CONTRIBUTIONS Installation Art: Image and Reality Charles Bestor University of Massachusetts Installation art occupies an odd and uniquely ambivalent position in the hierarchy of contemporary artistic disciplines. It is very much in the public eye and ear these days. Virtually every museum and gallery in any major artistic center has one exhibit that purports to be an example of installation art, yet no one is quite sure what installation art really is. As this is my first contribution to this journal, I have leafed through its back issues to find earlier articles on the subject and have come across virtually none that deal directly with installation art, even though such art almost invariably includes a computer-related component. I found that absolutely none deal with installation art in anything but the most technical terms; that is, none deal with installation art as an art, and not simply as an applied technology. This may of course be inevitable when one talks and writes about an art form that is essentially non-verbal in content. We tend to concern ourselves less with what we are seeing and hearing, and with the ways in which these things matter to us, than we do
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