Art By Another Name: Neen

An artist asks his community to help come up with a name for computer art. Later he asks a corporate-branding expert for help. But not all new media artists are that keen on Neen. Marisa S. Olson reports from New York.

NEW YORK -- New media art has a brand new name: Neen.

Artist Miltos Manetas was frustrated by the lack of appropriate terms his community had developed to describe his work, so he started the Name for Art project earlier this year.

Manetas said critics and art historians, not artists, have generally named art movements, citing the Renaissance, and the Baroque and Impressionist movements as examples.

"Artists usually do nothing but observe and represent. Sometimes, though, when reality is not inspiring enough, you need to push it." Manetas said he asked corporate branding firm Lexicon to get involved because the artist community failed to come up with a successful name.

Manetas approached Lexicon, hoping that the group responsible for inventing such monikers as Pentium, PowerBook, Compaq, and AirTouch could deliver a term more insightful and creative than "contemporary" or "Net" art.

"Names are rock and roll: They bring friends to the party," Manetas said via e-mail.

The name, which intentionally rhymes with "screen," was revealed at a New York city press conference Wednesday. Other finalists included. "Telic" and "Esc."

"'Neen' transcends art. It's more a state of mind than a form or school of art," said Lexicon CEO David Placek.

"The screen is becoming ubiquitous, we can make art for it and we can play games on it. It's this transcendent thing that entertains us," Placek said. He hopes that artists will quickly adopt the Neen moniker, appropriating the term in their own way.

"I've often wished for a better name for my work," said Internet artist Erik Loyer. "There are so many vocabulary problems in the medium that it becomes tough to discuss anything in common terms." But Loyer thinks creating an artificial name is not the best course of action.

"My gut reaction is that a corporate entity should not be responsible for the name. Frankly, I would be surprised if it took hold," said Loyer.

New media artist Jon Winet agreed. "There is something somewhat grotesque about this, as it seems like an inversion of how cultural movements should evolve. Ideally, things would evolve from the bottom up, being developed organically by artists and technologists, not a company with focus groups."

Winet called the project "a brilliant example of the power of the dot com environment." Winet concedes that trying to resolve the lack of a unifying identity for computer-based art has some merits.

He said it is symptomatic of the art world's difficulty with finding a place for this type of work. Developing a name, he thinks, is a sign that a hybrid arts/engineering/corporate culture is developing.

Glen Helfand, curator and freelance art critic, thinks that Name for Art is a great conceptual project because its industry roots give it more cultural capital.

By contrast, Matthew Mirapaul, the online arts columnist for The New York Times called the project "the same kind of conceptual endeavor that so many other of today's new media artists are engaged in. It's amusing, but it's unlikely that any sort of new coinage cooked up as a conceptual exercise will take hold."

"Rarely has an assignment been so engaging," recalls Placek, who has never taken an art course. "We are a stronger company creatively because we worked on this assignment."

Placek said Lexicon learned more about name creation and branding from artists and architects than the marketing world. Placek said Lexicon had previously hired consultants for studies of the work and vocabulary of Frank Lloyd Wright and Paul Cezanne.

While four Lexicon staff members were chiefly responsible for coming up with the Name for Art candidates, the final choice was Manetas' and he is very pleased with Neen. "This is about philosophy and surface: It's completely superficial but it also gives you a simulation of a philosophical notion.

"A good name for art precedes the art world. It becomes information about time. It gives a connotation of the visual but also of the psychological landscape. A name is like an artificial island: You step on it for a while and you search the horizon."