The Internet: A New Dark Age For Art?
Thursday, December 21, 2006 at 08:24AM A few months ago I managed to catch a program on cbc radio called Idea's( It's a great show, nothing else like it on tv or radio and I highly recommend it.) The episode, Warning: Dark Age Ahead was on a new Jane Jacobs book, Dark Age Ahead. The basic idea behind the book was that our society is on the verge of cultural collapse. The book describes what Jacobs believes to be the root cause of this impending breakdown in society. I finally got around to picking up the book to read.
Being an artist, I couldn't help but to think about what this might mean to the arts. It also happens to relate to one of my favorite topics in art history, the decline of Roman culture and art as it slipped into the dark ages, and the emergence of Christianity and the slow forgetfulness that completely erased the skill and craftsmanship of ancient Rome and replaced it with a spiritual inspired art form. Modern historians have mapped out this decline for us. Photographed relics chart a slow change that went unnoticed to the people experiencing it. If modern art culture was about to collapse, or undergo a dramatic change would there be any warning signs to say, Watch Out!!!?
As Jane Jacobs points out in her book, it's not so much the change in culture that's the problem but the forgetting of what came before the change Medieval Art is beautiful in its own right. It added a spiritual dimension to art that I don't think really existed before the emergence of Christianity, at least not for the western world. The real tragedy was the near complete loss of roman art. At first glance one would think that the modern world knows quite a lot about roman art, but consider this, almost no roman paintings had survived to modern times. Most of what we know of roman painting comes from the unearthed ruins of Pompeii. A city left buried and untouched for nearly two millennium. A vast number of marble statues were destroyed just to make lime. Imagine artwork valued so little it was more important for the raw material it was made out of. Christianity was also extremely effective at scouring away images and artwork that did not conform to its spiritual ideals. What was once considered acceptable art was now pagan, base and corrupt. How much was destroyed simply because it was seen as offensive?
Now why would I want to believe that the Internet is the herald of a new dark age in art? I use the Internet myself to reach a larger audience than would be possible on my own. How can I possibly dispute the benefit to artists across the globe the Internet has brought? Well I can't. The Internet certainly has been a boon to countless artists. It has given access where none had existed before. The bottleneck of galleries, curators, magazines and books has been broken and artists now have equal access through the net to the outside world. This is not a problem in itself.
The real problem with the Internet as a means to view artwork is that it completely strips away all context. All artwork regardless of era, style, size, or medium is reduced to a small square of pixelated light. If the viewer is lucky the image might be a few inches in size, but more often than not work is compressed into small thumbnails that really give no information at all. In most cases, very little additional information accompanies the images leaving the viewer with no idea to the size the work nor medium the work was created in. There is also very little historical reference as well.
I look at a lot of artwork on the net. I also live in a city with a very good major art gallery and many good commercial and artist run galleries. I'm also of an age that makes the Internet a somewhat new communications medium for me. When I started looking at artwork over the net, I was very aware that I was not looking at real artwork. At best it was somewhat the equivalent of looking at a slide. I'm aware that what I see on the screen is less than what the real work would offer. There have been many times I've wished I was able to see the artwork in person, knowing what I was seeing on the screen wasn't doing the work justice. I look for information on size and mediums and try to envision what the work would look like if I was standing before it.
There is now a generation of artists out there whose primary links to the arts is through the net. The Internet is not new to them. It's always been there. Their only context is the net. How does this shape what they see? Many of them live in large urban centres with access to galleries, but many more of them don't. How is the Internet changing how they think of art? How will art change because of it? Has it already begun to change?
The spiritualism that Christianity introduced to the roman world was not a bad thing in itself. Some of the greatest artwork in the western world was created because of it. The tragedy was that the roman people could not see what it was they were losing in process. The Internet age will probably produce some amazing artwork of its own, but it's also fundamentally changing how art is perceived. With these changes is there a danger of forgetting what came before?
Reader Comments (3)
this is not regarding your post, its about the image files you have uploaded on your blog.
Actually i think you have uploaded the high resolution files and it doesn't open in all the computers and i would like to see those images as i find your post article very interesting.
I hope you do something about it
thanx
bye
lloyd mendonca
The last bunch of photos I uploaded were a bit on the large size. I trimmed them down a bit. Hopefully they will load for you now. Thanks for pointing that out.
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