i literally cannot wrap my head around the notion that thereâs been a âdeclineâ in âreal art.â that music is shitty now, that books arenât what they used to be, etc etc etc.
art is more broadly accessible than ever. itâs unbelievable. itâs divine. thereâs so much art on this planet right now that i could pile it all up on a plate and devour it for the rest of my life without making a dent. denigrating the âqualityâ of âtodayâs artâ is like ordering a three course meal at your favorite restaurant and complaining about a food truck on the other side of town
whiners really don't seem to understand that we are in a golden age of art right now. like yes the world's falling apart. yes disney sucks shit. but i went to a quilt show last month and my god, there were masterpieces there. there are so many good cartoons. the webcomics boom of the 00's let so many marginalized creators hop the fences of traditional comics publishing and put out absolutely incredible stuff. comics have done more interesting shit in the last 20 years than they have in the previous forty. it goes on and on. ceramics, marble, dollhouses, bonsai, calligraphy, graffiti, soap making, knitting, weaving, embroidery, origami, kites, theater, every kind of music. electroswing! there's lightpainting and augmented reality. makeup, cosplay, tattoos, body modification. there's videogames and board games.
we are living in an absolutely staggering explosion of art as cheap computers and easily accessible internet communities have let people share their skills and creativity. there's a lot to complain about when it comes to the internet, but not what it's done to art.
people thought that photographs were going to replace portrait painters. and some commercial jobs, such as sketch artists for newspapers, were in fact replaced by this cheaper and more accurate technology. but then not only did photography become an artistic medium in its own right, not only did photography provoke all sorts of fascinatingly creative artistic movements that sought to answer the question 'okay, so what's painting for, then?', portrait painters themselves started using photographs for reference. pin-up paintings are referenced from photos. frank franzetta referenced from photos and lied about it. all the best illustrators of the 20th century did.
i've seen people saying neural net generators like dall-e and artbreeder are going to replace artists. and they might be able to produce cheaper work in certain contexts, taking away some as-yet-to-be-seen amount of jobs.
but i've seen a lot more artists using those generators themselves, then painting over the results.
like, seriously, this is one of my favorite topics. we're living in a golden age, a space age, an absolutely historically unprecedented explosion of creativity. the internet hasn't delivered every promise of its baby days when we thought we might get to live in an egalitarian utopia. the internet has turned out to be one more communication tool, and a lot of what humans communicate is dumb shit. but it gives us the ability to communicate with everyone, all the time, everywhere, and holy shit, are we making some incredible work in and around all the dumb shit.
i don't know what's going to happen to us all next, i know every year just gets scarier, but goddamn, take a minute to look at what we all made, and get excited for what we might get around to next year.























