(May 22, 2022 at 1:32 pm)Macoleco Wrote: Regardless of the technological advances, some techniques are objectively a better display of the human skills? For example, comparing oil paintings to digital art. What illustrations made on Photoshop or Clip Studio compare to the great paintings?
Interesting questions, and important for the topic at hand.
I'm sure I've never seen a digitally created work that I'd rank with really wonderful physical art. There are a couple of reasons for this:
First, a non-digital painting is always made of something. The physicality of the material is a major part of what it is. Old time artists knew how to get great beauty out of the physical stuff.
If you've only seen a painting or sculpture reproduced in a book or on a screen, you still haven't seen it. The real thing will always be more beautiful. This varies of course -- a Hokusai print is about 10 times better than the same picture reproduced in a book. But a Giovanni Bellini painting is a zillion times more beautiful. Oil paint (before we lazy people started just buying it in tubes) is infinitely variable and rich. It can be layered in transparent glazes or built up in ridges that stick up from the canvas, both of which are crucial for the appearance of the work, and both of which are lost in reproduction. The old guys knew things about the materiality of the paint that few people are aware of today.
Both printed books and computer screens homogenize the appearance of a physical object -- they reduce it to something that's pretty much like every other object reproduced in the same way. This means that when most people look at a painting only in reproduction, they judge it based on a tiny percentage of what it has to offer.
And we have to remember that each painting or sculpture, until recently, was made for a location and an occasion. Selling art in galleries (which are just stores) is relatively recent. The people making the altarpiece or the hanging scroll or the triumphal portrait knew where it would go and what social function it would fill. Taking it out of that location and putting it in a museum removes a lot of that, and reproducing it in a book or a screen takes it all away.
Digital art is made to be seen everywhere, which is nowhere. There is no aura, no provenance, no extra-visual value.
So all of that physicality and occasion is lost in digital art. And that takes away A LOT of what art has been.
Still, there is no hard and fast reason why a digital picture can't do something wonderful. Given the right person and the right inspiration, why not? But here we're back to the role of art and of its value in our current society. The things that people want art to do now are seldom the kind of transcending values that gave former art its importance.
Quote:And I think even artists accept that digital is a lot easier than analogue drawing.
"Easy" is a tricky word with art. There are drawings by Picasso or Matisse, for example, that were easy for them. Ten seconds and it's done, with no apparent effort (the years of practice aren't visible).
So again, I see no reason why digitally-created work that's just collaged together with click-and-drag couldn't be wonderful. It just hasn't been, so far.
