Cory Arcangel: The Coolest, Contemporary-est Artist on the Planet BY STEPHEN SHORT

Writing this paragraph about American artist Cory Arcangel one Friday in June, an email pinged into my mailbox, announcing that British artist David Hockney’s work was about to grace the stage at the Glastonbury Music Festival that afternoon. And not just any Hockney but the nonagenarian’s first AI-related work, in which the AI removes the figures from his painted series The Dancers, 2014, leaving nothing but an empty computer-generated landscape. Why am I telling you this?

Well pre-ping, the above paragraph was a primer on Cory Arcangel and his first artwork of note, Super Mario Clouds, 2002, based on the 1980s Nintendo game. Arcangel learned a computer language that enabled him to hack the game, and he deleted most of its elements – characters walking, the bricks, mushrooms and sound. All that remained was the blue-sky background and fluffy white cumulus clouds, moving in real time. And Arcangel projected it on walls. A brand new category of cross-pollinated art/tech “digital minimalism”, it was a micro/macro-masterpiece in redaction, and Zen some. Arcangel saw the cloud before Apple made it a tech term. And what Hockney was showing that afternoon at Glastonbury in 2023, Arcangel had accomplished via different means 21 years earlier.

Which tells you all you need to know about this playful aesthetic innovator. A pioneer of technology-based art, artist, composer, programmer and entrepreneur, Arcangel trained in classical guitar and studied music technology at Ohio’s Oberlin Conservatory of Music in the late 1990s, which coincided with the beginning of the digital revolution. He draws attention to the way things are made, why they are made and the arbitrary nature of the product that surrounds us, and ultimately, the absurdity of the mass culture we live in. `He often claims not to understand the implications of his work and often says he’s “the last to know”. 

All of which South Korea is about to experience via his inaugural show at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Seoul. Simultaneously, he’s also showing in Seoul with the group exhibition Game Society at MMCA (the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art), which he hasn’t seen on the day we speak to him. “I’m going tomorrow. The show is pretty amazing. My intel tells me that it’s a really wild, expansive show.” It concerns how the grammar and aesthetic of video games have influenced contemporary art and visual culture.

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What’s the biggest misconception people have about him as an artist? “That I’m not a contemporary artist. That I’m some kind of sub genre, that I’m like a digital artist, but I think I very much am a contemporary artist, because these are the tools of our day. That’s the biggest misconception.”

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