In the old times, an artist would
create in his studio, then he would find an institution to exhibit his
artwork, would possibly get the recognition he felt he deserved, maybe
find a patron willing to invest in his future career, have his artwork
sold, acquire a following and so on. This is the traditional scheme of
things, which some might say it still applies nowadays in its basic
structure, but somehow, it feels more complicated than this, and it has
become difficult to define a universally valid pattern of how things
should be working. The outline seems to have changed tremendously in the
last decades, due to new developments which occur on a daily basis and
which have modified the paradigm and the dynamic of the relationship
between the artist and the art consumer. The most important phenomenon
is definitely the ascent of the internet that allows effortless
circulation of information, and has also produced an entirely new
medium. Nowadays, we live in a world in permanent evolution due to the
technological breakthroughs, and sometimes innovation surfaces in more
places simultaneously; as a result, artwork is more than ever shaped
with the permanent obsession of originality. The gender separation
between different art forms does not exist so blatantly any more,
because everything is transmitted through the same media and in fact,
even the gap between objective reality and its effigies has become more
elusive than ever.
Another issue that has ascended to the forefront is that we live in an
age of extreme diversity, where artists have the option to orient
themselves towards a larger variety of media, while also exploiting to
the maximum the traditional and established ones. Although the subject
matters still stem from a combination of factors, either personal
experience, an interpretation of the meaningful social issues, a flight
from the overwhelming Big Brother reality or exploiting it critically by
means of cultural quotes, there is much more to be said about the
plethora of factors that have influenced the development of art trends
nowadays. Perhaps as never before, one can notice that the centralized
identity model of an artist is subjected to intense erosion due to the
constant bombardment of information. An artistic trend develops, grows
old and ends up in the same depository with yesterday’s and tomorrow’s
trends. We live in a frenzy of last moment information, 5-minute
celebrity, live war and life spent online, shared by millions of users,
and contemplation is rarely possible. The user is not necessarily
unhappy with the offer and responds to the stimuli every time the ads
are on, and the result may be an overwhelming saturation. What applies
to other fields of our daily lives is also of importance for the type of
artwork we choose, or we are exposed to, and the extreme variety is only
making any attempt to classify and judge more difficult than ever.
Artists often regard their
artwork as a free projection of a personal feeling, but they have to
shape their style in competition with others, with the wish to be
unique. The power of this originality is intensely eroded by a flood of
ads, fashion images and others.
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More recently, style and
personal information, in the new communication paradigm, have become
information packets, valid for short periods of time, and then rapidly
ejected from the system as redundant. Everything is transmitted
using the same digital code, and art can materialize all over the world
simultaneously. The Renaissance paradigm of the unique, artist-defined
perspective to be perceived by the art consumer seems to elude more than
ever a clear definition. The artist and the art consumer are not
necessarily the origin and the destination any more; they become just
turning points in the complex informational flow.
There are still numerous artists that use the
traditionally established media, such as painting or sculpture, to
convey their vision of the world. Their artwork has a craft component
which cannot be ignored: in order to produce an artistic object, a
certain set of actions have to be understood and performed, and the
desired result can be obtained only after mastering the craft aspect.
And then, there is the other category, the artists who have rapidly
incorporated, albeit in a transitional manner, the new media, namely the
computer as a tool of artwork creation.
They still use as a referent the real world, and attempt to depict in a
representational manner what they perceive as important from the
surrounding environment, but their tools are not the brush or the pencil
anymore, but computer software which helps, by means of a limited set of
preset choices, to express their personal vision. Why in a transitional
manner? Namely because they have only switched from using one set of
tools to another set, which are more modern and which, in a way, level
the playing field. If before, one had to master the technique, nowadays,
the ideas can be put in practice if one has access to a computer and the
appropriate software. The result of their artistic pursuit is still an
object though, which can be printed or rendered tri-dimensional by means
of a printer of a rapid prototyping machine.
Now more than ever, in the age of diversity and permanent change, when
we can have a hard time choosing from one hundred kinds of shampoo in
the drugstore, it is necessary if not to operate categorization, to
document the phenomenon and put together a catalogue, either as an
orientation for the art public, or simply, such as in this case, to
inventory the variety of art forms and individual creations and/or
trends that are endlessly moving in front of our eyes. Due to the ascent
of the internet, more and more artists have chosen this as their
primordial means of showing the public what is going on, and anthologies
such as this serve a higher purpose, namely to document an elusive
phenomenon and bring to the fore artists who can thus understand more
how their individual creations shape the world we all live in, what is
the responsibility of a creative consciousness, and where they stand in
the grander scheme of things.
© Dana Altman
New York, 2006
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