Art of the Genre: Is Digital Art Real Art?
I’ve often been asked ‘how cool is it to have all that original art from the Art Evolution Project?’ or ‘What will you do with all that original art?’ I tend to smile when I hear it because it somehow means that I know more than most where the world of art is concerned. The primary thing would be that the bulk of artists don’t give up originals these days unless you are willing to pay a king’s ransom for them, and the secondary is that much of the work done for me in the project was at least ‘touched’ by a computer or fully rendered in a digital format. The reality is that the original is not the piece you see, assuming there is even ‘hard’ original to begin with.
That in itself is a testament to the changing landscape of art and the power of the computer when used in the process of creation. Still, it leaves many people feeling a bit hollow, the new inability to own an original because only an artist’s hard drive has the capability for that. The computer also rocked the art field as the backlash from the lack of original hard art begging the question ‘is digital art, ‘real’ art?’
Everyone who is anyone has an opinion on this, and certainly one of my favorite views on the subject comes from Lazarus Chernick in his WordPress blog that can be found here, but instead of trusting the husband of an artist, I went out and got three well known artists to address the subject.
The following are responses to the question of digital art being real art.