I recently went to the opening of a group exhibition of 'New Media' art. While I was there I spoke briefly to a well-known Australian artist, who I had met the previous week at a technology seminar which I had been invited to attend. I told him that I thought the row of images we were standing in front of were technically well executed but that the images themselves were puerile and inane. I told him that I believed the artist was suffering from what I would describe as a poverty of the imagination. The well known artist to whom I was speaking (whose own work has, in recent years, dealt exclusively with current industrial technologies), told me that these days he found it increasingly difficult to "draw a line".

By this I thought that he meant he could no longer distinguish, even on the level of personal opinion, between good art and bad art. I can only assume that he had attended the exhibition opening because, for him, an exhibition about technology was interesting in itself, and that the quality of the works being shown was largely irrelevant.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that most "New Media" art is terrible when most art is equally terrible. However, I find it difficult to believe that computer art about computers is any more interesting or profound than drawings about pencils. I have also found that the work shown at "technology-based" exhibitions is largely a homogeneous mass, containing works that I would describe as generic art, and which rely on a wide eyed and credulous audience that gets as excited by anything moving on a computer screen as Homer Simpson does by a freon-filled, glass-bulbed Happy Drinking Bird.

For the purposes of this article, I want to consider the reactions and thoughts of a hypothetical viewer while attending the opening of an art exhibition that 'deals with the issues of new technology'. I have in mind a hypothetical viewer with certain, very specific characteristics. To begin with, the hypothetical viewer is male. The hypothetical viewer is not an artist, and has no desire to become an artist. The hypothetical viewer works with computers, partly because he enjoys it and partly because the pay is good. In his work, he makes use of the same tools as someone who would describe themselves as a "New Media artist". The hypothetical viewer has enough familiarity with these tools to recognise, for example, what software package has been used to create a certain image, and has enough ability to reproduce the process of creating the image fairly accurately. The hypothetical viewer has, in other words, enough knowledge to eliminate the "Gee Whizz" factor from his consideration of a work of what he has heard described as "New Media art".

The hypothetical viewer is interested in art, but does not read any art magazines or attempt to discover what is occurring within the art community, either locally or otherwise, beyond what he reads generally, sees on television or sees when he goes to an actual exhibition. When the hypothetical viewer was slightly younger he read many of the popular (mainly French) theorists. He decided that, as far as he could tell, most of them were only stating things that he regarded as either self-evident or extremely obvious or so general in subject as to be meaningless (but always stated in the most oblique and obscure ways possible), and he has actively tried to forget all of the political theory or cultural theory he has ever read. In other words, the hypothetical viewer looks at an image naively, without any knowledge of references to anything outside of his current field of vision. Furthermore, he believes that an image should be able to stand up to this sort of inspection.

The hypothetical viewer believes very strongly in what he would describe as an honest response. Some people would call this either a character flaw or an inability to consider the consequences of his own actions. In most situations, the hypothetical viewer prefers to think the worst of others rather than the best of others. The hypothetical viewer also derives a certain amount of pleasure, if I understand his character correctly, from making rash and uncharitable generalisations. Finally, for reasons he does not fully understand, he is occasionally asked to write articles for the sort of magazine that he himself never reads.

When this hypothetical viewer arrives at an exhibition that "deals with the issues of new technologies" he is initially dismayed. Many of the works he has seen before at other exhibitions with a similar theme. He understands that for this sort of exhibition demand far exceeds supply. He is relieved that he no longer sees fractal images at these exhibitions, or images composed of large and obvious pixels (presumably so that the viewer can tell that the image had been created on a computer). However, he suspects that such things have only become unfashionable to exhibit, and have been replaced by works that have equally generic qualities.

For as long as alcohol is available at the exhibition, he drinks heavily. He feels uncomfortable being surrounded by so many people that would consider themselves to be artists. He notices that the skill with which some of the images have been constructed is beyond his own ability, but that most are far below his own standard (which he considers to be basic work of a commercially acceptable quality). Perhaps unfairly, he expects the work that he is viewing to demonstrate an adequate level of craftsmanship. He feels the same way about aliasing in a computer image, or a touch screen that requires double-clicks to work, as a person trained as a painter feels about flawed perspective or clumsy brushwork. He often sees, attached below the title of a work, a list of the computers and software packages used to create the work. He feels that, since he has been given this information, he is expected to be impressed by these little artists' endorsements (if it was done on a Silicon Graphics computer, then it must be good).

