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In the Sunday March 5 edition of the New York Times Holland Cotter did it again. He writes on art groups: "The Collective Conscious.". Cotter sees collectives as an alternative to the market-driven artworld ("shoppable M.F.A. artists-to-watch"). Collaboration, accidental (as in friends brainstorming) or working together via the Internet is supposed to offer a new fresh aesthetics for the art world. Art collectives as the new artist genius? The one-artist-to-one-object relationship is broken when it comes to collaborative art projects. Holland argues that collective work "confuses how we think about art and assign value to it." Does not that depend on the actual project instead of simply the mode of (collaborative) working? His examples are little surprising. The amazing 'media actionism' group 0100101110101101.ORG (Eva and Franco Mattes), CAE, Center for Land Use Reclamation, Atlas Group, and Bernadette Corporation. "If art can be defined as the purposeful  shaping of images to embody and expand ideas, this collective's activities [010001011] easily qualify." And just imagine: they stretch conventional definitions of art away from the object. They engage in political activism, and white lab-coat-type scientific experimentation. "If this collective model represents an alternative to the object-fixated market economy of art, other models are notable for turning conventional ideas of what an artist is inside out." The art as genius model is a tired one. It's curious to read this in 2006.

Cotter's last New York Times article Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together delineated some of that historical collaborative work. Was not the importance of collaborative work obvious at least since the 1960s and the brief blooming of net art of a bit longer than a decade, preceded by a branching out of a wide variety of media art. The online archive Media Art Net offers a rich collection of this work. Art collectives today are not interested in individualistic signature style. Cotter recognizes that collaborative artwork is not inherently political or radical. But the article demonstrates the divide between the traditional art world and media art scenes where collaboration and group formation are not just the daily bread since independent social web media blossomed.  Cotter writes: "Internet-savy collectives like [Bernadette Corporation] .... exist exclusively on the Web - take a holistic view of art as long-term social process, rather than a short-term formal event. Just as important, they want to get their work out, free, to as wide an audience as possible, and the Internet let's them do so." Online, interest in long-term, slowly evolving work is rare. It is surprising that after many decades of collboration and significant literature produced on the subject- art collectives are suddenly the nw alternative to the commercial artworld. In fact, most of the defining points of this "new collective conscious" mentioned by Cotter are the modus operandi of networked cultural production since the early 1990s. Apart from essays by Lucy Lippard, there are texts by Charles Green, and Dieter Daniels who make the connection between group formation and art. And they are making it for a very long time.

<top image: Get Rid of Yourself, Bernadette Corporation>