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 4th 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 20th 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
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