The old creators - traditional artists like drawers, painters, sculptors, photographers, videographers, and designers working in multimedia, have been systematically replaced by the “new creators” who don’t make art. These new creators are the likes of data scientists, social engineers, and tech disrupters, that fashion widgets together to form a framework that other people use to construct on top of. I must be old if that’s what constitutes creation now and days. Don’t even get me started on AI generated images masquerading as art. As someone who is trained to care about every line or stroke, I find the whole concept offensive. Well, minorly offensive. It is kind of cool to bear witness to the capability, but I wouldn’t exactly say the image has a soul.
When I was in college, I took an intermediate oil painting class. Our professor told us to go out and buy lumber, nails, a hammer, a heavy-duty staple gun, and canvas from the local art supply store. After returning with our haul, we all started building the frame we would need to stretch our canvas over it. Once we had our finished frame, we were still looking at a blank canvas and knew that our work had just begun. Creation doesn’t come until we make that first communicative stroke.
They credit themselves for creating something new and take on the moniker of creator but lack the discipline that comes from years of art training, and therefore don’t have any wisdom to pass on to the actual artist who is trying to navigate a career in a world that has been made unrecognizable by impatience, and an intolerance for the traditions that helped western societies gain our culture of freedom in the first place. Hard work, responsibility, and sacrifice, used to be a thing when it came to making art. I’ll digress from associating advertisers as content creators, as artists, but again therein lies the confusion. Sometimes it’s hard to see the art behind the pitch.
Just another trite opinion from yours truly, but it seems at our present time, “creators” are regurgitating the same, tired themes, brands, and fashions. Even Zuckerberg managed to show us, literally, a worse impression of ourselves in the Metaverse. The collapse of Crypto, NFT art as even a thing, and tech companies getting financially bludgeoned on the scale not seen since the great dot-com bubble burst of 2000. It doesn’t bold well for the Web 3.0 revolution that is supposed to be underway, maybe, possibly? Just looking around it doesn’t feel very 3.0 to me.
I think these are all symptoms of the same problem, an imbalance. The root of the problem exists within the art industry and is not a problem that scientists or salesman can solve, no matter how good the camera. Artists need to use digital technology and social media to give the public at large, a holistic vision of the future where tech and culture reside on the same plane. For us, it’s at street level. Where mother nature, human nature, and technology are connected by pavement. It’s where our rubber meets the road.
