I don't think this is entirely true, but I like some of it. From the founder of The Neens Miltos Manetas
"Contemporary Art", the Art of the Past Century, was based mostly on the following principle: "if you put something in an empty room, it seems strange and significant". A variation of that was: "if you take something out of its context, it seems strange and significant". Another was: "if you change the scale of something, it will seem strange and significant," and a last one: "if you multiply something, it also becomes strange and significant".
But after 80 years of different combinations for any kinds of objects inside the hopelessly empty spaces of our art institutions, nothing seems really interesting. We see clearly now, that the supposed "art" is simply a bunch of trash, just some products bought in a mall.
Outside of the Internet there's no glory. Non-Internet artists are freelance employees of other employees (the curators of the exhibitions). Institutions bestow curators with confidence and power. They are not supposed to look for any unseen objects but for some evidence of human expression which they will bring back to their commissioners, the way a well-trained dog would do with its ball. Exhibitions are identity-control tests. They are not creating anything new, they are just sampling stories.
No wonder then that any top-level art exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennial, the Documenta in Kassel, the Manifesta, and the Venice Biennial, look like Graduation Day for students of Anthropology. In these "shows", any realistic representation could as well be used as an illustration for the National Geographic, while any abstract piece becomes mere decoration.
The Art World is relaxed and open to anything just because it knows that nothing peculiar will ever happen. Even if the gallery is left empty, the public will search for the label with the name of the artist who did the "work" and they will find satisfaction in one way or another. Beds, balloons and chickens: real Space has lost its emptiness. But on the Internet, where space is created by software and random imagination, an empty webpage is really empty. People and Web Entities ("Angels") can still invent unpredictable objects to put there."
-Miltos Manetas
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