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The Impacts Technology and Social Media Have on Art
How the Gallery Experience Has Evolved
Art has always reflected the era it was created. New inventions and ideas push artists to reflect the world around them and use new forms of media to present their works. However, with the invention and popularity of smartphones and digital media, the way that artists create and present their works have evolved to a level we could not have imagined twenty years ago. The use of technology has widened the opportunities for artists in the ways that they create art, as well as impacted the viewers’ experience. Instead of viewers experiencing traditional art in galleries, social media and the Internet has allowed artists to share and create their art in a non-traditional way that might be detrimental to the art industry.
Technology as a whole can describe many different forms of art such as photography, sound art, artificial intelligence, and more. A popular form of digital art are online programs that act as two-dimensional canvases that can be accessed by the Internet and drawn on computers or tablets. Some of these programs include Photoshop, Procreate, and Blendr, where anyone can draw digitally. Charlie Gere speaks about our use of technology in art and how it isn’t such a modern subject; “when new media art is represented at all in such institutions, it is almost always treated as a recent phenomenon [but] explicitly technological art has a history that goes back at least six decades”. While this essay will explore the use of general technology to create art, it will focus more on how the Internet has been used to create and share art online. Artists can also use photographs as references instead of requiring someone to stay in one pose for hours, which increases someone’s ability to develop more realistic and imaginative pieces. When a piece is created digitally, the easiest place to share the new piece is by posting it on social media. Anni Albers states in “Material as Metaphor” that “material is a means of communication” representing our closeness with different mediums and how each artist has the ability to communicate their feelings through art. Many artists use social media to showcase and promote their art on sites such as Instagram, Tik Tok, Pinterest, Facebook, and DeviantArt, sometimes reaching a staggering number of people. Due to…
