Using Context as an Artistic Medium

Lil Nas X, Jenny Odell, and Distracted Boyfriend

In her 2019 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy, artist and researcher Jenny Odell writes, "my medium is not the digital image, my medium is not even the screen, my medium is context.”

In a way, this is true of all post-internet art (or whatever it is we’re calling it now). Post-internet artists like Brad Troemel, Joshua Citarella, and Odell herself make objects and experiences that are located in the gray areas between prank and craft, criticism and aesthetic production, the internet and real life, platforms and people. There’s sculpture, photography, performance, and other stuff involved—but the thing underneath it all is context. What we’re really talking about when we talk about internet art is a revolution in context-making.

A piece by Joshua Citarella — a series of real-life flags for niche political ideologies that only exist online.

Context is also the…