I AM :
AN ENGLISH MAJOR
hailey.colbrunn
THe artist is dead
Our world today demonstrates a susceptibility to visual influence -in regards to advertising, entertainment- because of how audience includes a large portion of the globe. Creators take advantage of the ease with which technology has allowed their visions to be turned into final products and has also changed the market for art where art is mass produced and nameless. Because of our globalized market, the world stage of artists and creators exists on a screen, making the names of the creators less significant due to the fact that anyone can claim anything. Once an image is sold and implemented into popular culture, it can be posted to any person’s social media identity and is presented to a new audience who qualifies the piece in a displaced setting through recognition through association.
Art has become a commodity not of authenticity but of speed and technological savvy. An audience is less involved with how a piece came to be and more likely to look to the next thing in a newsfeed. "The Artist is Dead" is the notion that the process of art is becoming less and less dependent on the process and experience of the individual artist and is instead validated by its circulation. This essay aims to focus on the process of art as it moves through the digital era and how the integrity of the art/artist/audience relationship is being compromised.
Project boards rest against the wall of a high trafficked artists' space.
This desk is marked by years of paint and led from artists working with mediums requiring physical material.
A pencil is missing from this artist's case.
A drawing of an eyeless face sits next to the dehumanized "face" of a computer screen.
A still life is captured in an artists' space, reflecting the ever-changing scene of inspiration and perception in an artist's eye.
A hand painted artifact of tourist Mexico, created by a nameless artist, accompanies old pens and a jar of blurry change.
Discarded sketches scatter this desk just like dead petals scatter around a flower after it has matured.
An artist's work space is covered in original work but also includes a re-creation of Banksy's street art that is displayed in the artist's portfolio.
Art from the streets of Costa Rica is captured in a photo and displayed under someone else's name, being associated with that person's account rather than its original state and artist.
The drawing on the left was created by hand and the drawing on the right is Adobe Shape's rendering of the image into a vector file to be used in a digital drawing.