“Our So-called Art” is a blog page that explains the pros and cons of digital art. The author of this blog page is “NFT Digital Art”, which stands for New Futures Technology. They are an organization that creates digital art and helps people learn how to create digital art. New Futures Technology has a website, Facebook page, Twitter account, etc. They have been writing blogs on their website since 2008 and have many more to come. NFT Digital Art also offers free tutorials and workshops teaching people how to make digital art. Their website offers many different tutorials from how to use Photoshop to how to make 3D animations using Maya or Blender. They also offer many other services including:<\/p>\n
New Futures Technology was created by two artists, Sean Stemple and Josephine Berry.<\/p>\n
They host exhibitions of their work at the New York Hall of Science and the American Museum of Natural History in New York City every year in February. They also travel around the world showing off their artwork at different museums, galleries, schools, etc.<\/p>\n
The pictures below are examples of their work that can be found on their website or when you visit one of their events or exhibitions:<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.nftdigitalart.com\/blog\/post\/<\/p>\n
We are in the middle of a revolution in art. Digital technology is enabling an explosion of creativity, and the boundaries of art are being pushed outward into new territory. But despite these changes, many artists still cling to a traditional definition of what art is — and even more surprising, many people outside the art world are buying into it.<\/p>\n
Trying to describe or define art is a fool’s errand — but I think there are two ways you can approach it. First, you can take a kind of Platonic approach and look for the essential qualities that make something art. What are the characteristics that all works of art have in common? And second, you can ask: How do people react when they encounter something new? If they react with surprise or delight or interest, then it’s probably art; if they say “that’s not art,” then it probably isn’t.<\/p>\n
The first approach (the Platonic one) is tougher to talk about because it’s so abstract. There is no simple set of properties that, once found, will tell us whether anything we encounter is a work of art. As far as I know, Plato never described these essential properties — at least not explicitly; he said instead (in The Republic) that “there are many beautiful things<\/p>\n
A lot of people have trouble understanding what digital art is. They think that any art you can see on a computer screen is digital art. But that’s not true. My wife, for example, has a printout of a painting and she hung it on the wall, so it’s not digital art. She doesn’t have it on her computer.<\/p>\n
There are lots of people who make drawings and paintings with pencils or brushes and then put them on their computers and post them online. And they say, “Oh, this is just something I made.” But that’s not digital art either.<\/p>\n
It’s hard to talk about digital art because there are so many different kinds, but there are two basic types: some of it is made by artists on computers who use software; and some of it was made by programmers who use computers to do things that artists used to do before there were computers.<\/p>\n
Digital art can be divided up into two big categories: things you make with programs, like 3D models or animations, and things you make by hand and then scan in or take pictures of and then edit digitally. And then within those categories there are all sorts of differences.<\/p>\n
The problem with digital art is fundamentally the problem with digital technology in general: it’s not a tool but an environment.<\/p>\n
In an environment, the users are always more important than the tools, and the users will inevitably use any given tool to do what they want to do anyway.<\/p>\n
Creating art is hard. That’s why there’s so much of it, and so much of it isn’t very good.<\/p>\n
But that’s not a problem for people who want to make money from it. Selling images or performances or stories or songs is hard too, but there are easier ways to make money than producing good work (see: any lottery winner).<\/p>\n
And so we have a culture in which most artists are not paid well and most art is not very good. And the things people pay for are not usually the things that were hardest to create, or that required the greatest skill.<\/p>\n
It’s easy to shrug this off with some version of “artistic integrity.” The artist has to follow her muse where it leads, even if it leads her into poverty and ridicule. The audience should appreciate what they’re given rather than demanding something different, or better. And besides, if you know how the sausage is made you won’t want to eat it anymore.<\/p>\n
In fact none of these arguments hold up. The current system leads to bad art and prevents us from producing more of what we like best; it’s not an inevitable result of the nature of art itself. And the only way we can get different results is by changing how we think about how art gets<\/p>\n
If you want to create wealth, it will help to understand what it is. Wealth is not the same thing as money. Wealth is as old as human history. Far older, in fact; ants have wealth. Money is a comparatively recent invention.<\/p>\n
Wealth is the fundamental thing. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn’t need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn’t matter how much money you had.<\/p>\n
Wealth is what you want, not money. But if wealth is the important thing, why does everyone talk about making money? It is a kind of shorthand: money is a way of moving wealth, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. But they are not the same thing, and unless you plan to get rich by counterfeiting, talking about making money can make it harder to understand how to make money.<\/p>\n
Money is a side effect of specialization. In a specialized society, most of the things