Closing the Gap between Art and Life: Digital Art as Discursive Framework

Over the last two decades, culture has changed irreconcilably. No longer the ideological window dressing of cold war politics, it now finds itself at the core of a growing globalized economy. Politically aligned with local, national and international regeneration policies, culture often finds itself being used as a bridging mechanism between different and often conflicting social, political and economic interests. According to the theorist George Yudice (2003), culture is now expedient—there is no way of funding or producing small, medium or large scale art projects that do not bring into alignment a collection of inchoate and seemingly incompatible interests. Map on to this the digitally driven emergence of “convergence culture”—where, as Henry Jenkins (2006) argues, “old and new media collide,” “grassroots and corporate media intersect” and media producers and media consumers “interact in unpredictable ways,”—and you have the most sophisticated, complex and volatile cultural arena in human history. Within this capricious and frequently arbitrary milieu, art has long since lost its own self-asserted right to set itself apart as some form of omnipotent commentator on the ills of mass culture. The shock tactics of the avant-garde are now the stock in trade of advertising agencies and music producers the world over, and art, as we knew it, now has to fight for the oxygen of publicity with sport, daytime television, online social networking and game consoles. It is a losing battle.