"The Critic Operator of the Web 2.0?"

Ignacio Nieto Interviews Jose Luis Brea, New Media Fix

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 fantasy‹an 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
saw‹maybe even read‹for 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 readers will recognize). (See here.)

IN: Do you believe that blogs could displace ranking terms in search engines like
Google?

JLB: If I tell you the truth, I don't think so. I don't doubt that tools of
semantic articulation of content (and in some ways efficient for the organization
of searches) like Technorati or del.icio.us, or metablogs, could serve a similar
function. But, in any case, its utility would be principally limited to the
extended blogosphere, let's say projects specific to the web 2.0, linked to the
"personal publication." Regardless, there are fundamental spaces, all those
related to science, with the tools of the web of knowledge, with the new structure
of access to the web of academic research (with all the transformations that it is
experiencing), that keep needing tools of organization for navigation, to
classify and search, let's say. On one side, it is evident that this have not been
developed autonomously (for instance, there is no search engine for the "web of
knowledge," at the periphery of the search engines proper of databases for
specific data, for example ISI Thompson), and on another side, search engines like
Google do not stop attending also to those necessary searches. I want to say that
at the same time that projects are developed, like Blogger, also they place in
effect the digitalization of great libraries. Or, let's say, that they attend the
development of the web of "publication of personal e-culture" as well as the
re-conversion and turnaround of the web of "high cultural research" and "academic
culture" linked to the development of e-science (I choose general terminology and
I use it in an imprecise way, because after all, this is all about trying to
understand my response in relation to your question and up to what point I think
that the development of those proper mechanisms of the "web of collective
intellect" does not cover aspects of change for which old search engines are still
essential).

IN: The blogs that work like editors/directors (Salonkritik and Agencia Critica)
posses different directions, but they have various areas in common; from the
design to the technology that supports them, onto the concept that validates them:
criticism. Could you explain the genesis of each of these blogs?

JLB: Of course you are right about both things. It is obvious that they have a lot
in common: mainly on a formal level and on their development, which come from the
same hand; our team is very small ­and I also confess to you that all the
programming and maintenance is done by myself; I do not want, nor can I lose too
much time in researching technical questions (nor obviously in design), beyond of
what is strictly necessary for the final development of specific projects,
logically; even though, in any case, we dispose effectively of all kinds of
tools, from wikis to systems of podcasting, forums with postnuke or our own blogs
running on MT or Wordpress, and all on our own server, which allows us to launch a
new project that we find interesting in a matter of hours.

Regarding content and objectives, the two blogs are truly different. SalonKritik
basically is a resource of art criticism which is published in Spain, without much
pretension other than to align (therefore open to other publics, at the same time
and potentially to other debates) something that at a moment occurs only in one
medium that simultaneously is elitist and functions very corruptly in Spain like a
tool of power, which is the "cultural supplement." Let's say that salonKritik
tries to destabilize a bit the supplemental economy of authority. Open it to other
dynamics (even though I have to admit that the success that we have achieved with
this project is not reason to launch fireworks), to enable the publication of
visions and perspectives that are not published in that media, to which people can
answer, ultimately, to validate justly those other qualities that we know new
media have in relation to old media specifically in diffusion, contrast, and
participation in the construction of critical thought.

Regarding La Agencia, it is a more modest and ambitious project. More modest in
the sense, I suppose, that it would interest a smaller audience, but which is more
ambitious when aiming to make public something that did not exist, and which, in
my opinion, tainted the cultural landscape in Spain, which is the critique of
artistic and cultural politics. There is Art criticism (quite a bit, which is not
very good, of course, but very common) but in contrast there is not a lot of
criticism about politics of art. And, well, more specifically that is the
objective of the Agencia Crítica.

The main problem that I encountered with La Agencia, is solitude (I don't know if
this is as a forward or a goalie before a penalty, to tell you the truth),
although it is true that with time la Agencia receives more collaborations by
diverse people, which is what I believe would make it more interesting: that it
could cover the most expansive set of multiple points of view; as different as
possible. In any case, la Agencia has little time online still, and I am confident
that little by little, the number of collaborators that want to participate will
grow.

IN: A last question: Tell me about your new book?

JLB: Well, I have a couple of years working on it. The dense nucleus is a chapter
titled "e-ck: Electronic Cultural Capitalism" which in reality I considered
finished two years ago. It basically deals with the process of transformation of
Capitalism in which the accumulation of capital is centered mainly on the
processes of symbolic and cultural production, and all of the multiplicity of
consequences that it has, including in the new political economy of societies of
knowledge, as well as the critical position found within these cultural practices.

In any case, the title that the book will have is not that one (of Electronic
Cultural Capitalism) but of "Cultura_RAM," since other previous chapters have
focused each time on such conundrum, specifically, of characteristic
transformation of cultural practices (and its rules of production, distribution
and archiving: there you have the concept of RAM like a new form of characteristic
memorization) and the models of production and forms of knowledge, from the
university, the museum, to criticism. Some of the texts included, as it always
happens with books, have been previously published and distributed online, for
example that one on criticism of art, which is the one I referred to above, but
many others for now have not been edited. I am definitely finishing the book
during the next few weeks, and I hope to send it for publication very soon.

Notes

(1) Vietnamita: Spanish colloquial term given to "do it your self" offset machines
that were used by the anti-Franco resistance to print pamphlets.