Eugenio Dittborn: The Internet Revolution

I am getting ready to take part to the Johannsburg biennial, in South Africa with no little enthusiasm. In fact the difference which is specific of my art will be kept. The theme concerns exactly the interchange of roots: interculture is the key word (where, anyway, to have a passage from an element to the other, the parts have to remain separated). It is, in fact, needed to look for emotions that go beyond the market places, and, undoubtedly, the exhibitions quoted in the question ["who is going to take advantage of the Venice Biennial?" NWA] are places of the market.
	It is necessary to search for specific spaces, or to take advantage of market spaces changing their nature, that is, loading their nature with fantasy. This seems to be the only remedy to the foreseen cultural homogeneity which is risking to hibernate debate and, most importantly, production, limiting it to a kind of craft of the technological era. It is a phenomenon which we are already seeing as happening. The world's outskirts, for instance Latin America, are opposing, perhaps also through their democratic revival, the retrieval of critical sense and of their cultural identities.
Art is living in a kind of catacomb from which it resuscitates after decades or even generations. In this sense the problems brought out from the Internet are very important. In a decade it will carry a huge number of information which will be accessible to everybody. (The problem, then, will be to understand that the net is a sort of mail, through which it is possible to send every kind of composition, avoiding the risk to fall in love with the mean ignoring the substance.) We are observing a real revolution whose core is the cancellation of physical space and of the oceanical distances between our continent and the others. Soon Internet will be the flame around which art objects will fly around like moths, oscillating between the danger of disappearing and their unlimited multiplication.
	Trade will not disappear, just the way we have been doing it till today will, and with it all its elephantine manifestations. Everything will be very movable, and if international exhibitions will still exist, they will have a movable site, or even a virtual one. Centralism and bureaucracy of art will disappear, its noble capitals will fall. Even the role of the organizers will be reduces, as a natural consequence of the multiplication of the exhibitions. The discussion based just on images will have an enormous development, and finally the most important word will return to the sole sign that even multiplied remains equal to himself: the one of the artist.

Eugenio Dittborn

Presented upon authorization of Quadri & Sculture

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