There should be no Computer Art (1971)

Summary

The dominating and most important person in the art world today is the art dealer. He determines what is to be sold and what is not. lt is the art dealer who actually created a new style, not the artist. Progress in the world of pictures today is the same as that in the world of fashionable clothes and cars: each fall, the public is presented with a new fashion, artificially (sic!) created almost a year before in the centers (Paris, London for clothes, Detroit for cars, New York for pictures). Differences from one year to the next are rarely ever substantial, in the majority of cases they are superficial and geared according to the salesmen’s requests and analysis of the market. lt seems to me that “computer art” is nothing but one of the latest of these fashions, emerging from some accident, blossoming for a while, subject matter for shallow “philosophical” reasoning based on prejudice and misunderstanding as well as euphoric over-estimation, vanishing into nowhere giving room to the next fashion. The big machinery, still surrounded by mystic clouds, is used to frighten artists and to convince the public that its products are good and beautiful. Quite frankly, I find this use of the computer ridiculous. ln many publications on “computer art” we read complaints that “real” artists do not have access to computers because of the forbidding expense of the machine, and because of the artists’ lack of knowledge in programming. We also read that we could obtain really interesting and new results if artists had the opportunity (money) to realize their ideas using a computer, perhaps being helped by programmers and mathematicians.* At the same time, artists become aware of the role they play in providing an aesthetic justification of and for bourgeois society. Some reject the system of prizes and awards, disrupt big international exhibitions, organize themselves in cooperatives in order to be independent of the galleries, contribute to the building of an environment that pe...