In the School of Visual Art + New Media (SUNY Fredonia), where I teach digital arts, the majority of my students are preparing to be illustrators and animators. They are working mostly with software and are wanting to work for major entertainment studios. And by working with digital tools, their art making becomes subject to duplication, revision, and easy uploading and downloading of files. Digital art can exist on one machine or many.


Art schools are still largely modeled on the belief in the development of style and skills through foundational learning, observation, art history, and the exhibiting of making things. They are pre-digital institutions and not mass production. Art history in particular provides a sense of the development and changing role of artists and the impact of their artwork. The hope being that art history instills a sense of time and place of the students to understand what has happened in fields of art as it is laid out by the art world. Yet when it comes to exhibiting in a gallery the students do not seem to have strong affection for the conventions of installing art. Knowing framing, and displaying art is shrugged off by some. This physical act of showing work in the White Cube Gallery is directly tied to the principles of exhibition done in the Art World of a museum gallery. This lack of interest in gallery exhibition seems to also indicate a lack of professional interest in the Art World. 


Students research the artistry and history of other artists if they want to be a professional. I find that the professional inspirations of my students are largely internet personalities; influencers, streamers, gamers, and visible artists on social media.  The windows of their smartphones and laptops provide glimpses into what others are creating as social media, which is disguised mass media. Historically, mass media are societal programming done through mass production of image and sound in print, radion, and TV. Artists used to resist, protest, mock, and appropriate mass media in the tradition of critical, conceptual, activist, and avant-garde art. Today, the independent endeavor of making things (art being one of them) is easily publishable as digital media. The world of creatives is increasingly an online experience, de-centralized, processual, with the product and production directly tied to a single artist as an identifiable brand. And although some online creatives may be associated with major institutions and studios, the creative fields of the art world, commercial design, media, and film production are significantly different experiences from the intenet. They are physcial places with addresses and closed off production.


So while students are taking classes in art and design, they are also peering into constant information streams. Is it the space of the school or the internet where art and design students find answers? And which space is more important to them? There are of course sections of production in art programs. Print making, graphic design, and video production exist in art programs, but even these areas are limited in comparison to schools of journalism, communications, and broadcasting. Art schools teach production as a craft but on a limited run. Like the Art World of museums and galleries, art schools emphasize the creation of objects whereas an education in communications would try to tailor art objects for public consumption or be implement into advertising and branding.


Indeed, most art schools are still modeled on the Art World, in which single or limited run objects are exhibited and advertised for gallery viewing. Students at Fredonia must attend gallery receptions, tours, and lectures about the art and artist(s). While SUNY Fredonia has a strong studio arts program in drawing, painting, sculpture, and ceramics, the areas of illustration, animation, and cinema arts are preparing students for jobs in highly financed studios and major publications. These students can even post their digital art projects online before it is even show in a classroom or gallery. Yet, the students must go to these Art World events whose very commercial value is not mass production of image and animation, but accessing the private space of the gallery. Considering how much the students are engaged with content space of the internet, in what sense do these traditional facets of the physical exhibition in an art school have for them?


Most art students do not become exhibiting artists in the museums. By working in digital media, most of them will go on to studio productions. But even film, animation, and game industries seem to be shrinking due to the cost slashing effects of better computers, programs, and AI. In other words the main viewing space of exhibition for the typical art student isn’t a physical gallery, but the virtual space where posted content and streams are experienced. A conflict can be seen between the two kinds of output: In-person and Virtual exhibition.

It is easy to post digitally and hard to install physically after all. Some of my students think that there is a future for them through self-publishing on websites such as Paetreon. Others may see live streaming as a beneficial, even though the stream would never be about the object itself but the performance of making art. This bend for digital consumption and mass media has been a threat to the art world for a long time. The maintenance of the single edition and distinct mediums have been held up as fine art against the kitsch of consumerism. Pop artists use of mass media and Video Art with its ephemeral qualities and technological connection to mass media have been collected and sanitized through careful writing and curation by critics and historians. As digital technology has advanced art museums and galleries must also collect certain kinds of the digital art. This is because mass media is just another mode of cultural production which rivals the production of the Art World. Besides selling artwork for vast sums of money, and grants, the only monetary value the Art World has is charging admission to experience artwork. Whereas the internet is a viewing space for media that is largely free and disposable viewing.


The art world has cultivated value through the archiving of artwork to be shown, toured, and advertised. Whereas the digitality of the internet is rapid, simultaneous, and modifiable but like video is hard to monetize outside of the model of paid advertising, such as television programming.


So is the answer that art schools must not only teach the process of making art, but also mass distribution due to the digital rendering of art? That only teaching gallery exhibition is a disservice to the students. Not even just web design, but also treating the internet as curatorial space and publication? Perhaps these young minds would be right at home online with their art, compared to the forced activity of gallery hangings. A student’s naïveté understanding about the logistics and materiality of framing, mounting, lettering, promoting, and even displaying digital media on a stand alone screen with speakers would be canceled out with a web platform. The internet does make displaying creativity look easy as operating systems and code adjusts audiovisual elements for mass engagement.


Then again, there was one time that some students told me they had never posted a video to YouTube. The simple process for posting a video publicly made them nervous. I can only assume because the  high quality standard of video production on Youtube is too intimidating for a young artist to ever want to post. We of course can look back and know that was not the case not too long ago. Now YouTubers invest in DSLR cameras and LED lighting, and conform to speaking styles. Young art students can be creative or find creativity online, but if they do will they just succumb to watching? Will the high quality of closed production intimidate them instead of provoking them to make?


I write all of this as way of working through the educational values that an art student can get through art school, but whose output as local or global modes of viewing appear to place art schools in a predicament of knowing essential skills. In my time as an undergraduate, I was taught that cutting mats and dry mounting were essential for photography. I do none of those things now. And I took video and media classes which focused on message and technique but not distribution or audience. My students are informed by not just the content of social media but also recognizing the platforms of distribution as having characteristics. Is physical space necessary for digital illustration and animation? Or is the physical space for art just the medium of curators, and the Art World is not where these students want to be? Is art education broken by technology that both displays and generates artwork all at once?