Is that art – or can I delete it?
Everything is going digital – even art! Digital museums, art tours, 'paintings', galleries and markets. Yet an even bigger revolution is still in the making.
Last year David Hockney bought an iPad, though in 2008 already he had begun drawing on his iPhone, using the simple “Brushes” app popular with millions of users. He says convenience was part of what he liked about it, as it allows him to get started as soon as he wakes up, without having to grab a paintbrush and glass of water first.
But there’s something he likes as well about digital art itself – it glows. Glowing images! "On paper these pictures would lose the special glow that is their essential trait," says Thomas Borchert, commenting generally on the exhibition of Hockney’s digital iPad works entitled “Me Draw on iPad”, shown at the Louisiana Museum in the town of Humlebæk outside Copenhagen. That’s where we shot a video of Hockney in action drawing, in the museum café.
Hockney is neither the only nor the first artist to produce digital works. Yet he is definitely the most popular painter to unreservedly adopt this relatively new technology. Perhaps a revolution is underway?
Art works have always been bound up with application techniques and innovations, from the mixing of colors in Chauvet Cave (ever seen Werner Herzog’s movie?) on down to Pollock’s dripping method, the entire history of art is simultaneously a history of developments in materials and technique. The production (or reproduction) of art works is after all the result of techniques being reinvented, rediscovered, adapted or combined in new ways. These are what underlie aesthetic and technical concepts ranging from plain mimesis to idealized, reality-transcending truths, surrealism and abstraction. The relationship between image, copy and reality, as well as the basic function of art, are topics that can be examined independent of material techniques.
In a few years we can expect digital sculpture to be a sensation once 3D projection reaches the mass market. Admittedly, calling it all a revolution seems a bit of an exaggeration. There is however another new technique of artistic expression of a significance that is not to be underestimated, and is increasingly appreciated.
Hockney sends his digital works out to friends all over the world, sort of like sending out gift cards. He too says he hasn’t figured out a way to get paid for this, "But many of my friends enjoy them, and that’s all that matters. Just enjoy the exhibition.”
Mr. Hockney can evidently afford to work for free, while other artists are worried about getting their work into galleries at all, where they must be shown to attract any potential buyers. There is however an online auction house called startyourart that caters to the needs of these newcomers in the business, that provides unknown artists a marketing platform for selling their works. It’s founder Jenny Seul was looking to make art works accessible to a broader public: "I was always being approached by people who were interested in buying art, but just didn’t like going to art galleries,“ says Seul, “which typically have a sterile atmosphere, and you feel like you’re under constant surveillance there. The internet now allows prospective buyers to browse at their convenience, being able to search by specific criteria and budgetary constraints.”
Before the idealists get up in arms about the profaning and commercialization of art, we would like to point out that without a market there would be no art, and that a democratization process of lowering inhibitions does not spoil everything great about art, but rather may be a catalyst instead. Selling and valuation must be seen and recognized as a part of the creative process. In this as in many other markets, digital technology opens up entirely new distribution channels, which in turn influence production itself. These developments are no less significant that the impact of digitalization on photography. In a Debut article we introduced Edward B. Gordon, who sells one picture per day over the internet (LINK). An exhibition of hybrid analog/digital works by Thomas Zehnter is now open in Bochum, cleverly entitled "RezAPPte" in German, blending ‘formulas’ with the word ‘app’. All of the works on display are nothing but colored QR codes in large format – which can only be properly viewed via smartphone!
Thus not only the selling of art works but their displaying as well is undergoing change. Numerous art guide apps have effortlessly found a far wider audience than all art book publishing put together. Plain old websites like startyourart.de are capable of reaching many more people than any gallery can, though obviously they can only show pictures of pictures in their efforts to reach potential buyers. Artworks themselves are becoming more mobile as well. "In older days they had frescoes on ceilings, then pictures on canvas or wood became enormously popular due to their movability. Today we have apps that make art more mobile than ever before in history," says Peter Weibel, Director of the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, which gave out the first-ever App Awards this year. Frescoes will easily last for several hundred years, but how long does digital art endure? New display devices keep being developed at an ever-increasing rate that alter the displaying of earlier formats, so as to almost certainly render them unusable within the next twenty to thirty years. But we’re not there yet. Right now we are looking at an innovation that raises the question of 'what do we want to keep anyway?' Monitors now display all kinds of digital and analog art to new audiences, while a startup company called art.sy is working on changing our perception of what art even is.
The site "art.sy" integrates into the art world the e-commerce tactic of "People interested in this item also bought...” (it is kind of amazing that some heads-up supermarket manager hasn't come up with idea of tacking this message onto store shelves). Here’s how it works: You query art.sy using a photograph of an art work. An algorithm then identifies similar works and recommends them to the viewer based on a set of more than 550 characteristic units – image morphemes or distinctive art semes – are attributed to each artwork. At art.sy they think of these as 'art genes'. art.sy uses these art genes to conduct a form of recommendation marketing that could have more impact on the art market than simple distribution websites, by utilizing the same selection mechanisms that the market itself is organized around. Just like a hundred years ago, what art is and what is considered valuable is determined as much by gallery owners and critics as by artists and the public. art.sy could thus come to function as a new and highly effective mechanism for shaping tastes, which is accessible to everyone. In the age of technical producibility and reproducibility, rather than the art work itself it is art tastes that will likely have greater effect than any technical changes in medium or distribution. The question here is how we perceive art and what our understanding of it is, and this is determined in a kind of negotiation process. Voilà – the revolution.
Photos © Kevin Nellies / flickr