Copyutopia

Art is not characterized by hegemony in respect to other fields. Beauty and truth are no longer exclusive to art. Rather than these qualities, certain conditions and mechanisms define a work of art at a given moment. But even if this is the state of things, enough remains. Art still remains a field where determined circumstances, qualities and desires become visible. And there remains the option to advert a vocabulary, a series of motives, gestures, concepts and reflections particular to this field.
This immanent change within the art field collaborates in order that its boundaries remain porous. More artistic elements are discussed outside the field of visual arts. It is as if arts autonomy were in bits and pieces, and they were all distributed. Elements which together conform art, we now find scattereded in every field imaginable. Diedrich Diedrichsen calls this process "New visual rutines". The look is widened. Arts failed purpose, one of the elements which constituted freedom of art, the freedom, since Kant, which justifies arts own rules, we no longer find them in visual arts. In a certain way, the artistic language is returning to its original definition, which embraces far more fields than visual arts.

Extract from "Cruzar las fronteras en lugar de importar y exportar" in La Utopia de la Copia by Mercedes Bunz.

Mercedes Bunz believes in the Internet, she lives in Berlin and is editor of Tagesspiegel Online. Since 1997 she has edited DE:BUG, one of Europes most important magazines for electronic music and world view. Co-founder and connected to Bauhaus Universität Weimar, she wrote her PhD thesis on the history of Internet, now published on Kadmos Verlag. Cultural critique and journalist, a student of Dietrich Diedrichsen, author of Persons in Loop (Personas en Loop), she recently published The Utopia of Copy (La Utopia de la Copia), a compilation of articles published in German media.

She questions art, genre, style, age, sexual identity along with our contemporary society and world. Her essays are portraits of everyday life and a map of cultural consumption in discource with thinkers like Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. The essays can also be read as a survey of the mode in which contemporary esthetics are produced: From the Internet to the fanclubs of Kraftwerk, Missy Elliot and the new liberal pop.

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