Is the internet dead? This is not a metaphorical question. It does not suggest that the internet is dysfunctional, useless or out of fashion. It asks what happened to the internet after it stopped being a possibility. The question is very literally whether it is dead, how it died and whether anyone killed it.
It was the year that Post-Internet Art ‘finally cracked the market’. In 2014, a conversation that had been bubbling away for years between a small circle of international artists and critics became the latest trending aesthetic to flood into the mainstream. What ‘Post-Internet’ actually means is anyone’s guess (and everyone’s tried), but from the Zabludowicz in London to the Ullens in Beijing, it was here, there and everywhere. To paraphrase Hito Steyerl: the Post-Internet walked off-screen and straight into the white cube.