But less than a decade ago, digital art was still in desperate need of what Silicon Valley would refer to as “angels”: patrons with influence, access, and resources to lend it an air of legitimacy. Today, it seems as if the possibilities for digital art’s second wave are as boundless as the Internet itself, as artists from the broadband generation create work containing some of the DNA of traditional mediums like painting, photography, and performance-entirely on their computers. Now, these questions belong to every artist.” It was only four years ago that Cornell wrote in Frieze magazine that she “spent a considerable amount of time thinking about why ‘Internet’ is such a gauche word in contemporary art.” But in the catalog for “ Surround Audience,” she declares, “While this field hasn’t lost its specificity, the questions raised by digital media about identity, power, and possibilities for artistic agency have migrated beyond format and become integral to life. This admission is as good a time stamp as any of Net Art’s incubation period, especially since Cornell-the onetime director of Rhizome, the digitally inclined arts organization, and presently a curator at the New Museum, in New York-has organized (with the artist Ryan Trecartin) the museum’s current triennial, “Surround Audience.” As this massive survey makes emphatically clear, the art world is moving-albeit fitfully and awkwardly, like an aging parent or a print-media company-into the wired age. “ Lauren Cornell just ’d your livejournal!” (A quick review of popular mid-aughts Web platforms:, now known as Delicious, was a link-sharing precursor to Pinterest LiveJournal is a diaristic social media site that is somehow still relevant in Russia.) “At the time,” Cortright, 28, tells me over coffee, “I didn’t even know who Lauren Cornell was.” She receives a note-via AOL Instant Messenger, she reckons, considering the era-from Guthrie Lonergan, who is an early pioneer of what has been called Net Art and occasionally is mocked as Post-Internet Art. In this distant past, the artist Petra Cortright is just another high school student sitting in the glow of her computer screen, uploading animated GIFs she created to her blog. Here’s a file, likely corrupted, recovered by the human error–prone app known as memory recall: The year is 2003, maybe 2004-before Instagram, Tinder, and Uber.
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