He also sees an excess of slogans and crude political posturings making banal and obvious statements, the high art equivalents of the bumper sticker or the posters hung up in offices that say things like: "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps". The use of the terms virtual reality or information highway or the prefix cyber (cyberpunk, cyberlesbian, cyberdog, cyberdrivel, cyberdaggy) makes him slightly nauseous, as do rows of ones and zeroes. He sees many works that refer to non-existent future technologies, portrayed as if these technologies are already in existence (or are at least inevitable). In the computer industry, such non-existent technologies are called vaporware, and the hypothetical viewer is not impressed or interested by what he would describe as either rampant speculation or purposeless hype (Out with the old, in with the new!). To the hypothetical viewer, this sort of artist offers no greater insight than the average newspaper journalist. To the hypothetical viewer, this is a very poor thing.

Many of the works that the hypothetical viewer sees are what he would describe as art by association. This type of work refers to other artworks, or specific styles, or other disciplines. Since this type of work refers to other art, it must (by association) also be art. The hypothetical viewer is suspicious of this sort of work. He regards it as a trick, and feels that the practitioners of art by association rely solely upon the average viewers fear of appearing stupid or uneducated. To the hypothetical viewer, there is a distinction between something that refers to a subject, and something about a subject. He is firmly convinced that many artists simply refer to subjects, and hope that a gullible audience will attach its own associations to the work (under threat of appearing stupid). On occasion, the hypothetical viewer is introduced to artists who produce art by association, and who tell him that their work is about architecture, or history, or technology, or some other similar subject. If the hypothetical viewer suspects that the artist is somehow fraudulent, and if the hypothetical viewer is reasonably drunk, the hypothetical viewer will ask the artist what it is about their chosen subject that interests them. Invariably, the artist is unable to tell him, at least in a way that the hypothetical viewer can accept as meaningful.

Perhaps what most confuses the hypothetical viewer is the number of works that use "natural" imagery, particularly images of trees and hillsides, in exhibitions "about technology". He suspects that the artists who specialise in this type of work have all been influenced by some overseas artist that he has never heard of, but assumes must exist. Certainly, the hypothetical viewer can see the joke (although he suspects that the artists' themselves would call it an "irony"), but as jokes go it does not seem to deserve so many retellings. The hypothetical viewer even questions the technological base of the works that he sees at a "technology-based" exhibition. The hypothetical viewer cannot imagine any art that does not use some form of technology. However, the curators of exhibitions about technology seem to have narrowed down the field to works that were created or are exhibited on computers, works that at some stage in their production have come near a computer, and works that have virtual or cyber in their titles. Since practically all art requires the use of some sort of technology, the hypothetical viewer has decided that any work can, at least nominally, be described as being "about technology", and that to say a work is "about technology" is thoroughly meaningless, and to say it was created "with technology" is self-evident.

The hypothetical viewer believes that he can tell whether a work is good or bad. He has been told that this is an unacceptable and untenable position to take, but he believes it anyway. He determines whether a work is good or bad by trying to imagine the hypothetical artist who created the image that he sees in front of him. For a work to be what the hypothetical viewer would consider good, the hypothetical viewer must be able to perceive the presence of a unique and distinct individual behind the work, with distinct concerns and interests. Even when the hypothetical viewer meets artists responsible for work that he considers good, he imagines the hypothetical artists implied by the work to be separate individuals from the artist themselves. Furthermore, for the hypothetical viewer to like a certain image, he must feel that he trusts the hypothetical artist's intentions and reasons for creating the image, and believes that the image created by the hypothetical artist has what the hypothetical viewer would describe as an honest quality.

At a "technology-based" exhibition, most of the works shown are what the hypothetical viewer would consider bad art. When he tries to imagine the hypothetical artists responsible for such work, he is unable to attribute to them anything more than the most general of characteristics: the hypothetical artist has attended an institution that teaches art, and the hypothetical artist tries to keep abreast of the current trends in art through reading art magazines and books of art theory. What the hypothetical viewer sees seems to be less the t~product of separate human beings than the product of some machine, operating according to a set of rigidly defined and formal rules, and fuelled by the pulped ideas of French theorists and foreign artists and the sort of hokum he would expect from a barker at a freak show. To put this in perspective, I will tell you that the hypothetical viewer believes that most of the world is run by very similar machines. But, conversely, the hypothetical viewer believes that the purpose of art is to escape from this machinery in the first place. At about this point the alcohol runs out, and the hypothetical viewer leaves soon afterwards. The next morning, the hypothetical viewer decides that bad art is not worth missing a night of television or suffering a hangover of the proportions of the one he is now suffering.

I generally agree with him.

© Chris Gregory is 25 and lives in Melbourne. He works as a multimedia designer and developer, and is currently working on a collection of his short fiction for McPhee Gribble.

MESH#6 Winter, 1995. MESH film/video/media/art is the journal of Experimenta Media Arts