Artist Focus -- Cory Arcangel

DATADIARIEZZZZZ seems to be the most well-known work of Cory Arcangel's, if not his only work of which to speak. The work, according to the introduction page, is the result of Cory's own computer hacking. Somehow, Cory placed the memory of his computer (his computer? our computers?) and plays it back in the form of visual colors and shapes. The viewer can choose the data from a given day in January of a determined year and view all the data left from the actions of the day.

The intro page prides Cory Arcangel's project as a work of art taking little to no effort or rumination. It gladly acknowledges that Cory Arcangel cannot realistically be considered even an artist, web-artist or otherwise. I suppose there's a certain interest in the "phenomenon" that a series of visually appealing nonrepresentational, colorful videos were produced "accidentally" by a non-artist. Perhaps we can file this under the movement of quotidian art, under that ultra-modern and ultra-liberal concept of art as accident, art as incidental, art as almost everything. I suppose some might view Cory's videos and remark upon the visual appeal, even a sort of poetry to the change of colors, shapes, distributions... an emotive response to the flow and the color, as if we're reading something personal from, as the website titles the work, a diary of a non-human. Yes, it would be possible for the viewer to squeeze visual and poetic value out of this sort of work.

I'm conflicted when I view this, however. In the last word of the previous paragraph, I specifically used the term "work;" perhaps we should be asking ourselves as viewers as this piece, this experimental and almost flippant arrangement of html, can honestly be considered the result of labor and care as the term "work" implies. I am troubled when the intro page readily backs the fact that Cory is not an artist in the most familiar and conventional term, but that (in suggestion) his website should be acknowledged as art. 19th century art critic Aurier said that to create art, an undertaking of transcendent nobility, should be to represent “the highest and most truly divine in the world … the only thing existent – the Idea." Like so much other contemporary and modern art, I see no divinity in this work, no great idea, no weighty undertaking. I will consider Datadiaries a web experiment, but I will give it no adjective higher and more respecting than "cool." It is certainly clear that Cory Arcangel is no artist; therefore, I am hard pressed to call his production art.