Lawrence Alloway's "Art and the Communication Network": the Future Basis of Social Art Media

The British art critic, Lawrence Alloway (London 1926-1990), was also an author credited with the coinage of the term "Pop Art."  As the senior curator of art at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York (1961-66) he wrote about much art that was concerned with mass media and consumerism.  As someone who was friends with artists, other critics and museum aficionados, he became very well acquainted with the art world, which he later dubbed as a communication network.

 Photograph taken by Alexander Liberman of a gathering at his home

 c.1965 (from left to right: Lawrence Alloway, Tatiana Liberman, Barnett

   Newman, Sylvia Sleigh, Helen Frankenthaler (standing), Robert Motherwell

         and Annalee Newman)

As the social media world sorts itself out as having a kind of systematic order and hierarchy, the paradigm that Alloway puts forth as that which is the art world's foundational structure, may be a suggested format.  As written about in the Tate blog http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/art-world-network-and-other-alloway-keywords Alloway saw the art world thusly:

The artwork starts its life in the artist’s studio or ‘work-place’, where it might be seen by a small audience before moving on to the commercial art gallery, a private collection, or a public collection. From either of the three transit hubs it will likely move into a museum exhibition, which will shape its entry into the ‘fourth context’, literature, in the form of exhibition catalogues, art magazine reviews or general interest magazine features. In each case, the diagnosis is not positive for the object, as it is ‘no longer substantially present as an object’ once the progression from studio to literature is enacted. For Alloway, the final stage represented a kind of flattening with the intrusion of literature. Within this progression, Alloway indicated the key players: art historians, curators, collectors, critics and dealers who, by acting out their specific role, incite a role-blurring as the need arose around the promotion of the art or the artist. Not surprisingly, the critic, or writer, has the most altered role at the mid-century because he or she is in the interpretative function of a speeded-up distribution cycle. Of this role, he remarked, ‘The typical strategy of an art critic today is to look for ways to reduce the quantity of art which the network handles so easily’.

If we superimpose today's  social media's template of blogs, micro blogs, and general social networking capabilities, the work of the artist may initially be seen online by a critic such as Alloway, shown in an online exhibition, and written about on a Museum blog or an online periodical by such a critic.  This format, which is already in use, already creates a myriad of opportunities for art exposure, but does not meet Alloway's goals to reduce the quantity of art which the network handles so easily.  Of course, it  is only a selected few artists who may grace the web pages of the MOMA, Guggenheim, Whitney or more recently The New Museum (the major contemporary art venues of Manhattan), yet the possibilities are endless.  In the future which is in its formation stages at present, there will evolve a kind of stratification system that will create a hierarchy of what may become an academic avant garde to a kitsch garde, which will be discriminated by types of readers from the most sophisticated to those who want to merely keep up with links to what is trendy.  If Alloway were alive today, he may have chuckled about how complex  and chaotic a system the web is, but it be certain that his critique of it would be smart and savvy.  We will see what the developmental future holds, and who will form and critique it.