Chapter 11: Destructive Creativity: Arts in the Information Age 

 

What is 'cool' now isn't just an isolated piece of culture, but rather the result of a history of 'cool'. The future of humanities must begin to converge with art in order to bridge the gap. In other words, to be 'cool', older art forms must merge with more contemporary art forms. Society is currently so visually overstimulated that something needs to change just to get an idea from on mind to another.  Destructive Creativity refers to one approach, which is reassembling the past into the future.  It refers to the present aesthetic, mutation and remix culture. Creative Destruction is a slightly different approach.  Critiquing culture becomes an inherently edgy aesthetic. Tradition is linked to the avant-garde through the reappropriation of familiar things. Information is a new raw material, a form a currency. The chapter gives a history of destructive art, new art's need to reject or destroy the old to move forward. After pages and pages of examples of earlier works, the chapter gets to digital works.  Jodi works with the aesthetics of the internet, using a web browser as a frame.  Still, inside that frame, the text is made to look like an old DOS-based personal computer, acting as a reminder that contemporary art has at least some root in the past.  The self-destructive, self-activated behavior of the art is the formula for twentieth-century art.

 

This chapter seemly chronicles every step on the path to current existence of edgy art, which was tiresome to wade through, but certainly not useless. For every part of the current state of 'cool' that Liu describes, he provides several examples of the predecessors. Knowing more about the current state of art than the past and reading the chapter put everything into a perspective that wasn't necessarily any different, but is perhaps now more informed. What was noticeably missing from the discussion was the influence of an artist's contemporaries. Having not read the entire book, it is quite possible that Liu talks about it elsewhere, but regardless, talking about art with respect only to the past is ignoring half of what influences it.

 

Liu, Alan, 1953- . Laws of cool : knowledge work and the culture of information / Alan Liu. [0226486982 (cloth : alk. paper) ] Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Call#: Van Pelt Library HM851 .L56 2004