Not even Victoria Beckham would say that a massive framed picture of her was fine art. But American nerd-art wunderkind Cory Arcangel isn’t Victoria Beckham, he’s the guy who filled the Barbican Curve gallery with 14 different bowling video games, and he thinks Posh Spice is art.
His show here features two rooms filled with big, bright digital images alongside stacks of speakers pounding out a pulsing repetitive static noise. The images veer between the mundane (cats, David Guetta, Adidas track suits, Posh Spice) and the artistic (shimmering digital puddles, Photoshop presets, video games caught mid-pause), all printed the same size.
‘How is this art?’ you may be thinking. ‘I could print out a massive picture of a fucking kitten too.’ But what Arcangel has done is create a sort of self-portrait in clickbait. This is the artist’s whole digital world laid bare. It’s his internet browsing history, his phone pictures, his artistic experiments.
And it isn’t a million miles away from what Marcel Duchamp did with his famous urinal, pushing the idea of the ‘democracy of art’, encouraging viewers to see the beauty in everyday objects. Arcangel’s show is more like the democracy of the desktop.
Most importantly, it all looks amazing. Arcangel has a great eye, and that pounding white noise soundtrack all makes you feel like you’ve been staring at a screen for way too long. The whole thing works so well because sweatpants, cat pics and headaches are part of our everyday lives. Somehow, you walk in thinking ‘bollocks to this’, but you leave feeling like you can completely relate to the work. Maybe, after hours spent staring at the screen, the line between art and David Guetta blurs. We’ve all been there.
