DEMOCRATIZNG ART

In the western world, it took a revolution  of great blood and gore to make art accessible to the common citizen. Today the quiet revolution of digital technology is opening up new ground not just making art more accessible but allowing more people to become artists.

The Louvre Palace once home to kings, opened as a public art gallery during the French Revolution in 1793. Art that was commissioned by the Church or Royalty, became the heritage of all of society. The common man had the crafts, and folk music to aestheticize their lives. Art gradually filtered into everyday life.

Art has always been quick to appropriate new technologies and new materials. From at least the 4^th C BC, artists have used devices such as the camera obscura , perspective frames, the camera lucida, availed of progress in science such as the development of synthetic colours for the textile industry, the invention of acrylic paints, the printing press, the still camera , the movie camera, and now the computer and the internet.

Art has always also had its finger on the pulse of society. When mass production created an urban mass culture, pop art emerged, using graphics of advertising and commerce and accessing wider audiences.  Happenings and art performances, followed the rebellious youth cultures of the Beat generation and the Hippies.

Perceiving art as an exclusive activity still holds its ground, galleries still exist, art auction houses have a booming business, the unique nature of an art work is still sought, and the reproduction of John Constable’s  Hay Wain on chocolate boxes, or the Mondrian inspired design on L’Oreal shampoo  is often perceived as a dumbing down of culture, or as some believe, the revenge of the proletariat against the excluding space of High Art.

Andy Warhol broke with tradition using the technology of commercial mass production of images.  However, the work was still editioned, its value maintained and one had still to visit an art gallery to see it.

Then arrived the poster reproductions of artists’ works, with companies advertising ‘ Choose from over 500,000 artists’. Everyone could now afford to have a Matisse on their kitchen wall. These were however low quality reproductions, and it was hoped it would encourage people to visit art museums to see the original.

As digital technology took over the world in the last decade of the 20^th Century the quality of reproductions developed to the extent that it is difficult for the viewer to distinguish between the real and the reproduction. The Getty Foundation  prepared a 100 billion-pixel digital version of Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb on line while the original was being restored. It allows museums  to display perfect reproductions of fragile works that normally would only be shown a few months at a time.

Many  Art Museums  have put their collections on line, even inviting `viewers to comment on the works,  bringing chatter to what Andre Malraux called “ the Voices of Silence”. Just as the radio brought concerts into the working class home after WWI, the internet brings the art onto our laptops and broadens the base of art lovers.

Scholars can pour over a detailed digital image of a famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa, instead of through jostling crowds and from behind a glass. One can virtually ‘walk’ through caves with fragile prehistoric art that are closed to the public. One does not have to spend time and money to travel to the Prado or the Louvre to see a work of art, its available for free on one’s laptop or mobile device.  Struggling artists can share and sell their work online. Buyers also have more choice of purchase by visiting gallery and artist websites.

Thomas Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says “Every generation has to find the right modes of communication, and if it helps open doors it’s a good thing.”

Using intangibles to produce art is not new. Video art, sound pieces, art performances and happenings have been around for almost a century.

What is new today,is that not only do more people have access to viewing art, but digital technology allows them to produce creative work, regardless of whether they have ever been to art school, or trained as an artist.  One often hears a regretful voice saying I would love to have been an artists but I can’t draw to save my life.  A digital camera, Adobe Creative Suite, a  laptop and a pen tablet  can fix that. The net is filled with examples. Not all of it is art just as not all writing is poetry, but digital technology and the internet, has opened up new possibilities.

One can divide work into art shared through new technology but shown in real spaces, and art generated by digital technology that only exists in virtual space. At the intellectual end of these may be Jeffrey Shaw, a pioneering new media artist whose immersive artworks use  digital technology, or the painting robot, Vertwalker,  created by artists Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas, and  at the playful end there may be the many creative often irreverent commentaries and images that find their way onto facebook , Instagram or Snapchat .

Is this a new urban folk culture? A new dastan goi or virtual graffiti? The internet is free, often iconoclastic, a shared space for constant cultural commentary, and can be, as the author Melissa Langdon suggests, anti-ownership, sometimes even anti authorship, certainly a less intimidating spaces to experience art.

There is a cautionary side to this fairytale: technology changes, become obsolete, or deteriorates. Would we expect it to last a 100 years?  Or as long as cave art made 30,000 years ago?

Durriya Kazi

April 2017