The Work of Art in the Digital Age

- Since the cave mornings of Cro-Magnon man has painted and decorated with colour solutions - In the Digital Age it will be natural - even compelling - to question the traditional painting, its status and legitimacy. - Has the traditional physical painting become a mere thing of the past, an antique, a relic or an artifact from the archives of art history? - In millenniums art has rebelled; shaking of every reductive determination, spoken appraisal and valuation - disobedient and rebellious - striding for freedom; thus it has achieved our highest esteem. - Today art turns to its absolute emancipation: it releases itself from materialism and catapulted out into virtual reality the picture will at the same time become ubiquitous and non-existent: in the Digital Age the picture does not even have to exist!... Perishability, is it bygone? - Thus, Yesterday is passé; the 21th century poses: a new world has sought us out and it doesn¿t backtrack, it boasts itself in an unknown brash semiotic: gigabytes, GUI and GIF, can you Google it? IT is today to be; or bail out. - The magic words of our time are clipart, download, edutainment, freeware, hotspot, hyperlink, net-etiquette, screendump, webhotel ¿ and remember WYSIWYG isn¿t always trustworthy. The world anno post-MM is a hip hypertext: to be or not to be down loaded¿ that is the question. - In the Digital Era everything is digitised and infused by virtuality - everything is constituted by; everything is this diffusion. Therefore, in the Digital Era it is expected that digitisation and virtualization will penetrate art, and vice versa that art will digitise itself. - >>The Work of Art in the Digital Age