Introduction

"Green Hair" by Lisa N. Jones

For the vast majority of human history, we have been bound by geography. Human society was based on proximity. As societies percolated, we saw the rise of towns, cities, and nations. Eventually, cities became the heart of human society. In 1954, Robert Redfield and Milton B. Singer divided the cities of the world into four categories. The most ancient category includes the cities which “carry forward, develop, elaborate a long-established local culture or civilization. These are the cities that convert folk-culture into its civilized dimension.” [1]

However, we are on the verge of a major change. It is not the end of cities, as many writers at the turn of the millennium claimed. The internet has not destroyed the basic fabric of human society. Rather, it has been what Frances Cairncross calls “the death of distance.”[2] We are able to communicate instantly around the world, as Kelly Turnbull and I were able to do across 800 or so miles. We are able to access information any time from almost anywhere. We’re even able to get information out from almost anywhere, as Twitter demonstrated during the 2009 post-election protests in Tehran.

The access to information, though, is only half of it. The real coup of the internet, as Cairncross points out, is that “there is no gatekeeper, no waiting list, no membership requirement…the single most important reason for the internet’s success is its open standard for transmitted digitized data – voice, video, or text – from one computer to another.” [3] It is a truly open medium, the very definition of open source. Now, if someone so desired, they could go buy a tee shirt from a small company in Texas, or perhaps chat with people who have similar interests but happen to live in India, or read about gossip in New York City, all while sitting in their apartment in North Carolina. They could even make a new website and try to sell something: if the idea is good enough, it might take off. After all, we all start out equal on the internet, at least economically.

What about culturally? We can look at the great indicator of culture, art. Art and the associated world around it have achieved an almost stereotypically dreamlike status in the collective memory of our society. Perhaps that fantasy is of the painter working in a studio, or the tale of the visionary artist who only finds fame after death like Van Gogh. Then there’s a romantic, perhaps made-up memory of the artists’ collective, the bohemian lifestyle of Montmartre or Greenwich Village or San Francisco where artists live and work in close proximity. Are these fantasies, these very romantic and appealing rumors about the art world true? Can they even be true now, in the age of the internet? In this paper we will be looking at the art world, both of today and of the past to find the answers: how is the internet changing that dream? And perhaps more importantly: does that dream even exist?

[1] (Redfield & Singer, 1954, p. 57)

[2] (Cairncross, 2001)

[3] (Cairncross, 2001, p. 77)