Art

  The paper analyzes recent constructions of American public policy regarding funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Arthur MacEwan’s study of neoliberalism functions as a framework for understanding broad historical shifts in the perceived role of the State in funding the Arts on a national scale, while the primary investigation presents the suppression of Body Count’s song, Cop Killer, as a case through which to assess the viability of the neoliberal rationale for federal arts funding. The paper contends that the neoliberal approach to public arts has lead to funding rationales that construct art as a commodity subordinate to the principles of supply and demand, while limiting, if not denying, the constitutive role of art as political speech in the life of a democracy. Further, the case study suggests that Keynesian and post-Keynesian economic models apply more cohesively than the neoliberal model as a bona fide rationale for federal arts funding, where active federal arts policy is vital both in the creation and maintenance of a stable climate for the production of capital and in the proper functioning of a representative mode of government.

Cory Arcangel's reconfiguration of classic video games into video art may at first be considered an exercise in nostalgia. Indeed, Arcangel is widely noted for his use of obsolete media and retro-style video games as artistic material. As a member of the Nintendo generation, Arcangel often encounters remediated cultural signifiers of his childhood within the ever growing video game community and market. Nostalgia in the video game industry and gaming community is essentially a desire for an unattainable and simulated past and yet one that works actively to construct an alternative genealogy that reflects the personal and cultural memories invested in video games. The desire for authorial control over simulated memories of digital interaction shows that a framework is required to conceive of digital cultural memory and the ways in which it can be considered and contributed to. Arcangel's video art, especially his video piece Super Mario Clouds, requires a utilization of nostalgia and digital cultural memory to fully interactive with the work. However, his reconfigured classic video game does not instigate nostalgia in viewers, but invigorates a new framework in which to examine temporality and memory in virtual environments. This is achieved through a collective interactivity with the work that re-authors a video game narrative rather than conforms to it and thus exists within a present moment of actualizing the self as co-producer of digital culture. Immersive simulation in video gaming and intricately networked information communities has made existence within the present almost unattainable. Many members of the digital and gaming community have cultural and biographical memories that were created in virtual capacities but there is little understanding as to how to recall them or present them as legitimate. This paper examines digital and nostalgic methods for articulating and documenting digital cultural history through the use of Cory Arcangel. His art is symbolic of the genealogical methods for reconsidering the digital citizen and consumer, but most significantly, providing this culture with an archive that does not simulate its history but reflects it through its need to be made.