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an exhibition of surreal digital art created by Demetrios Vakras

Two decades ago airbrushing was on the verge of being accepted as a legitimate means for artistic expression. Books published in the late 1970s and 1980s lamented on the hostility of the art establishment accepting airbrushing as a legitimate medium equal to oil-painting, water-colour or etching...... now, it doesn't even rate a mention.

Nearly a century and a half ago the advent of photography was to have replaced the artist altogether. That never happened. Photography happily coexists along side oil-painting ... which brings us to computer generated imagery.

Although possibly not a transient trend like airbrushing, digital "art" may become its own specialist field, like photography. But practitioners in the field have to understand one fundamental point which has to date been ignored in the discussion: and that is whether the work in question is art regardless of the media used in its creation.

... Take as an example H.R. Giger. His work is airbrushed. Of the plethora of artists whose works were reproduced in various tomes on airbrush art his are some of the few that are still recognised as art. Why? Because his endeavour was to create art, not celebrate the tool it was created with! (There are a few other airbrush artists, Paul Wunderlich for instance, whose art also transcended the celebration of the tool it was created with.)

There is a sense of deja-vu about the digital art movement at the moment. It has replaced airbrushing. And, like airbrushing, it has become the tool of graphic designers (who should never be confused with artists). What should never be referred to as art quite often is - and the quite awful is celebrated as the success of the "digital revolution".

Much 2D digital work tends to be based on photography and has become the domain of graphic designers. It tends to be a cut and paste of other's photography (collage) - with no credit given to the source of the material. That is, the real artists (photographers) have their works appropriated by a talentless hack graphic designer who imagine themselves to have created art!

(In 1929 Max Ernst published his "pictorial novel" La Femme 100 tetes  illustrated with his collages of surprising and unexpected juxtapositions. They were works of inspired brilliance. Yet the 2D graphic designer of today who considers their works to be art has usually not even heard of Ernst!)

Other 2D digital designers tend simply to launch  an application, say, Adobe Photoshop, or Fractal Design Painter, cut, paste, feather edges and apply various filters. With filters a preconceived idea is not needed. A different sequences of filters especially between programs can create different results and thus one source image becomes a plethora of "individual" works of art. This is the pretension to art with the click of a mouse - "art" borne not from the desire to express a thought, an idea, but instead created to achieve an aesthetic result... Thus it is decor posturing as art.

Alternately there are 3D programs with which to create digital images. With a program like Metacreations Bryce it is extremely quick to create an image. Most of these compositions are generally nothing more than competent flower arranging (although flower arranging may be "an art" it is not art in itself!). You select your objects, group them, select their texture, select the sky, click a button and watch a "painting" materialise. The unfortunate side of  Bryce is the ease with which one can arrange objects (which the program can't model) and the assumption made by users that such rearrangments constitute art. The tragedy is when "Brycers" are celebrated for having done nothing more than import a figure (modelled in another program) into Bryce, arranged it within a scene, and then used a scan of a work by H.R.Giger as a texture (that is, the figure will have a Giger painting wrapped around it). The resulting image may look like a Giger, because it actually is. Copyright is an irrelevance to the Napster generation where the appropriation of others' endeavours is considered a right.

Visiting the plethora of 3D web-rings along with what are misleadingly titled "computer arts" magazines, I cringe with embarrassment at what passes for art. Graphic design is peddled as art because the graphic designers tell us it is.  If there is a sense of "sameness" it is because constrained by corporate advertising dictates, the design cannot risk alienating the market it is designed for. Banality thus becomes a virtue.

(Note: this is much the same as the corporate world's tastes in "Fine Art". Usually a non-figurative work with splashes of colour, smears of paint, without too much skill, is hung on the board-room wall. It adds colour to the walls but doesn't have much, if anything at all, to say .... The art that has proven itself popular to collectors is nonfigurative. It does not affront the senses or sensibilities; works well in decorating corporate walls; is egalitarian, not "elitist", as anyone can do it; can be argued to be "avant-garde" as it rejects "traditional" representational art, and thus appeals to "intellectuals" & theorists... An entire industry of galleries, critics, investment bodies and artists has grown around nonfigurative art. They all have a huge financial and intellectual interest in promoting their point of view. Were it all to collapse the vacuous arguments of the arts intelligentsia would be exposed for what they are & entire collections rendered worthless, not priceless. 24/5/2001)

Nudity in art has been derigueur since the Renaissance... However in the digital realm any hint of nudity is to be censored. You won't, for instance, see any of my images which feature the figure - for example the haunting i or hephaesteos' post industrial muse - reproduced in digital art magazines! This censorship might perhaps be pertinent when it comes to advertising or for book/cd cover illustrations, however it has no place in art.

At this stage I cannot see digital art being defined as art without being ridiculed. There are some brilliant artists but they are swamped by a teeming mass of mediocrites, illustrators who should never be defined as artists but often are. Ultimately, those digital practitioners who will be deemed artists will be very few indeed - as was the case with airbrushing.

(I must, at this point, confess to an admiration for the 3D work created for the film industry: 3D animation. With high-end 3d programs (including the disastrous Lightwave) we have a new art of the imagination animated. However, it must be noted that this industry does nothing more than animate the ideas others have drawn, others have conceived, others imagined, and thus by definition is a craft like that practiced by carpenters, set-builders etc., rather than art. There has yet to be a digital Jan Svankmajer.)