitsch-fest in the past tense; net.art, the historic subject at hand,
was an infamous period of the umbrella or successor dubbed network art.
Maybe this is why we are also invited by Bosma, in the end, to look at
"Written in Stone" as "humorous and personal." I always thought the practice
of chiseling history in geology was a rather heavy and autocratic process
reserved for the Godhead. The dumb trick at play here: ridicule worship and
icons and relics but above all keep the faith. Bosma even laments that
net_condition made it hard "to pay respect to individual works." It's yet
another neo-con sales pitch littered with Biblical phrasings…and my heart
and mind is already hurting these days.

-af