Let's talk about Art. (In Understanding Comics... and other things...)

   

   Alright, so, I'm going to start spewing. Prepare yourselves. After reading the first four chapters of McCloud's Understanding Comics, I began to think about the implications of what he was discussing in my own work. Being a Writing/Photo/Don't-Know-What-I'm-Gonna-Do/Oh-Shit-I-Don't-Know-What-I'm-Gonna-Do Major, I am constantly thinking about words and images. When do words speak louder? When can an image stand alone? When do we need both? When does a still image stop being relevant? What role does technology have in all of this? 

   

   Art. No one knows how the hell to define it. Sure, they'll give you some bullshit answer, but no one really knows how to explain it, because it is constantly changing. Here, we have a bunch of moss growing on a brick wall in what would typically be described as graffiti, but, because it's moss, and because it's a classic typography, it's all of a sudden "Art." Now, I'm not skeptical of calling this art, but I'm skeptical as all HELL of the people who say this is, but spray-painted words (with the exception of dicks and foul-words, unless tastefully done) are not.  Someone explain that double-standard bullshit to me. But, I think it's important to see how words play a role in art. Comics make that obvious, but in less textual driven art (such as the September piece above) when does it add to the art, instead of distract from the visual aesthetics? 

   Alright, so let's take a moment to talk about GIFs, because I think they are relevant to where digital art is going. Comics, too, but I think these examples are key. In one, text plays a role. It's a rather cliche' way of going about it, I know, but it forces you to think about how not only an image and text are working together to create a composition, but the fact that the composition is in motion is also important. In the piece below, someone took a classical painting and made the water move. How does this change your experience with the piece? If writing, or rhetoric, is an interaction, how does this change that? Who is now the artist that deserves credit? Ohh....shit. Things just got complicated.

   Lastly, I want to talk about abstractual manipulation. I think that additions of text and movement have a great deal to do with the future of art, but I think there is also room in this conversation for subtraction. How does the composition of a photograph change when someone takes a marker and some chalk and blurs out the space between two people's faces? What happens when someone takes what looks to be an intricate painting portrait of a woman and rips off her face, exposing the paper beneath? We could get into the dehumanization, or de-authorization (better yet, the de-artistization) of these pieces, but I'm not going to go there. We can do this in photoshop with a few buttons. We can rip other people's art off the internet and turn it into our own. Plagiarism at its best, right? But, I think this is an important idea to think about. Maybe I'm just the crazy Photo major kid in the class, but I really do think this is relevant to our Digital Rhetorics studies. McCloud opened my eyes to comics, but it made me open my eyes even more elsewhere. Where does rhetoric begin, and where does it end? This digital shit makes it a sticky situation.