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02/26/2009: "Art in the Digital World"
Just by merely reading this blog, or participating in the numerous ways Absolute Arts makes is possible, you are entwined in the digital world of art. In some ways, there is nothing real about the ethereal bits and bytes that make up any Web site, art or otherwise. If anything, when you think about it, how it happens is surreal.
Right now, you and I are having a pleasant communication interlude with you at your leisure and me at mine, all courtesy of the World Wide Web with many thanks to Tim Berners-Lee. And, the course of this communication is exemplary of how the digital world and art interact. What we have all come to take for granted in the span of 15 years regarding the Internet and how it affects us all is nothing short of amazing. Personally, I’m thrilled to be alive at a time when all this is possible and when all the possibilities digital everything creates is nothing short of wonderful and truly astounding.
As with many, if not most aspects of life, art and the digital world intersect all over the place. Take for example the emerging body of seriously fine and respectable digital art. Some not so long ago would not consider any art made digitally to be “real” art, and there are, I’m sure, plenty of naysayers today too. Then there are the near ubiquitous digital fine art reproductions, which are still widely known by the giclée moniker. A relatively new development is how many green minded artists seeking to reduce their carbon footprint are turning to the wonders of products such as the wondrous Wacom Cintiq 21UX tablet to either work up sketches and ideas before turning to canvas or moving through a finished product.
How much interest in digital art is there? If the sales of Marilyn Sholin’s new book, The Art of Digital Photo Painting are any indication. It’s huge. Her book has sold out numerous times at Amazon.com because the printer has not been able to keep up with demand. In stark contrast to nearly every Web site with a forum that allows virtually anyone with an email address to join, her www.digitalpaintingforum.com has more than 2,000 loyal paying members.
With photography gone nearly exclusively to digital, and the continual improvement of marvelous tools such as Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop, there becomes more common ground between artists who seek create visual images with diverse backgrounds, including photographers and graphic artists. I’ve talked about it here and on my Art Print Issues blog. The name that seems the most descriptive and honest to me about the output from the melding of technology and art on this level is Convergence Media.
Like most ideas, Convergence Media conveniently refers to and borrows from another established term, mixed-media. When so much is possible with digital manipulation and so many tools available to enhance an artist’s eye and hand, the notion of convergence art makes sense to me. Perhaps it will to you as well. Either way, please join and enliven the debate here.
Digital life in the arts has taken on all sorts of permutations. There were a large number of artists who managed to forge a career, or at least a profitable part-time income using eBay. Pioneers there such as Natasha Wescoat have moved on to greener pastures and wider national and international exposure. But, what they learned there gave them the platform, knowledge and confidence to grow their art careers. Sites such as Absolute Arts that use their own unique comprehensive means to helping artists and collectors connect have continued to thrive and grow in importance in bringing their core constituent artists and art devotees along with them.
Art.com has risen to become the single largest seller of art worldwide, albeit primarily posters. Although it is a private company, there are still reports from its pre-IPO stages a few years back indicating sales of $30 million annually. That is a lot of paper borne art, even if sales include framed as a finished product. Volume like that made it the number one customer for virtually every fine art poster publisher around the globe. It too helped fuel the rise of certain popular artists there. And, for better or worse, it is just one of many macro factors that have permanently changed the face of the art print market.
Today, Art.com has numerous competitors seeking to take a bite of its market share. Last year, Etsy.com, which had its initial focus on the indie artist handmade crowd jumped into the flat art field with the acquisition of online art site Imagekind.com. It also garnered headlines in the business press with a whopping $27 million round of financing.
There also is EBSQart.com, Boundless Gallery, Red Bubble, Yessy to mention just a few that seek carve out an established Internet presence. While these sites tend to skew more towards the scale of decorative arts that can range from lower and medium price originals to giclées and prints, the quality of the work found on them is often delightfully original and excellent. They are on a much different path and don’t fairly compare to sites such as Absolute Arts when it comes to pricier originals, sculpture and providing a robust online art experience that includes depth in scale of art and art information, news and blogs, etc. This is not a value judgment on other sites as I believe there is a definite need and a place for art at all price points.
Digital artists need and deserve to be taken seriously. Certainly, Absolute Arts has helped the cause. It regularly features blog posts by the talented and thoughtful digital artist Brad Michael Moore. It featured this post in March 2007, "Digital Art 2007/ A Conversation With Don Archer" by Bruce Price. It is a piece worth re-visiting as it skillfully reveals through great questions the incisive thinking of Don Archer’s fertile brain.
In 20 years of attending art shows, the places and events tend to run together in one’s mind, or at least in mine. But, there are moments of lucidity and clarity in remembering meeting some people, seeing their art and marveling at their creativity and vision. Such an encounter was with Bonny Lhotka. As best I can recall, it was at an ArtExpo show in Los Angeles, but it could have been any number of other venues too.
While the venue is hazy, the impression I received was strong and rung a clarion like response in me. That is, it left me knowing I had seen the future, and I liked it. This was perhaps 1995, in the Stone Age of the Internet. Bonny was exhibiting digital works by herself and her co-founding partners, Dorothy Krause and Karin Schminke, of the digital artist collaborative known as the Digital Atelier®. It conducts research on digital imaging for fine art application.
I recall not only be amazed at what these artists were accomplishing, but how they were collaborating over long distances. We take such things for granted now, back then, it was way off the radar of common business practice, even in the arts. Though it was a long way off, well before the term giclée was coined, I sensed something special about what Bonny was doing. Not just that the art in itself was intrinsically beautiful and interesting, but also that it portended things to come.
Since at the time I was tethered to an old-fashioned “that’s the way we have always done it” management and source of income, I had to be satisfied as an interested onlooker rather than one who could help speed along the awareness of the awesome potential digital represented. In other words, I was chagrined at not being able to put resources I knew would help to work for the cause of digital art. When you have seen the future, you can’t go back.
And, of the dozens of people who worked on Decor magazine and it tradeshows, I was the only person to show real curiosity and enthusiasm for digital art then. Now everyone else who worked on magazine and shows has left the art business. They are long gone while I find myself more curious and enthused about the prospects for digital art and the digital world than ever.
If you haven’t given digital art much thought, or have just stopped being in wonderment about how the constant evolution of technology, which is of course, all digital, then perhaps now would be a good time to take it all in. If the geeky, magnanimous philanthropist owner of the Magna Carta, the Corbis library of stock photo and lord of a 20,000 square foot mansion could have the vision long, long ago that art digitally displayed would make a unique statement that would also inform, entertain and educate his family, visitors and himself can be rightly considered a trend spotter, then the future of digital art is safe.
That is to say if Bill Gates was able to grasp the importance and usefulness of digital art so long ago, then we can hope his influence can help fuel the groundswell of growing interest in digital art, aka Convergence Media. The movement could have worse patron saints.
Barney Davey
www.artprintissues.com
