Around the time of Donald Trump’s accession to the American Presidency, internet culture underwent heavy scrutiny by analysts and critics who ventured to explain how wild trolling, anonymity, and neo-reactionary trends facilitated the ideological Reign of trumpism. In this fashion, post-internet aesthetics and, namely, the multifarious genre referred to as “post-internet art” was targeted by heavy criticism depicting it as complicit in the “post-fascist” zeitgeist.  Art’s absorption of online reality, alongside its occasional accelerationist ethos of embracing online “alienation” was soon seen as a stigma against art’s very own mimetic habitus. Some critics invited their readers to practice cultural resistance against the “ideological quicksand” of the internet and its aesthetics alerting them to the “sociopathy” of the mid-2010s internet culture. Artistic practices that employ mimicry to instigate open and ambiguous re-interpretations of reality were outlined as socially dangerous, or “sadistic”. By labelling the sum of such practices as “affirmative”, those critics called for a return to negation, refusal, or sincerity as necessary aesthetic re-orientation. In this presentation I will argue that this particular criticism against post-internet art hides a deeper fear of mimesis that, actually, facilitates the colonization of an entire debate by the Alt-Right. Drawing from the experiences of Greek art and curating produced in the years of the financial crisis, I argue that art’s entanglement in post-digital peripheries poses no neat choices between affirmation and negation, necessitating the introduction of more hybrid and dialectic understanding of art’s social meaning.

Kostis Stafylakis (b. 1977, Athens, GR) is a visual artist, art theorist and curator with a PhD in political science from Panteion University, Athens. He graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts and he also holds an MA in Art Theory and an MA in Continental Philosophy from the University of Essex. He experiments with how mimetic adaptation can accommodate ambivalence, impurity, and dissent. His recent solo show was ‘Chloroquine Juggalo’ at KEIV Athens (2021) and his recent two-person show was Readiness: Civil War at Panke Gallery, Berlin (2022). His artistic activity includes participations at Prepper Paradise, Bureau Europa, Maastricht (2022), Toxicfest, Tick Tack Antwerpen (2021), Enter: New Commissions by Onassis Foundation (2020), et.al. He was co-curator of the 6th Athens Biennale ANTI, the 4th Athens Biennale AGORA, et.al. He has published various essays on the junction of contemporary art with the Political, in anthologies and journals. He has been Artistic Director of ViZ Laboratory for Visual Culture. He currently teaches at the Future Art Education program by Lab12/ASFA and the post-graduate program of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Western Macedonia. www.kostisstafylakis.com