Remember Flash? Remember splash pages? For a brief moment the internet had rid ourselves of the clogged glitz of pageantry, webpages moved to chaste legibility, a now eclipsing era when pretty much every gallery - blue chip to apartment - resembled each other democratically: washed of blitzing design, 2008: Facebook's rising militant pages nailing the coffin on the lurid heap of Myspace, the iPhone exiling Flash, and the year CAD launched its own suprematist site. Difficult to discern whether CAD started the trend for desaturated austerity or simply sensed what was in the air with Wade Guyton and subjectivityless painters, stripping the individuated gallery hands for a digital white cube. Hard to remember how difficult finding documentation had been, how gallery's websites were a diaspora of middling horror, how the feed hadn't yet become the dominant digital intake, before Instagram and Facebook ascended as the apex of artistic social conviviality, before all content had designed bingeablilty, in iPhone bereft darkness, the digital campfire of Contemporary Art Daily. Galleries took note, it seemed every gallery adopted the basic black and white that any html lackey could emulate. Cleanliness, order. Now, today, Splash Pages return (they never really went away for LA for whatever reason) and HTML 5 replaces flash, iPhone compatible. In 2008 it was a point of pride that anyone could make the paintings you were making and the websites showcasing them along with it, in 2017 paintings are colorful expressionistic, technical; paintings today look like the Myspace pages we had entombed, and our websites bloat along with them to prove they can. Top separate themselves from the imitations. It is not enough that the 10mb images load, we place an icon, a gesture to show we know they are loading, an ornament.
See too: Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, CAD