A recent issue of ArtNews featured a Russian artist said to be pursuing "a digital aesthetic." His works, it turns out, are "pixel-based paintings of art-historical classics." Why does digital art need to refer to anything historical? What's the point? Digital is the unpredictable present and the unseen future. Let's see where that goes. At the start of the 20th century, intellectuals hailed the beauty of the machine. This philosophy was called Machine Aesthetics. (What the intellectuals actually loved was the sleek aerodynamic surface of the racing car or ocean liner, not the dirty engine or dangerous boiler.) At the start of the 21st century, we are entering an unexpected new chapter in Machine Aesthetics. Now there's no beauty on the surface, as the computer can be in a cardboard box or hidden in the wall. The beauty is deep within the silicon chips that enable computers to perform a billion calculations a second. Digital art can be understood as Machine Aesthetics Act II (the Inner Beauty). Digital art can be used to replicate traditional media and to represent traditional subjects--e.g. to paint a flower or a nude. Brilliant work will be done in this direction. But why use this exciting new medium in old-fashioned ways? Avant-garde thinking suggests: this new kind of machine (the computer) should be used to create new kinds of art. How do they do it? Hard to say. Even digital artists can't always tell how other digital artists achieve their effects. There's trade secrets and luck and even unexplainable, unrepeatable results. In an odd way, digital art of today is like glass blowing in Venice in, say 1800, when every glass blower had personal secrets and techniques. This mystery is part of the fun in digital art. But don't be intimidated. If you don't like the art, it's bad. If you like it, it's good. Buy it. An arty ceramacist was interviewed in the Princeton Alumni Weekly. "Sometimes," she said, "the most interesting pieces come from a series of guided accidents." Many digital artists would agree. They look for those wonderful accidents that are more beautiful than anything they might think up beforehand. That Jackson Pollack dripped all those paintings was a big problem for many people. Cynics said, "My kid could do that." The Jackson Pollacks of today are digital artists. People ask, "So, when my kids get a computer, they'll be able to do digital art?" Sure--exactly to the degree that when they get a set of oil paints, they'll be able to do oil paintings. Half the population thinks the computer is a devilish machine both impersonal and anti-creative. For these people "computer art" is an oxymoron...The other half thinks the exact opposite! Computers are gods. Push a button and opera comes out. An artist painting on a computer isn't doing anything because the god-like computer is doing the work...Neither view is very helpful. The computer is just a tool. A word processor--i.e. a computer programmed to manipulate texts-- doesn't create poetry, and an image processor--i.e. a computer programmed to manipulate images--doesn't create art. As always, poets make poetry and artists make art. Digital art is a democratic medium. Once a piece is created, the artist can make multiple copies. In this respect it's exactly like photography, another much maligned democratic medium. For the first 100 years of its existence, let's say 1850-1950, the camera was not considered a real artist's tool. What did the photographer actually do? Push a button, that's all. Little by little, good artists went to work with the camera and made great art. Philistine opinion gave way. The same story is now being replayed starring the computer. What took a century in photography's case will pass by in relatively few years for digital art. Andre Breton and the Surrealists said that artists should liberate the subconscious. The idea was that you don't try to control everything. You let the creative process loose. Turns out the computer is a natural ally to experimentation, freeing the unconscious and, in effect, getting out of the way. A photograph shows us a piece of the world we can see. Digital art, on the other hand, shows us a world we cannot see, a new world I call the digital universe. Retouched photos, manipulated photos--these are more a part of photography than of digital art. The future of digital is fine art made from newly created pixels. The pixel is the language of the future. Digital is the landscape on which we will live. The goal of the digital artist is to explore the vast new aesthetic possibilities that digital technology has presented to us. Welcome to the digital universe. !!!! by Bruce Deitrick Price, first published on Creativity-Portal.com in 2005. The issues remain the same. Okay, okay, it's one of the world's great programs. Everybody says so. The problem is that too many people are taking photographs, messing with them in Photoshop, and calling the results "digital art." Enough. Let me presume to lay down the law in a completely new and lawless territory that I like to call the Digital Universe. It's not enough if an image is taken with a digital camera or printed out on a digital printer. A billion things a day are. It's pointless to call the results "digital art." (But many art sites and art shows do.) It's not enough if a photo is retouched or manipulated in Photoshop. Doing so is the norm now in photography. It's just silly to call the results "digital art." But almost the whole world does. What is so wrong with calling photographs photographs? I say, if it was taken by a camera (there's a clue) and remains for the most part a representation of something in the real world that a camera was pointed at, then, what do you know, it's a photograph! Here's my modest proposal: you must transform a photograph, using digital tools, into something substantially different from the original photograph before you can use the term "digital art." Artists have been retouching and manipulating photographs for more than 100 years. Man Ray did dark room manipulations in the 1920s. Ansel Adams did supersharp photographs in the 1950s. Richard Avedon did those marvelous wildly colored pictures of the Beatles in the 1960s. All without benefit of digital. Isn't it a little pathetic to come along with a fancy new medium and create stuff that's not as fancy as what came before? Digital does not need the past. Digital, I believe, is all about the future. It's about using wondrous new tools to make new kinds of art. But I have been to so-called "digital art shows" where almost all the work was photographs that could have been created 25 years ago. A major digital gallery gave first prize to highly realistic photographs that were just Ansel Adams redux (i.e., very precise). How retro can you get. When I owned a design business in Manhattan, I had the honor of hiring one of the great retouch artists of all times, Sol Schnaer. He could take anything out of a picture, or put anything in — all with paint brush and airbrush. Photoshop makes this kind of magic much easier. But conceptually there's nothing new. All too often, people today are just doing a Sol Schnaer. Or they're doing a Richard Avedon or Man Ray or Ansel Adams. And hey, if you can take a beautiful photograph, I suggest stopping right there! People don't get tired of what Mapplethorpe did. If you're a great photographer, you don't need Photoshop, not crucially, and you certainly don't need to call your beautiful photographs "digital art." I say death to Photoshop because way too many people think Photoshop IS digital art. This is a myth and a destructive one at that. The public sees a few manipulated photos and thinks,"That's digital art? What's new about that? What's so exciting?" Digital art, properly hailed as a vast new universe, becomes diminished and denigrated, finally becoming just a synonym for Photoshop's ability to alter photos. Early on, I had a contrarian hunch: if lots of people are running photographs through Photoshop, a lot of this work will end up looking redundant, so maybe I should avoid photographs altogether. Now (let me admit it) I enjoy saying, "No photographs or scanned materials are used in my work. I start with a blank screen..." What exotic new territory does digital let us explore? I think this is the question, the goal, the mission, that should obsess digital artists. Why use watercolors to try to mimic oil paints. Why use photographs to try to imitate either one? Why use digital as merely an appendage to an older medium? I suggest that each medium is its own brave new world, and perfect in its way. Let it be what it can be! In the case of digital, a new and distinctive vocabulary is emerging: gradients, precision, layers, transparency, 3D effects, extreme palettes, and a thousand filters and effects that have no parallel in traditional media. These powerful tools enable us to pursue, in a new way, the goal that art has been engaged with for the past century or so — the depiction of new realities and new visions. © Bruce Deitrick Price 2005. All rights reserved. Essays_files/DEATHTO.cvx

by Bruce Deitrick Price. first published on ArtNorfolk.com in 2004.

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