I'd like to preface this with a warning- there are probably going to be things said here that you don't like. I ask that you let them sit with you before you get angry- I only ask that you think about them, not that you agree.
Who am I to say these things?
I have somewhat of an uncommon position here on social media in the digital art space. I've been practicing digital art seriously for more than 10 years now. In that time, I've also gone to college and gotten my degree in media studies- where I learned about the making and history of fine arts, film, and also of digital media. This education also exposed me to the more technical side of digital media in coding and creating programs.
Even with all that, I've ended up in IT. I wanted to go into visdev, or the games industry, but my art wasn't good enough for it and I didn't have the portfolio to go anywhere. Furthermore, I've never had a considerable presence on social media, which is the primary way I show my art.
So maybe I'm just a hater, who can say. /shrugs
John Berger and You (roughly)
One of the things I learned in school was that art- physical art- has a weight to it. Berger discusses it in the (only?) chapter I've read in Ways of Seeing. Berger didn't write in the time of computers- or at least, not in the time of the internet. Instead he discusses photography and film, and their ability to replicate works of art. As far as I know, this was in response to a different writer's views, but the essay provokes a question- is the reproduction a valid way to experience the art? What, if anything, is lost in the translation to film? (This is really paraphrasing as it's been a while since I've read it- probably bad academics but this is Cohost okay, not some sort of publication.)
On the one hand, famous works of art only exist in one place at a time (generally). They get paywalled by private collections, hidden away in museums, or destroyed to disasters, malfeasance, or time. There is a lot to be said about the accessibility in the distribution of reproductions. People can experience something- even if it is a lesser version of something- where they wouldn't have ever had the chance to otherwise. Accessibility of art is, I think, not a particularly reviled opinion these days.
On the other hand, the experience is different in-person. There is a value to seeing it at its rightful scale- being able to approximate the artists hand as the brushstrokes would have been placed. Many times, fine art relies on the viewer being in the room with it, as scale and physical proportion have meaningful connotations behind them. A lot of art doesn't work when replicated by any means. I don't think this is a good argument for not making replicas more available, but I think the weight of a piece's physicality is lost in the replication, and very little can be done to mitigate that.
The concept of originality extends from this knowledge. There is only one original mona lisa, and the experience of that original is inherently different from any of its replicas. (With the understanding that editions/series exist, and that forgeries are their own can of worms that I won't get into now) From this, we can pretty safely extrapolate that originals have value and that the original experience is desirable.
The Paradox of Digital Art
With the rise of AI, the draw of talking about NFTs has gone down drastically. Putting aside the ecological implications, the driving force behind minting art on the blockchain is in itself kind of fascinating in a way I don't think the online art community fully touched. The impetus to minting art as a NFT is to create an original from something that theoretically doesn't have one.
Yes, there are working files, there are full resolution versions, there are unwatermarked versions that act as an original for digital art. However, these measures are superficial in a world where lossless transmission is readily available. Everyone, for the most part, is able to get the original experience simultaneously. Digital art has incredible plasticity- you can view it from multiple devices, in multiple places at the same time. You can zoom in until you see the barest pixels, and thanks to the internet, you can share that experience exactly with others.
Some hairsplitters may bring up differences in color calibration on viewing devices, the difference between looking at something on their phone and looking at it on their monitor, or other environmental factors that may lead to differences in experience. To them I say that compared to photographs, scans, or videos of a physical work, art that is born-digital is experienced the same by everyone. (Probably a conversation for another time).
To some, the prospect of rough equality in access between all viewers of your work is exciting- it's a huge boon, what you see is what you get. To others- usually those who are outside of digital art spaces- that replicability degrades digital art to nothing. We've all heard the "oh digital art isn't art, you just press a button and it makes the art for you," "the computer does all the hard work." It's easy to write this off as people willfully misunderstanding what we do -usually it is- but entertain the thought with me for a bit.
One of the advantages of physicality in art is that there is a level of scrutiny to which the pieces typically stand. You can look closely to see the brushstrokes. You can notice ink bleeding or inconsistent registration. You can see the depressions on a page where someone has rested their hand or tool. In school I learned these are examples of indexicality, a complex and somewhat silly word for evidence that a thing exists -usually physically. These traces are lost in replications (of course there are exceptions but this is true for most things) and are what makes an original experience so different.
