Artforum’s May issue, out today, considers the legacy of video art, a medium whose novelty once electrified artists and theorists. This week, the editors revisit Hollis Frampton’s “The Withering Away of the State of Art,” from the December 1974 issue. Originally presented at “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (the institution is currently hosting the major survey “Signals: How Video Transformed the World”), Frampton’s ambitious essay grapples with a young, troublesome form that had only recently begun “that relentless search
Though much attention has been given recently to certain artists’ experimentations with AI, best described and dismissed as spectacle (in the true Debord sense), any number of artists have challenged and even mocked the technology and its specious claims to neutral operating systems or unconditional utility.
Whether you view the exponential incursion of new media as cause for celebration or concern, check out three concurrent group shows if you’re at all curious…