by Carly Berwick

Contemporary art seems to be leaving modernism’s history of alienation for the engagement of audiences. Is Cory Arcangel the first digital artist we have to take seriously?

If you happened to walk into the darkened room at 83 Grand Street in Manhattan in early September you would have seen a video of The Beatles’s historic 1964 appearance on the Ed Sullivan show projected opposite the front door—the four moptops facing down a din of screaming girls. But if you happened to return to the gallery a few weeks later, the same video was nearly unrecognizable: over time, the bodies, instruments, and floppy hair of the four Beatles had morphed into blocky pixels, increasingly indistinct and further from memory.

“The longer it goes on, the better the piece looks, and the less embarrassing it is,” says artist Cory Arcangel, its creator.

For the past few years, Arcangel has been hacking his way into video games, movies, and Top 40 hits, removing and adding elements that transform familiar pop icons, from Super Mario to Guns n’ Roses guitarist Slash, into strange new windows on contemporary culture. It only took Arcangel six simple lines of code to turn The Beatles video, Untitled (After Lucier), into an artifact of digital compression and cultural disintegration.

Arcangel’s work, which has also been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, reaches out to people in a way that much contemporary art has resisted: engaging rather than dictating, inviting viewers to become participants and creators as opposed to passive recipients. You might call this an open-source approach to art. Art is best, goes this way of thinking, when built from the bottom up, when viewers complete an artist’s work by picking up wrapped candies (as in a Felix Gonzalez-Torres piece) or by giving instructions for the artist to carry out (as in Sophie Calle’s work) or in Rirkrit Tiravanija’s dinner party art. All of this parallels the rise of social media and even recent branding manifestos that caution companies against hardselling increasingly savvy—and connected—consumers. In this new networked era, products flourish when consumers promote them—join them—of their own free will. An artist (like Arcangel) who reduces a popular video game to clouds or turns pop music’s great heroes into a pixilated maelstrom, doesn’t need to convince viewers to enjoy and engage with his art: they’re already there.