New technology may have particularized our relationship to sound, but other things in our world have been made more imprecise. The cult of celebrity has taken a turn for the ambiguous, and many relationships and accepted precepts of the art world now float around in a gray zone. Both are affected by technology that blurs the line between the performer / creator of work and the audience. Widely accessible creative tools and the promotion and distribution capability of the internet means that many more people are making and sharing creative work. The rise of a new celebrity can happen without any connection to the traditional star culture system, and the rise of an artist can happen without the backing of conventional gallery shows more quickly than it could have before.
Internet art gets work out of the gallery and into the minds of people who would not normally have access to it – groups that are either physically or social isolated from a strong art scene. Connecting to these social and economic cultures is an important part of Net art, just as it was important to the conceptual artists of the 1960s who wanted to take the power away from galleries and museums. Happenings pushed art into the public realm, surprising an unsuspecting public into reassessing notions of art and its relation to culture. In the same way, my insertion of my internet personality Br00keMsweet88 into the public sphere of other video bloggers has caused the audience to question whether it is performance art or pop culture drivel. If Br00ke were a real person auditioning for the Real World, she would be a performer in the entertainment sphere. But as she is a construct, it is art.