What everybody knows: protocols of rumour

Stephen Wright — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:27:29 +0000

Stephen Wright

Exhibitions are all right for those of us who like that sort of thing, but like other artworldly activities, they’re pretty harmless. As art seems to have exhausted much of its potential, why not turn our art-critically honed tools to more corrosive phenomena – the kind that suit no one’s purpose, like that all-pervasive, horizontal network of open-source speech-acts of confident uncertainty known as rumour? If only because rumour can wreak more havoc in the public sphere in half an hour than art can in a century, is it not worth at least considering as a possible role model for an unauthored, viewer-free art that escapes itself?

collective speech acts

What everybody knows: protocols of rumour