indessed roscivs

In Thursday’s post about digital doctoring of movies, I said, “art is not art because it is rare, or because it is difficult to create”. I’d like to expand on this idea, using a quote from Cliff Stoll’s book, Silicon Snake Oil, as a jumping-off point.

… look at the corrosive effect on our creative community. We reward designers rather than illustrators. Magazines, for instance, have become playgrounds for fonts, photomontages, and color bleeds. These are easy to generate on any computer. Drawings and hand-shaded cartoons, well, they’re more challenging. So we find our literature littered with giant letters and italicized pullout quotes, but few illustrations or cartoons.

It seems that in the artistic world, the means is more and more being mistaken for the ends. ‘If art is easy to do,’ it is argued, ‘it ceases to be art.’ Likewise the reverse is often asserted–that because something is more difficult, it must be more high quality. Thus the use of computers is almost seen as “cheating”.

We must look first at the question: what is art? What do we find good, what is high quality, and what is not? To over-simplify things quite a bit, art is good because it touches our minds in a particular way which we enjoy. This idea of “art is good because it is rare” is absolute junk. “Flashing fifty great works of art across my monitor in two minutes cheapens the work. A part of the value of art is its rarity.” (p. 85) Utter nonsense. The cheapening, if at all, comes either from the lack of fidelity in reproduction, or your failure to take the time you would have taken in a museum to appreciate them. The former has nothing to do with its rarity, and for the latter you have no one to blame but yourself.

I’ve worked in design studios before, and just because some things are “easy to generate on any computer” does not automatically mean they are easy to do well. The Sunday comics are filled with painstakingly hand-drawn illustrations and cartoons, and yet many of them are pathetically uncreative and blasé. Imagine a way one could automatically generate cartoons on the computer, to instantly take them from mind to page without this painstaking process, while the end result was identical to the hand-drawn variety. Would these cartoons be any less works of art?

What is certain is that, with the ease of creating them, many more people would try their hand at cartoons. Predictably, the vast majority of them would be junk. But this doesn’t make the ones that truly were artistic pieces any less superior. The same thing has happened with the introduction of computers in the artistic world. Clip-art, fonts, and layout programs are all relatively easy to use. Predictably, the vast majority of new people trying out these tools produce nothing but junk. But the true artists are still producing quality output, and are thankful for the ease and new features which computers provide.

All that the relative infrequency of illustrations and cartoons when compared with fonts and photomontages tells us is that they are indeed more challenging and time-consuming to create. It tells us nothing of their artistic worth. Would a hand-lettered and hand-illustrated magazine, in which every letter in every sentence was meticulously traced, and every picture hand-drawn, be somehow magically “more artistic” than the identical computer mass-produced version? The quality would depend on the content–the quality of the prose, the quality of the fonts, the quality of the pictures, and the quality of the ideas–not merely the difficulty of creating it.

If it were more difficult to design than to illustrate, would you lament the corrosive effect on our creative community, pointing out how we reward illustrators rather than designers? Design, you might argue, requires much thought and care, while illustrations can be quickly produced by any unskilled hack. Such arguments do not show any inherent superiority of design over illustrations, or vice versa, but simply point out the relative ease or difficulty of creation.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.