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<< explores from a philosophical point of view (i) how this fusion takes place, (ii) the relationship between the digital image and traditional painting and especially (iii) the status and legitimacy of the traditional physical painting in the current Digital Era.