In the old times, an artist would create in his studio, then he would find an institution to exhibit his artwork, would possibly get the recognition he felt he deserved, maybe find a patron willing to invest in his future career, have his artwork sold, acquire a following and so on. This is the traditional scheme of things, which some might say it still applies nowadays in its basic structure, but somehow, it feels more complicated than this, and it has become difficult to define a universally valid pattern of how things should be working. The outline seems to have changed tremendously in the last decades, due to new developments which occur on a daily basis and which have modified the paradigm and the dynamic of the relationship between the artist and the art consumer. The most important phenomenon is definitely the ascent of the internet that allows effortless circulation of information, and has also produced an entirely new medium.  Nowadays, we live in a world in permanent evolution due to the technological breakthroughs, and sometimes innovation surfaces in more places simultaneously; as a result, artwork is more than ever shaped with the permanent obsession of originality. The gender separation between different art forms does not exist so blatantly any more, because everything is transmitted through the same media and in fact, even the gap between objective reality and its effigies has become more elusive than ever.
 

Another issue that has ascended to the forefront is that we live in an age of extreme diversity, where artists have the option to orient themselves towards a larger variety of media, while also exploiting to the maximum the traditional and established ones.Although the subject matters still stem from a combination of factors, either personal experience, an interpretation of the meaningful social issues, a flight from the overwhelming Big Brother reality or exploiting it critically by means of cultural quotes, there is much more to be said about the plethora of factors that have influenced the development of art trends nowadays. Perhaps as never before, one can notice that the centralized identity model of an artist is subjected to intense erosion due to the constant bombardment of information.

 An artistic trend develops, grows old and ends up in the same depository with yesterday’s and tomorrow’s trends. We live in a frenzy of last moment information, 5-minute celebrity, live war and life spent online, shared by millions of users, and contemplation is rarely possible. The user is not necessarily unhappy with the offer and responds to the stimuli every time the ads are on, and the result may be an overwhelming saturation. What applies to other fields of our daily lives is also of importance for the type of artwork we choose, or we are exposed to, and the extreme variety is only making any attempt to classify and judge more difficult than ever.
 

Artists often regard their artwork as a free projection of a personal feeling, but they have to shape their style in competition with others, with the wish to be unique. The power of this originality is intensely eroded by a flood of ads, fashion images and others. More recently, style and personal information, in the new communication paradigm, have become information packets, valid for short periods of time, and then rapidly ejected from the system as redundant. Everything is transmitted using the same digital code, and art can materialize all over the world simultaneously. The Renaissance paradigm of the unique, artist-defined perspective to be perceived by the art consumer seems to elude more than ever a clear definition. The artist and the art consumer are not necessarily the origin and the destination any more; they become just turning points in the complex informational flow.
 

There are still numerous artists that use the traditionally established media, such as painting or sculpture, to convey their vision of the world. Their artwork has a craft component which cannot be ignored: in order to produce an artistic object, a certain set of actions have to be understood and performed, and the desired result can be obtained only after mastering the craft aspect. And then, there is the other category, the artists who have rapidly incorporated, albeit in a transitional manner, the new media, namely the computer as a tool of artwork creation.

They still use as a referent the real world, and attempt to depict in a representational manner what they perceive as important from the surrounding environment, but their tools are not the brush or the pencil anymore, but computer software which helps, by means of a limited set of preset choices, to express their personal vision. Why in a transitional manner? Namely because they have only switched from using one set of tools to another set, which are more modern and which, in a way, level the playing field. If before, one had to master the technique, nowadays, the ideas can be put in practice if one has access to a computer and the appropriate software. The result of their artistic pursuit is still an object though, which can be printed or rendered tri-dimensional by means of a printer of a rapid prototyping machine.

Now more than ever, in the age of diversity and permanent change, when we can have a hard time choosing from one hundred kinds of shampoo in the drugstore, it is necessary if not to operate categorization, to document the phenomenon and put together a catalogue, either as an orientation for the art public, or simply, such as in this case, to inventory the variety of art forms and individual creations and/or trends that are endlessly moving in front of our eyes. Due to the ascent of the internet, more and more artists have chosen this as their primordial means of showing the public what is going on, and anthologies such as this serve a higher purpose, namely to document an elusive phenomenon and bring to the fore artists who can thus understand more how their individual creations shape the world we all live in, what is the responsibility of a creative consciousness, and where they stand in the grander scheme of things.


Dana Altman
New York, 2006


Dana Altman is a writer and editor. She lives in New York, NY.