Interview with Regine Débatty
How-to Make Money Not Art
Coming from a classical background, you studied Latin and ancient Greek, how did you start following the new media art world?
I entered this field step by step: I was working for cinema and video when I met Max, a guy who used to do performances using a mobile phone. That was something really new, it was few years ago and he had quite a success: he managed to sell his program to one of the biggest mobile phone companies in Italy and it was used for advertising and promotions. After hearing about his experience, I thought it was interesting to observe the work of those people playing with technology and the way they relate to companies, so I started researching and writing about that. With time, it has become my job.
One of the problems of the newest forms of art is that most of the main art institutions ignore them and there’s no “academia” that can judge if something is good or not. In the field, your blog is really well considered and it replaces somehow the other missing institutions. How do you make your selections?
The lack of critics is totally one of the problems in the new arts field and that’s also why my blog has become so important: there’s not much like this around. The way I select what to blog is really personal: I avoid talking about stuff that has already been published and seen before, but besides that my judgment is based on personal feelings. My interests are focused on different aspects of arts, and time by time I post more about what is my priority of the moment. I don’t write of art theory, I speak about my personal passion; it’s completely different. I guess that people like my blog also because it’s very spontaneous and it shows something I really care about.
The new media art is mostly based on the same channels communication uses. Where is the limit? What’s just communication and what, instead, deserves to be called art?
I don’t think I’m the right person to answer this question, because I don’t have a theoretical background in art criticism. I can’t tell you how I recognize that something is art.
I can tell when something is just good design rather than real art, and I can tell if some artists are doing works that are not interesting and if, on the opposite, some designers are developing ideas which say a lot, but that’s not a rational thing, it’s more connected to the feeling that the piece gives me. Art, to me, shouldn’t be limited to the aesthetical aspect, because I don’t find it meaningful and I prefer whatever has a critical approach and deals with more than just one level, that go deep inside important issues.
Your work is to daily update the blog “We make money not art”. Do you think that a blog is perceived as a credible publishing channel compared to magazines or usual printed press?
I have a kind of fetishism for paper and I believe that the news over the web won’t replace printed publications, but I have to say that a blog is the best way to report about what I’m interested in. I come from a journalist background and I had some difficulties in the beginning with changing my style and making it more personal to fit into a blog style. After more than two years I have learned how useful a blog is: I like its flexibility, its fastness and the fact that it allows me to work from everywhere, since I travel a lot, and to report about news coming from all over the world.
For what concerns the credibility, with time I’m getting to be known and the target I refer to regards it quite highly, also because I worked a lot on the blog itself to develop it and give it a deeper structure. Now it’s not the usual blog, but I turned it more into a magazine online, with longer features, reports form festivals and interviews.
I’m trying to be less stuck to the web: in the beginning all I blogged about was taken from the web, whereas now it’s mostly coming from what I find out traveling and meeting the artists.
[www.we-make-money-not-art.com]