Part two of some, which seem to be slightly rambly. Oh well. Better out than in.
Before I get going here, let’s just take a minute out to think about the image creators of the world. I’m not talking about painters, or any other type of specific mileau, but rather just the general act of creating images in itself, from your imagination. That’s what most people consider to be art.
That act of creation – whether by putting pen to paper, or by Cory Doctow’s pixel-stained peasants – is so important to the artistic industries. It’s the baseline idea of what art should be for so many people, that the idea of being an artist is tied to the stereotype of the painter in his garret. Even some artists fall into this ontological trap: I want to be an artist, therefore I shall be a painter, because that means that I will be making images.
For me, painting is a dead form, as much in need of protection as coppicing or any other medieval technology superseded by better, modern technology. Whilst painting could hang on well into the twentieth century, it’s last great gasp came just before the widespread introduction of television into households. It didn’t matter what Clement Greenberg wrote then, because compared to “I Love Lucy” or “Mr. Ed” all paintings are remote and detached.
A painting can still be beautiful, of course, but there are many other ways to make a beautiful image. Contemporary art galleries have created the term giclee, to describe a technique of printing computer images on canvas. This term is completely made up, engineered to lull the purchaser of these images that it’s okay to buy what amounts to a fancy print-out, because it’s art in the capitalised Fine Art sense.
And it’s that idea of a Fine Art, made by Fine Artists like Painters, that really confuses things. Personally – and bear in mind that this entire series of short writings is all from my personal perspective – every time I meet somebody who describes themselves as a painter, I worry. Usually that person is carrying around the sort of mental baggage that allows them to think that they are important, that the act of image creation via paint is somehow more worthy, and that their work is somehow worth more than their contemporaries.
In the digital world, this is not so. This has been proven for around the last five years, cohesively, determinably, repeatedly. All information can be copied, and even if it doesn’t want to be free (as the early hackers claimed), it must be moved. Visual information is a rich source of inspiration for us all – something we can’t help, owing to our hunting processes built into us.
Anybody who places themself apart from this new paradigm of information flow, or (mistakenly) sets themself above it, will find that events will happily take place without them. For a while, they’ll be able to sit back and reap the rewards of their pre-internet behaviour, but even as they do their impenetrable castle’s are going to start being undermined.
Suddenly I feel like this writing has turned into political polemic about the new age of an internet of things. I’m not heading in that direction though; this was just a detour, setting some groundwork before we can talk about the aforementioned raft that supports artistic economy and endeavour.
This was slightly delayed and altered by my supercold – this past few days have seen me become a pink-and-green snot making machine. Eurgh. Next up, I really will get to the ideas I talked about in the first part.
