In the first part of this article, published last week, I forwarded a defense of digital art, which is sometimes criticized as not being “real” art at all. I will continue to do so here.
Another criticism of digital art is that it doesn’t have “texture,” just the smoothness of an ink jet printer. Digital art can be printed on nice art paper of course, but you cannot show an impasto-like painting with the thick paint.
But there are people experimenting with printers that will be able to show textures and some digital artists are using robots to paint with actual acrylic paints — so who knows. But of course, no print art, including prints of impasto paintings, can do so either.
People like originals and texture in painting, they say, but how many have seen the Mona Lisa in person, and how well can they actually see the texture behind the railing and the bulletproof glass? Most print art and illustration is digital these days, and I mean “most”; look at any gallery of contemporary illustrators, and you will find that over half, maybe more than three-quarters, are all done on Photoshop.
People also say that the Photoshop filters are too easy and fake, but they are copies — to start with at least — of the real camera filters used by the great early photographer like Steichen and Steiglitz and many others. Is photography not an art now? Only Ayn Rand seemed to think so, and I think for wrong reasons and for a lack of knowledge of it. They are also not easy to use, except in their simplest way — I combine hundreds of filters in many layers, sometimes more than 50 or so, and at that level, trust me, it is not easy or easy to copy as a technique.
My friend Artie says — rhetorically — “So if some 12-year-old plays around on the computer and comes up with something as good as a Picasso, is it in fact good art?” I would argue “yes,” of course, but a 12-year-old will not come up with something as good as a Picasso. At least the odds are against it.
But learned technique is not all in art. When Duchamp put a toilet on a gallery wall and signed it with the designer of the toilet’s name or when more recently in installation art or people signing copies of great artists’ work with their own signatures, they are asking valid — though no doubt aggravating — questions about what is “art.”
People are often impressed with what they cannot do — like in realistic painting. And when it is great, it is truly great, but how often is it in fact truly great? Why did Picasso and many other modern artists draw with their eyes closed and with the wrong head and even with there mouths and too often drunk or drugged, if not to “break through” simple “technique”?
Why did Dubuffet and other artists study the art of children and the mentally handicapped and even mad men if not for the search for a primordial glimpse of God and men and women and a desperate search for what is in fact the origins of “art”?
Digital art comes in many styles from fantasy and goth art to highly geometrical art to photo-realistic work to just using it as another “tool,” as I do in my own work. I draw on paper and use chalk and paint and physical collage, and photographs and found photos, and use other background work and use the computer usually as a camera to “scan” and make “layers” out of all of it and to fuse it all together into a single piece.
I could do that all photographically — if that is not a “trick” also — but it is simpler and faster on a computer. I do not even know how to do many simple things on the computer that many high school kids know; I use the computer and programs — they do not use me.
Notable artists in digital art, the Internet tells me, are James Faure Walker, Matthias Groebel, George Grie, Olga Kisseleva, John Lansdown, and I especially have found and enjoyed Joseph Nechvatal lately. There are many early digital explorers not mentioned here. Look up both computer and digital art on the Internet and explore more about it.
My friend Artie said to send my art — and he no doubt means my digital art — to the famed philosopher of art, Arthur Danto, to see if he liked my work. I don’t know if he would, of course, but the great digital artist Joseph Nechvatal was his student for years at Columbia University, so I bet he at least likes his work!
Art must reflect what is it to be a person in the period in history in which he or she lives. It would be odd that in a truly digital age where half of us, as I write this, are probably on digital phones, that artists spending from years to a half a century expressing their humanity in their work should no doubt be accepted as “artists” by future historians and anthropologists, but not by their contemporary viewers.
A famous psychologist by the name of Benoit was an early student of Zen Buddhism , and thought he gained from his studies. He was both approved of by some and approbated by others. I remember he said in his own defense something like “ I do not have to burn the Gospels to read Hui Neng,” and I say to others that I do not have to throw away my pencils and pastels and paintbrushes to enjoy exploring a modern invention of extreme genius — the genius of many! — that goes back to Leibniz’s great universal calculating machine.
Digital art is not easy and takes great skills — but don’t like it just for that reason. As art only, like it if it is in fact “great” work — great “art.” But if it is, be fair at least, and then do enjoy it!
Both art galleries and museums are starting to specialize in this sort of art and more will be doing so soon. Also there are cover stories on the major art journals.
So as they say on “Star Trek,” “boldly go where no [artist] has gone before.”
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