Alfredo Cramerotti

The established categories in which photography was once subdivided, practiced, understood and discussed have been reconfigured. It’s as though our society has freed image making from previously articulated specific applications, blurring the boundaries between genres and functions of image-making, and rendering the photographic image as a free-floating subject on its own, detached from any function or relation specific to its origins; what we may term as the “hyeprimage’.

The text aims to explore the fact that photography is a vocabulary, a language that is neither written nor verbal, but visual and digital. Using the curation of art as a method, and building on my previous body of research on the interaction and mutual influence between artistic and media work (Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing, Intellect, 2009), I will attempt to grasp how photography has entered its adulthood, and how we can use it to understand and resolve some aspects that typify our visual information age.

Large-scale temporary art exhibitions such as biennials present special characteristics which in turn illuminate broader questions of art practice, curatorship and cultural management, as well as cultural and social affect. This article considers the third Berlin
biennale for contemporary art, focusing its initial discussion on questions of exhibition space including ‘hub’ forms that attempt to break from conventional ‘art-viewing’ practices. The article further considers the relationship of specific exhibition sites with
prior social, cultural and economic histories to the reception of art, inquiring what is at stake in the semiological management of ‘sites of representation’, with particular focus on three Berlin locations. Contrasting ‘neo-liberal’ approaches to large exhibitions structured as commodities in major sites such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris or London’s Tate Modern, with less consumerist and more participative approaches, the analysis considers alternatives to current practice on the part of cultural managers and curators, and debates what is at stake for cultural politics in developing modes of art practice and exhibition.

An excerpt of Alfredo Cramerotti’s book “Aesthetic journalism: How to Inform Without Informing” (2009), published by Intellect, which discusses how the production of truth has shifted from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism, which marks a new approach to the debate of the possibility of the critical potential of art within the aestheticization of the information.

Aesthetics is that process in which we open our sensibility to the diversity of the forms of nature (and manmade environment), and convert them into tangible experience. The potential of aesthetics in relation to journalism is based on two considerations: first, as mentioned above, traditional journalism itself uses a highly developed aesthetic tradition, which in time has gained the mark of objectivity. Thus, by being ubiquitous and universal, the 'consumer' no longer regards it as aesthetics, and accepts it uncritically. Secondly, the implementation of different aesthetics is a way of questioning the hegemony of the status quo. Content is – and stays – important, but it is very hard for an artist to live up to the research capabilities of a standard newspaper or TV station. Therefore, the artist has to play his or her cards by disclosing a universally accepted aesthetics of truth, that is: using another aesthetics, which reveals the former as such. My argument is that one cannot really speak the truth about something, but can manage to get closer to the real by constructing a model for it. In the end, the ability to imagine is closely connected with the possibility of change, and this is the potential residing in all forms of cultural production. An aesthetic approach to journalism and fact-reporting is a mode of related with reality, and with our experience of the world: art is nothing other than another attempt to represent the environment we live in, and the way we experience it. Knowledge and aesthetics are not necessarily opposites: this is only the (Western, philosophical) idea that pleasure, because it strives to achieve a state of wellbeing and pathos, cannot produce 'real' knowledge.

Addressing a growing area of focus in contemporary art, Aesthetic Journalism investigates why contemporary art exhibitions often consist of interviews, documentaries, and reportage. Art theorist and critic Alfredo Cramerotti traces the shift in the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism – a change that questions the very foundations of journalism and the nature of art. This volume challenges the way we understand art and journalism in contemporary culture and suggests future developments of this new relationship.