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While the terminology of style has all but disappeared from recent art critical and art historical discourse, artistic practice in the last decades has increasingly focused on the stylistics of the social environment - the way in which every aspect of life is emphatically formed, designed, and stylized. In On the Style Site. Art, Sociality, and Media Culture, Ina Blom argues that this development calls for a new reading of the relationship between art and the "question of style," one that approaches style not just as an art historical tool or method of explanation but as a social site in which the relations between appearance and social identity are negotiated.
The artworks discussed in this book treat style as precisely such a site, and could therefore be discussed in extension of what are generally known as "site-specific practices" in art. However, the style site works may allow for a different interpretation of the politics of such artistic practices, as well as place the life-art ideal of the 20th century avant-gardes in a new light. Such reinterpretation becomes possible as the negotiations of the contemporary style site are related to the significance of style in an information economy increasingly set on capturing the forces of life itself.
Ina Blom is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and is also active as an art critic.
