[NetBehaviour] New Article/Review - Data-Driven Artists And Their Critics

[Alan Sondheim]

For me the physicality of much of the artworld is good and necessary; it 
reminds us we're flesh and blood, however prosthetic, that the world is 
physical and fragile and so much is close to extinction. It creates 
situations of face to face sociality which otherwise might not exist. When 
I've taught at art-schools I always looked towards the painters and 
ceramicists - not for the 'art' necessarily, but for their immersion in 
the substance of the planet, which seemed at times eerily more real than 
the hyperbolism of the media players, including myself. I'm tired of this 
ignoring of flesh and blood, the rare earths in our goodies that are 
killing people on other continents, the violent and virtual umbrella of 
structures like Google, Apple, Facebook, etc., as if our world was 
constituted by benign ghosts whose greatest sin might be spying on us for 
commercial gain.

End of rant -