Told a gallery owner his digital prints were just photos, got an earful

At a small art fair in Portland last summer, I told this guy his digital pieces looked like filtered photos. He got quiet, then showed me his layered PSD file with 200+ hours of brush work and custom textures. I had to admit I was wrong. Has anyone else had to eat their words about what counts as 'real' digital art?

2 comments

2 Comments

matthewross17d ago

Yeah, I mean I get why the gallery owner was annoyed, but honestly I'm still not fully sold. Just because you spent 200 hours layering textures doesn't automatically make it 'real art' to me. It's like spending 200 hours making a really fancy filter - you're still starting with a photo at the end of the day. I've seen people run a photo through a bunch of Photoshop actions in like 20 minutes and call it digital art. Some of those custom textures are just downloaded brushes anyway. Idk, maybe I'm old school but if you can't recreate it with actual paint on canvas it feels like cheating to me.

noah_rivera5717d ago

Lol imagine dropping two hundred hours on something and someone still calls it a fancy filter, that's brutal but fair. I feel like if you can just download a brush pack and call it a day, it's more like assembling art than making it. But then again, I've seen oil painters spend ages on a piece that looks exactly like a photo, so maybe the line's already blurred. Still, telling a gallery owner their '200 hour labor of love' is basically a glorified Instagram filter feels like a great way to start a fight though. Would you rather defend digital art or just grab popcorn and watch?