ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the artistic strategies of the postinternet art movement; primarily, those of mimicry and repetition, which appear to abandon the historical role to challenge societal norms given to the artistic avant-garde. It explores a postinternet art that is symptomatic of a world where corporate tech providers have come to occupy the role of the avant-garde, rather than artists, but that does not succumb to nostalgic and compensatory fantasies of a pre-internet idyll, which are so common in contemporary popular culture. Ostensibly, postinternet artists adopted a fatalistic view of the corporatised internet of the 2010s as an immutable and impenetrable force. And its strategies of mimicry and repetition are also the cause of the movement’s most trenchant critiques in the art press. The chapter considers these strategies within a longer art historical context and rethinks their critical efficacy today. It does so through close attention to three artist case studies: DIS, Petra Cortright, and Jordan Wolfson.
