Art And Nature A Look At Three — страница 2

the French culture is an ancient one with kings, leaders, and war heroes who could all be considered much more culturally important than Monet. Impressionism itself was not an entirely French movement, and was not particularly important to their cultural identity. It had more to do with Europe as a whole than with France, but even on such a broader scale the movement was not as important to the world as the world was important to the movement. Impressionism was just another of western art form in a long line of art forms that reflected how the people of the times saw their country it is no more important than cubism or realism or any other art form that Europe has gone through in its history. Overall, Monet s art is easily identifiable and relative to a western observer; partly

because we have grown up with it, and partly because we have evolved from the world in which it was cultivated. We understand impressionism because all the art that a typical student of western culture studies either leads up to it, or has followed from it. We relate to Monet because we understand the world in which he painted; we learn about it in history class and we hear stories about it from our grandparents. Most people in our culture understand more about this art than art of foreign cultures. The average person would have no idea what art looked like in Native American culture, or Aborigine culture. But the European standard is seen as the ideal, and so that is what is studied in our schools. It is ironic that the average American living in 1999 can relate more to Monet s

art, painted almost a hundred years ago on a different continent, than we can to the art of the next artist, created in our time and in our nation s largest city. Welcome to the pure white space, the altar for display of the art object. The gallery space defines art by seperating it from the common, secular world, framing it in an uncommonly featureless, smudgeless, empty room. The web turns the gallery upside down. In the web ’space’ the physical world becomes almost alien — there is no object to hold onto. For me this new medium creates an interactive space of its own, providing a vantage point from which to take a fresh look at the physical space in which we live. This narrative is from the first page of Mark Napier s web site, which also happens to be his gallery and

his medium. It should come as no surprise that art is moving into the digital realm from the canvas and onto the web , as Napier describes it. The Internet is quickly becoming the one of the most important and influential media tools available. It is certainly the most powerful since the invention of television. American culture is all over the web you can find nearly anything there. There isn t a company, school, movie, or organization that doesn t have its own web site. People are coming together in chat rooms. Ideas are meeting from all over the world through the fiber optical cables of phone companies. You can shop, find entertainment, find friends, loved ones, send mail, and get the news all over the Internet. Why shouldn t you be able to appreciate art? And not necessarily

art that was created in the physical world and is merely represented through pictures and words on a web site; art that was created specifically for and through the Internet. This is work that goes largely unappreciated; it is not studied in schools, it is not put on display in museums, and it is not talked about in our culture at large. Internet art could be the next big thing in the modern art scene, or it could be a joke at a cocktail party in a few months. Part of the problem is it is hard to know who is a serious artist and who is a joke there is no one regulating the web. Mark Napier, for example, apparently doesn t even own a spell check on his computer he spelled the word separate incorrectly on his art work . Anyone with some free time and a computer can have their own

web site, free to say whatever they want, display whatever they deem appropriate, and anyone can find it. This is a medium in which in a few short years nearly all of the western world will be proficient in; as the younger generations who grew up with computers and on the web become the work force of the world, computers become more and more a necessity in today s western world. This would be the first time something like this could happen everyone will know who to work a computer art program. Never before has the majority of a large culture all been fluent in a particular art. Will this make the art generic and unappreciated? Or will it lead to a boom in the amount of art in the world? However tied to computers our culture is today, it has not yet accepted the Internet or a