by Angela Mcfall

Created on: October 12, 2009   Last Updated: October 15, 2009

BRAVE NEW ART

The different types of art is one of my favourite topics. Art is a non verbal language, a language of line and colour and movement.It is dreams and nightmares hammered into shapes and freed into abstract compositions, it is future, present, and past. I have my notion of art and other people have their notions of art. Art is a painting of a woman half smiling, half frowning being frantically photographed by thousands of viewers on a daily basis. But it is also a line of stones arranged on a walk and a cow in formaldehyde. It's history is long and has always been guided and shaped by the critics, curators, and viewers, but what is happening to art in the present tense. We are in the midst of an information explosion and images play a larger role in our lives than ever. Have the boundaries been broken down between the sacred art object and the everyday world? Is there any point in differentiated the different types of art anymore?

We are the inheritors of a very long history of art, museums stuffed with cracking oil paintings of gods and heroes, galleries bursting with neo-revivalist-isms, and sculptures in marble, steel, and plastic. We have endured a long history of heavy art objects only to suddenly arrive in the weightless present. A brave new world of instant images, gleaming projections, downloaded files. Is this where art lives now? In the pixelated realm of cyber space? I have spent my whole life learning to draw and paint, I am deeply attached to the uniqueness of a painting I have created, and can't reproduce exactly even if I try. And now, all around me the image has exploded and I no longer know how to differentiate the different types of art and distinguish good from bad, high art from advertising, design from dada. And perhaps I no longer need to. Perhaps this is the ultimate destiny of art. To do away with the artist centred control of the art object and open up a more free flow spontaneous 'art is any creative act movement'.

On a site for handmade goods, whose name has four letters and starts with E, one can buy an 'original' artwork for a hundred dollars.Why you can even choose the colours and have it painted up and sent to your home within a few days.It is called art, it is sold as art, both the buyer and the maker believe it is art. A person who stencils fairies calls herself an artist, as does a person embroidering mushrooms onto an apron. In a field so vast who is going to draw the borders and define the different types of art?The swimming pool has expanded into a vast sea and there is most definitely no life guard keeping a watchful eye. So given this expanded sense of art does in an atomised society we are left to create our own classifications, borders and boundaries in differentiating the different types of art in our own individual way. Perhaps there is a freedom in that diversity. But I know for me, at this moment in time, I still love my oil paintings deep, my charcoal drawings messy and my sculptures 3-d.

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