For digital art, indexicality to real life is impossible. There are no fingerprints, no stray brush hairs, no minute clues that it was made by a physical human hand, save for how the artist decides to leave their mark. It sacrifices this for a consistent original experience. I believe there is a strong link between this lack of physical indexicality and the general homogenization of digital art over the years. Everyone gets the same experience, so those details of the artist's hand aren't nearly as important. A piece of digital art is simply an image, an idea, wrested from a physical context.
Trends Toward Singularity
Those of you who have followed me across platforms know my hatred for photorealism as a visual genre- especially digital photorealism. To me, they're not final pieces, they're studies, and likely plagiarized (but again, that's another post entirely). One of the things that drives me up a wall is that in nearly 100% of cases of digital photorealism, the piece already exists as a photo. If your photorealism was perfect, it is indistinguishable from something that already exists. The explicit goal is to make it look like something that already exists (or sometimes, something that could exist with some deft photobashing and color editing).
Physical applications of photorealistic technique at least have the advantage of scale, and again, that physical indexicality, but digital? If your photorealism looks exactly like a photo, who am I to believe it isn't just a photo? Who is anyone to believe you? You've effectively erased yourself from your own art and I for one will not be buying it, no thank you.
As time goes on and technology becomes better and better, so too do the little vestiges of the human hand become easier to replicate. First it was filters to make photos look like they had brushstrokes, now it's generative AI. At the same time, what was expected of good digital art became more and more widespread- pieces that smoothed out lines and brushstrokes to look seamless, particular types of stylization gained attention and therefore gained attraction. What people wanted became more and more uniform from social pressure and that from the industry. Stylistic originality was either squashed by being unappealing to these new standards, or subsumed by them.
I'd be remiss not to mention the driving force of capitalism. How can ideas take hold if we're not sold on them, after all? Anything not profitable is not worth exploring, especially so if you are dependent entirely on your work. The individual cannot afford to deviate from what sells, and the industry will not deviate because of greed. Capitalism is the churn, forcing ideas to homogeneity. It is not, therefore, surprising that genAI has taken off the way it has.
All this time, we've been drawing ourselves out of our work. It was only a matter of time until the work made itself.
On Art and Images (a.k.a. the controversial part)
All this time, I want the art community to ask itself, what were we making? Were we actually making art?
People talk about art as a form of self-expression all the time. Art is like breathing, it's like humming a tune to yourself, it's thinking put into a different form. Why is it, though, that we feel so differently looking at something in a museum? Surely the context makes a difference, and even if I'd had the chance, I wouldn't dare put a sketch out in a museum. If I wanted people to see my work in a place where people go to learn, to experience it in a setting specifically made to facilitate concentration on the work itself, what would I choose?
To me? I'd want to share something that says something. It's not that my sketches or personal works don't have value, it's that they're for me. They're little ditties I sing to myself. They're conversations I have in the mirror, or with my friends. They're a long discussion with someone about their OC in the case of commissioned works. If you're going out on stage to do a ted talk to hundreds of people who take you seriously, surely you wouldn't just talk off the top of your head.
Social media has a weird problem of being at once very personal and very public. There are no boundaries between you and other people, and also you cannot perceive the other people who do interact with you. This sense of intimacy, the easy replication and consummate commodification of digital art, none of it lends itself to a setting where one feels obligated to say something important. So... for the most part we don't.
Art becomes just images. The intention behind the human hand is gone.
But what if it was art again?
One thing I want to impress upon people getting into art these days is that only you can make the work you make. Aside from physical violence, nobody can take that away from you. Your art is your own, your intentions are your own.
A machine may be able to make images, but it can't make art. It especially can't make your art. You control the conversation. You control the parameters, and what traces of yourself you put into your work. Hiding our humanity and striving for a perfection that capitalism has decided the rules on has got us into trouble. The only true way out, individually at least, is to take what you control, and make it yours.
