In the Western world, it took a revolution of great blood and gore to make art accessible to the common citizen. Today the quiet revolution of digital technology is opening up new ground — it is not just making art more accessible but allowing more people to become artists. The Louvre Palace, once home to kings, opened as a public art gallery during the French Revolution in 1793. Art that was commissioned by the church or royalty became the heritage of the entire society. The common man had the crafts, and folk music to aestheticise their lives. Art gradually filtered into everyday life.

Art has always been quick to appropriate new technologies and new materials. At least from the 4th century BC, artists have used devices such as perspective frames, camera obscura and camera lucida. They availed of progress in science with the development of synthetic colours for the textile industry, the invention of acrylic paints, the printing press, the still camera, the movie camera, and now the computer and the internet.

Art has always had its finger on the pulse of society. When mass production created an urban mass culture, pop art emerged, using graphics of advertising and commerce and accessing wider audiences. ‘Happenings’ and art performances followed the rebellious youth cultures of the Beat Generation and the Hippies.


Art has always had its finger on the pulse of society. When mass production created an urban mass culture, pop art emerged, using graphics and accessing wider audiences.


Perceiving art as an exclusive activity still holds its ground. Galleries still exist, art auction houses continue to have booming business, the unique nature of an artwork is still sought, and the reproduction of John Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’ on chocolate boxes — or the Mondrian inspired design on L’Oreal shampoo — is often perceived as a dumbing down of culture. Some believe, it is the revenge of the proletariat against the excluding space of High Art.

Andy Warhol broke with tradition using the technology of commercial mass production of images. However, even though the work went through editions, its value was maintained and one had still to visit an art gallery to see the original. Later, with poster reproductions of artists’ works and companies advertising ‘Choose from over 500,000 artists’, everyone could now afford to have a Matisse on their kitchen wall. These were, however, low quality reproductions and it was hoped it would encourage people to visit art museums to see the real thing.

As digital technology took over the world in the last decade of the 20th century, the quality of reproductions developed to the extent that it is difficult for the viewer to distinguish between the real and the reproduction. The Getty Foundation prepared a 100 billion-pixel digital version of Van Eyck’s ‘Adoration of the Mystic Lamb’ online while the original was being restored. It allows museums to display perfect reproductions of fragile works that normally would only be shown a few months at a time.

Many art museums have put their collections online, even inviting viewers to comment on the works, bringing chatter to what Andre Malraux called “the voices of silence.” Just as the radio brought concerts into the working class home after World War I, the internet brings the art on to our laptops and broadens the base of art lovers.

Scholars can pour over a detailed digital image of famous paintings such as the ‘Mona Lisa’, instead of through jostling crowds and from behind a glass. One can virtually ‘walk’ through caves with fragile prehistoric art that are closed to the public. One does not have to spend time and money to travel to the Prado or the Louvre to see a work of art; it’s available for free on one’s laptop or mobile device. Struggling artists can share and sell their work online. Buyers also have more choice of purchase by visiting gallery and artist websites. Using intangibles to produce art is not new. Video art, sound pieces, art performances and ‘happenings’ have been around for almost a century.

What is new today is that not only do more people have access to viewing art, but digital technology allows them to produce creative work, regardless of whether they have ever been to art school, or trained as an artist. One often hears a regretful voice saying I would love to have been an artist but I can’t draw to save my life. A digital camera, Adobe Creative Suite, a laptop and a pen tablet can fix that. The internet is filled with examples. Not all of it is art, just as not all writing is poetry, but digital technology and the internet has opened up new possibilities.

One can divide work into art shared through new technology but shown in real spaces, and art generated by digital technology that only exists in virtual space. At the intellectual end of these may be Jeffrey Shaw, a pioneering new media artist whose immersive artworks use digital technology, or the painting robot, Vertwalker — created by artists Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas. And at the playful end there may be the many creative, often irreverent, commentaries and images that find their way on to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Is this a new urban folk culture? A new dastangoi or virtual graffiti? The internet is free, often iconoclastic, a shared space for constant cultural commentary, and can be, as the author Melissa Langdon suggests, anti-ownership, sometimes even anti-authorship. Certainly a less intimidating space to experience art.

There is a cautionary side to this fairytale: technology changes — it can become obsolete or deteriorate. Would we expect it to last 100 years? Or as long as cave art made 30,000 years ago?

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist and heads the department of visual studies at the University of Karachi

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 23rd, 2017

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