The digital image and the art world 
The image is produced today mainly on the basics of digital processes, which in a decade, come to invade all forms of expression so likely sustainable and quasi-exclusive . Yet the art institutions are reluctant to consider this technological revolution and to grant him a place commensurate with its use in our daily lives. Digital art is still the poor relation of both criticism that market and even education. "Many officials of cultural institutions, complemented by some French intellectuals, still wonder if digital art is art or just art" (Hillaire Couchot. Digital Art -Flammarion)
The reasons are many and deep. Digital technologies are indeed surrender into question all the foundations of art, from creation to the perception, not to mention market value.
Since ancient times until the late nineteenth century, an artist (or craftsman) is a recognized professional in the experiment, acquired after long training most often highly specialized. The prevailing idea is that the mastery of a technique is essential for good design. This view is shattered by the early twentieth century and contemporary art thrives on a crisis of representation to attach to the concept, more that the finished product. Trend already outlined since Leonardo da Vinci, the artist has now become a pure intellectual but rejects the know-how, an inhibitor of its spiritual creation. The object has meaning only in terms of the idea that generates it.
The digital seems to mark the return of this knowledge so maligned. But know-how which, with the entry of computers into homes, is now becoming accessible to all. With minimal training and usually overcomes the digital technology to focus on the idea. It is from this point of view, totally in tune with contemporary art. The precepts of Fluxus in the Sixties, an art produced by each of us become reality forty years later.
But, as often happens when a theory becomes a reality, we perceive it through and suddenly the mind: anyone who can improvise artist, artistic production is no longer in the hands of a small circle recognition of insiders. It takes a sudden realization that the value of art is related to the scarcity of works but also to the artists. A designer today needs to be identified, the media. The public can not recognize more than offset that her memory. The proliferation of artists sound the end of the marginal nature of the creative and romantic. By making it anonymous would deprive him of his aura, associated with a public image that automatically maintains with the company.
The work itself, until the twentieth century, always been physical and the fruit of a "muscular," as Regis Debray, however small it may be. For painting, like sculpture, a purchaser acquires an object that has all the more valuable it is rare and unique. Photography, video and movies have shoved this order of things by producing their method of multiplication. The art market, after several decades, has absorbed the first two by making an artificial scarcity by limiting and numbering of prints. The film, meanwhile, chose a divergent path by creating its own distribution networks, thereby ensuring full autonomy. However, he returned the artwork in question by making immaterial: you pay for a performance at the cinema without its support, an illusion that lasts for the duration of the projection. As for the theater but Hegel, in his Aesthetic , do not count among the arts when we speak of early cinema to cinema, from 1912, 17 years after the first public meeting of the Lumiere brothers. Note that the technique of digital image in film is the only one that seems to interest today both critics and official institutions.
The digital image is freed from its holder without having the social spaces of representations, such as movie theaters or TV stations. How then talk about creating value for a curtain that slides on the Net? Clearly that sell to a potential buyer used to exchange material against hard cash?
It happens that the art market is still working on the basics of painting, that is to say with a practical and unique work. It is unclear how the merchants will manage to introduce scarcity in a world now accustomed to free access, copying and Internet distribution. This implies a major challenge, inventing an economy that would separate the value of rarity. The movie should take the lead in pulling him, his profit from the mass market.
Digitization involves the opening up of technical or, to use a more modern vocabulary, it operates a hybrid arts, already advocated by Duchamp in 1920. The photographic material related to this particular process to a silver halide, is now on the same footing as all other graphic materials. From the moment an image is "pixelated" no matter whether of photographic (some objective reality) or the brainchild of a designer (fully virtual). The digital can even mix of bitmap and vector and opens the door to the simultaneous use of all graphics software. Not only processes but lose their distinction separating real / virtual rendered obsolete. To summarize, photography, as individual and independent media, may well disappear from the realm of art. Insofar as the photographic image using the same methods as other graphics, we cease to distinguish quickly and will build a set that will be called "digital images" and "images" short without worrying about their objectivity or part of their substance. This is true for other graphic arts: "Digital has an irrepressible tendency to displace the traditional arts as soon as he penetrates and gradually alter the purity of their specific origin. "(Ibid Couchot. Hillaire).
Like the photograph may be freed painting from the representation of reality, the digital image is likely to release a photograph of the status of evidence and objectivity into the base material, kneading , shape, as well as paint on canvas but the main difference being that the notion of trace has been lost to the calculation. This is what hinders most theorists and art critics: the lack of copyright replaced by the computer. This echoes the same reservations as those nineteenth century vis-à-vis the photograph: loss of the hand, imagination, critical thinking. Note however that digital technology applied to music has never been debated and it was immediately accepted by the entire musical world.
Image digital yet joined Maurice Denis and his definition: "A painting is, above all, a flat surface covered color in a certain order." It overcomes the ambiguities with reality to become full-fledged establishment. In short, it follows the same path as the painting, a century and a half later, but without a replacement to take over the representation of reality. This may mean that our relationship with reality is also changing and the opposition with the virtual quickly loses its meaning. A new era of representation may be opening up with digital. It is time that the official institutions and the "owners" of the market of art are fully aware, they know, instead of ignoring him find his rightful place in that art, in France at least, inevitably institutions and markets. The current lack of recognition is in danger of digging a little further the gap between the public art formalized, while obscuring a fundamental change and a majority of the XXI century.
Illustration: Patrick Gonzales - untitled
The article was published on AgoraVox
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