‘Likes’, lacquered cherry pies and Anselm Kiefer: the weird world of post-internet art

In the mid-1990s the art world got excited about internet art (or ‘net.art’, as those involved styled it). This new way of making art would harness the world wide web, take the form of exciting online projects, bypass traditional galleries and be accessible to all with a dial-up connection. ‘Net.artists’ were self-styled radicals particularly fond of that most modernist of tropes, the manifesto, which they distributed via electronic mailing lists or electronic bulletin boards. These artists adopted funky, web-style names such as ‘Irational.org’ and ‘VNS Matrix’ and showed their work online at similarly funkily named websites like Rhizome, Suck and Echo.

But there was, alas, a gap in the Matrix, to paraphrase Keanu Reeves’s finest film. As the art world boomed in the first decade of the 21st century, internet art dropped almost entirely out of view. Now, though, it’s back in a second incarnation. The somewhat confusingly named ‘post-internet art’ has, over the past couple of years, become the latest buzzword in contemporary art.