Editorial

For its official launching the Web Net Museum dedicates a complete retrospective to Fred Forest, the more mediatized French artist and, paradoxically, maybe, the less… recognized ! Certainly now, everybody knows its name. Notably since his interventions on Internet. But how much know, in truth, his artistic practice ? One says of him he is the pope of the networks and one names him, familiarly, Citizen Fred ! He is indeed, in France as artist, the inescapable pioneer of the means of modern communication. But, once again, how much know in depth a work of research he pursued, in a coherent way, on more of three decades now ? Making this artist, as says gladly Pierre Restany, the visionary and undisputed artist of this new culture of the interactive communication that is imposed to our societies.

The goal of this online retrospective, it’s first for the Web Net Museum to deliver to the public, for its own information, as for to the pretended licensed "specialists" of contemporary art, the reality and the consistence of a "impressive" artistic convenient, so much by its mass of production than by its originality. A mass of information, actions, performances, thoughts, works,... It’s there, now, under our eyes on the Web Net Museum ! No one will be able to ignore, for ever, for those, of which the legitimacy seriously put back in question to the official coterie, that will have demonstrated, once besides, lack of clairvoyance on everything that anticipates.

The second objective that we assigned ourselves and to which this online retrospective answers, it’s to put at the disposal of the illuminated amateurs, the researchers, the academic and historians, a corpus of information on which they will be able to work henceforth, in order to remedy in France, at an endemic deficiency that deprives our best artists of the minimum support of information. A support and an help that would finally give them, to equal chance, the possibility to put forward their qualities in the international competition.

As we attend a redistribution of the cards and powers in the society, the role of the Web Net Museum will be precisely to compensate a notorious lack of information on some artists, creating out of the traditional market, by a voluntarist politic, committed on everything that changes. Beyond this role, we will tempt to put in evidence that in our societies in mutation, the processes of recognition as well in art than in others sectors of activities, where we already note the effects of it, undergo a deep putting back in question, driving to a displacement of the values. In this conjuncture all becomes again possible, now, for those that, with the requisite expertise, the enthusiasm and the necessary will, are ready to push to the wheel… so that the wheel turns. And chance will be them more open if is added… a sharp sense of the realities, minimum imagination, the means and the indispensable know-how concerning electronic communication.

Less than two months after having confided to Louis-José Lestocart the online organisation of a generative art exhibition, to Susanna Sulic to achieve an exhibition on the theme of art at the post-biologic time, organized, in exclusive rights after "Interactive World", a face-to-face between Pierre Lévy and Philippe Breton, put in place an exhaustive retrospective of Fred Forest, we ask for ourselves in what and why we would not be in right to claim this legitimacy that of the extravagant and inefficient institutions monopolize unduly. The online retrospective of a given artist that we offer now to the internauts, all over the world, is a first answer to this deficiency.

We assume better this challenge that we are convinced, already, it can be won, if we wait for nothing else that to make sense in a society that need of it in year I of this 3rd millennium.

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