The artist is now the insider who finds a new style of trifling within the game. The artist as outsider is dead, for there is no outside from which to signal back across the border. The limit to the game has to be found from within.
McKenzie Wark, “Gamer Theory”
To put this in context, this comes from a book describing (as far as I can tell, not having read it all yet) how the imposition of the digital onto the world has transformed it into gamespace, and the above passage from a chapter that describes the progression of connections reducing space and our relation to it, which leads up to a comparison of Katamari Damacy to the military entertainment complex. It’s a dense chapter.
But the idea of artist-no-longer-as-outsider, and general lack of outside, led me to couple thoughts, one of them being my recalling the quote bouncing around from UK artist Banksy, about how all the best and brightest artists now end up in advertising and such, and we are left with an art world full of the mediocre and self-absorbed. Put in context of the directions our part of the world is headed, the global village as monoculture, this makes some sort of sense. I imagine the only way we’ll hear the artist at this point is if the signal comes from within. Global access in the form of the internet has shown that given the choice, we’ll only seek out others like us, consuming that with which we are already familiar. The very talented might do their best work from within, then, as it might be the only way we hear what they say.
