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| Author: jkarnes |
Date Posted: 01/23/03 |
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Napoleon, a Urinal, and Traction Control a Floating Torso:
An Exploration of The Validity of Digital Art, and Technology’s Role in
the Abolition of High/Low Artistic Classification
I am incredibly amused at the fact that I can have a computer in my microwave to cook my food, a computer in my car to control my traction, and a computer at work that controls… well, everything there. What’s more amusing, is the fact that with all of these technological advances, if I introduce a computer into my art making process, shit hits the fan. There is a stigma left over from days past that if it is not drawn, painted, or chiseled by hand out of a chunk of rock that took 20 slaves to carry, it’s not art. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is, or how much time you’ve spent on it; it’s just not art. Artists, more so than the general public, tend to feel very strongly about this. The most current fuel for this debate is an art movement that has taken the art world by storm: digital art.
Compared to chisel and rock, keyboard and monitor just do not seem to cut it in the eyes of many of today’s traditional artists. Digital art is considered a ‘low’ form of art. In other words, this art form is compared to the validity of children’s sketches on the bathroom wall in terms of expressive quality and technique, as well as things like ‘paint-by-number’ and comic books. Low art, in traditional terms, is absolutely not acceptable to the elite purveyors of high art; these people would rather pay millions of dollars for a photo realistic portrait painting of someone, or something, that they could go look at for themselves. Seems a little odd, but maybe I’m just not down with the latest trends in financial investment and laziness.
People claim that artistic creation by means of using a computer, or digital art, is low art either with mediocre reasoning, or just out of plain elitism/prejudice. I intend to show that digital art is indeed as valid as any other art form in existence, and that it has democratized the world of art by bridging the socioeconomic gap between high and low art. Through the investigation of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s ‘Napoleon on his Imperial Throne’ from the Neoclassical movement, ‘Fountain’ by Marcel Duchamp from the Dada movement, and one of Christopher Lee Donovan’s apparently untitled digital pieces (DeAnna_-_Floating_01.jpg) for the digital art movement, we will aim to compare digital art to past artistic experiences for signs of validity. Simultaneously, through exploration of the outdated nature of the classifications ‘high’ and ‘low,’ we will see just how evolution of creative thought has led to the extinction of these social boundaries.
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