I may not have been looking in the right places, but I’ve yet to find an interactive experience that I really thought was amazing, to the point where I’d rank it alongside the world’s great works of music, visual arts, literature, and film. At best I’ve seen things that are interesting, but not a masterpiece. (That doesn’t mean there’s anything intrinsically wrong with the medium, of course.)

On the other hand, that interesting essay might be hard to publish in the Times.

I certainly would have liked it better as the essay. Imagine if it had started by saying, “There are some things that annoy me about interactive art — I’ve got a little list of them — and I found examples of all of them at the Cyberarts festival.” Sounds like a kind of negative piece, but a better one.

We could complain that she didn’t look at the good stuff, or complain that there is some mockable “old art is better” subtext in the article, or we could ask “is she right? are these aspects of digital artworks annoying?”

Not having seen these pieces, I can’t answer the question with reference to them, but I’ve certainly had annoyances with particular pieces of digital art (and some pieces of e-lit), so I think it’s interesting to see someone trying to define general categories of annoyance, with reference to particular works, in the short and unfootnoted form of a New York Times article.

I think there’s quite a bit of successful stuff in the Cyberarts festival this year. I suppose the reviewer didn’t have time or patience for a piece like Teri Rueb’s “Itinerant” which (gasp) takes as long to experience as a movie. Who would want to give so much time to that annoying interactive art stuff? Let’s pick a few pieces, give them 30 seconds each, and then make fun of them.