From Object to Platform

Abstract

In this article we argue that the upsurge of digital technology in contemporary art practice is requiring artists, art institutions and audiences to engage with time in new ways. Beginning with the way institutions such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art broke with the museological paradigm of only displaying ‘dead’ art, we then examine how the emergence of video art in the 1960s created new practices of time-based spectatorship and altered exhibition protocols. From this vantage, we identify and address a key tendency in the present, namely the move away from conceiving the artwork as a finished object, in favour of the production of open platforms requiring the participation of the public in order to generate their content. We argue that this new setting for art is complex and ambivalent, enabling both new forms of collaboration and social engagement, but also pushing art towards the ‘experience economy’ of commodified leisure.