INTERVIEW: Jose Luis Brea. The Critic Operator of the Web 2.0?" by Ignacio
Nieto
http://newmediafix.net/daily/?p=405
http://newmediafix.net/
February 12, 2006
NMF's contributor, Ignacio Nieto interviews Jose Luis Brea who was formerly Dean
of the Fine Arts Academy of Cuenca and Director of Exhibitions for the Ministry
of
Culture between 1985 1988. As a free lance art critic, he is a regular
contributor to Spanish and international art magazines including Frieze, Flash
Art
and Parkett. He is Spanish correspondent for Arforum and regional editor for
Rhizome. He has organized multiples exhibitions as independent curator and has
published several books including Auras Frias and El Tercer Umbral. Currently,
he
is prefessor of Esthetics and Theory of Contemporany Art at Carlos III
University
in Madrid, editor of the magazine Estudios Visuales and he is director of two
new
online projects: salonKritik and ::agencia crítica::
Ignacio Nieto [IN]: With the popularization of blogs, a number of spaces have
developed which had no place within the logic of political economy; contained
and
produced by media, creating a new front for ideas and critical thinking. For
you,
what would be the advantages and disadvantages that blog technology has over
traditional media (newspapers, radio and television)?
Jose Luis Brea [JLB]: I believe that there are two fundamental advantages: an
extended possibility of access, and participation. The first is very important,
of
course, because it proposes access to critical thinking that is made available
to
a larger part of the population, something that was not possible in the past
(this
is without exaggeration, of course, one must never forget that the supposition
of
total access is an illusory fantasyan interest of Capitalist ideology).
Considering television and the culture of diffusion, Bourdieu called this the
"lowering of the level" (of access). Let's say that more people heard and
sawmaybe even readfor example philosophers; Derrida, and now Zizek, whom
they would never have had heard, seen or read before. This is much more evident
with new media (especially since the development of the web 2.0)
But for the same reason this amplification (possibility to access) would not
have
an excessive importance; it would be purely quantitative, it would not
contribute
without making "more of the masses" the culture of masses, and maybe to
incorporate in it cultural objects, of the critical tradition which before
belonged to areas in culture less popular, more "elitist" or more reserved for
specialized communities, let's say (for example "deconstruction," "Theory of
acts
of speech," or "antagonist thinking"). This is why I think that the quality that
is important is the latter, that which I have called "participation." This is
something that the web 2.0 has re-enforced a lot. Before, of course, it had
already occurred that all new media, obviously from radio to video, from
"vietnamita"[1] to photocopy or the fanzine, and of course, the website
programmed
in HTML, makes possible a certain extension of interactivity (in the construct
of
collective critical thinking), related to the conversion of the
spectator/reader/
receiver into emitter. But with the emergence of the blog, forums postnuke, and
phpBB, wikis, and podcasting in general all DIY media publication has grown
exponentially, and it is there where a great leap has been produced; its impact
on
the discursive field we currently entertain, (critical thinking), necessarily is
huge; and it will ultimately culminate in those diverse forms authors call
"collective intellectualization."
Let's say that all the manifestations of technologies of treatment, gesture,
diffusion, archiving, and organization of access to knowledge (not only the
tools
of e-science, but also those dialogical and interactive prototypes of the web
2.0), necessarily open and submit critical thinking to processes much more
intense
and, to put it this way, frantic public contrast. The challenge for critical
thinking resides in confronting the consequences of its new logic and its social
construct.
And it is there where it should be pointed out, also, the disadvantage, the
danger, which respectively corresponds to new media: that the elusive "lowering
of
the level" is not only produced in the terms mentioned above (of more open
access), but also produced as a lowering of the level for content. Let's say
that
the public dialogue ends up converting critical thinking into chatter,
vulgarity,
in an ineventual series of commonalities badly developed and repeated from blog
to
blog, like echoes each time more hollow of ideas, which in those repostings lose
more and more panache and sharpness. In my reflection on the transformation of
the
tools of cultural criticism with the apparition of these new media, I dedicate
an
ironic post to this question specifically titled "Chatter" (of unquestionable
Benjamanian references, which surely some r
