First of all I would like to thank Incubate for inviting Andrew Keen to the Incubate Innovation Lecture. Andrew Keen gave a clear lecture about his vision on Internet issues. He raised some legitimate questions about the future of western art in a civilization were nobody pays for an artwork. He states that the digital revolution has destroyed art, industrial art as we know it. I won’t summarise his ideas any further, for it is well known and can otherwise be read in his book The Cult of the Amateur, or his essay in De Groene Amsterdammer: ‘Waarom zijn kunstenaars arm?’

I would like to give my reflections on the debate after Keen’s lecture led by Xandra Schutte and with Konrad Boehmer, Amelia Andersdotter, Hans Abbing and James Kirby. The Incubate innovation lecture lived to its name by using an innovative way of audience participation through the use of Twitter. As the discussion proceeded people were twittering on the issues. This was interesting because what was happening was a real time demonstration of one of the discussion topics: filtering. The content of the Tweets varied from being a useless commentary (@ajkeen pronounces Vermeer as ‘Vomir’ #iil09) to legitimate questions (Is internet really democratic? Only 20% of us can take part in this discussion… #iil09) In this case I do felt the tweets needed filtering. Following the different tweets and small talks on twitter doesn’t contribute to an in depth engagement of the discussion. Being distracted by all sorts of sense and nonsense one is constantly filtering, constantly forming an opinion. This can be a good thing but it can also take a lot of energy without really getting somewhere.

I have one point of critic on the discussion of filters. James Kirby made a rather cynical remark like all human filters are hypocrites who want to be taken out to dinner. In the following discussion the filters were interpreted as reviewers or post-artwork filters. But the pre-artwork filters, that decide on the access of an artwork before it has access to a wider audience, such as musiclabels, publishers, etc., were not considered. In my opinion there is a major difference between the two. Thanks to internet the influence of the pre-artwork filters has shrunken significantly with the result that more artists were able to expose themselves and find an appreciative audience. This is for me one of major contributions of internet to the art world.

It seems to be that the internet optimists, such as Amelia Andersdotter, were on average younger than the more pessimistic views like the ones from Konrad Boehmer. For me this discussion is not about the young versus the old. It all comes down to making a system wherein good art can be made and survive. Maybe the older generation tends to think that there was a reasonable, although not idealistic system, in the industrial age.

Obviously money is an important factor in this issue. Where are the cash flows? Ironically enough Keen states that the physical is the value in the new world of the digital revolution. So let’s go see a concert from a band we have checked on MySpace.

Shane Burmania

You can watch video’s of the Incubate Innovation lecture (including Andrew Keen’s keynote) here.