How Has the Internet Affected Art?

A new exhibition at the ICA Boston, which opens today (7 February), will explore how the internet has impacted the production and reception of art. The exhibition, Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to today, hosts 60 artists from 21 countries and features a variety of mediums such as painting, performance, video and digital installation. Additionally, Olia Lalina and the collective Howdoyousayyaminafrican? will showcase their projects on the museum’s website throughout the exhibition’s duration. Other artists on display include Thomas Ruff, Harun Farocki and Frances Stark.

The show starts with art from 1989 because this is widely considered the year the internet was born, as well as being a year of significant social changes, like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests. The exhibition’s aim is to create a chronological narrative that traces the evolution of the world wide web and discerns changing perceptions to the internet, from optimistic to dystopian perspectives.

Eva Respini, the ICA Boston’s chief curator, said: “We define (the internet) as a set of relationships that have changed everything – how we see, how we understand ourselves, how we present ourselves, how we think about truth, how we think about fact. It is this idea that artists are exploring in a variety of different ways. This is not a show of technology, it’s a show about technology. The internet has now been around long enough that we can take a step back and examine how it has changed the production of art as well.”