Saturday, January 3, 2015

“Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With

Exhibition view 
Photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk 

Installation photo, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 2014
(“Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With)

The death of Contemporary Art Daily will be another site with better formatting. The speed of consumption was what birthed CAD - the instant glut of it - yet it now lags with the machinations of its web1.0 formatting still using clickable arrows in aggressive pageview extraction tech. Group shows become a chore, clicking buttons like a neanderthal. If someone rehosted the exhibition images to be located on a single page it would kill CAD overnight. Like a Myspace waiting for a Facebook. Incredible that museums still give CAD  domain over their documentation. Their current position as the contemporary art world’s documentation curator is waiting to be usurped by those who plot it. Which, who currently is plotting this coup of the power it wields is ominous, for those who desire this power obviously have use to manipulate it.

Also this exhibition's celebration of the white guy among a group of chinese artists feels a little like a samurai film starring Tom Cruise.

Note: CAD is currently in the process of updating the format of the site.