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Notes -
Is there anything interesting going on artistically lately?
Aside from the obvious, that digital artists are getting supplanted by cheap, fast AI images?
I tried searching a bit, and asking ChatGPT, and mostly people seem to be saying that there are a bunch of different things going on, many of which are identity based and fairly boring as far as I'm concerned. The last large movement I liked was probably Impressionism; Art Deco is also pretty good.
People around here mostly paint the hills and skies, which I think is just kind of a default, I don't know if I'd call it a movement. I guess recently I like the atmospheric, somewhat out of focus landscape artists, like Gareth Edwards or Paula Dunn.
If you like surreal, nightmarish art in the vein of HR Giger or Zdzislaw Beksinski, maybe check out the work of Suguru Tanaka. His stuff is very visually striking and has quite an otherworldly quality to it I quite enjoy.
Not sure if this would be up your alley though. And yes, most of the trends in visual art as of late (I would argue even since the mid-20th) have been lacklustre at best.
Thanks! That is pretty interesting. I did like the few Lovecraft stories I read more than I had expected as well.
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As far as I can tell, the major art movements of the past 50ish years are Apple minimalism and anime. I’ll openly confess that it’s not too inspiring, but both have very definite ideas about the form and purpose of art which have insinuated themselves into the overall cultural moment.
Insofar as I don’t recall many people writing on these as art movements I suppose they could be interesting.
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Extremely absurdly niche genres/mediums that you can't train an AI on because there's no prior art is my guess of where to look.
Where to look for what? Interesting artists?
On the one hand, that's likely to be true, like the interesting music coming out of various subcultures in the 90s.
On the other hand, I'm not sure how one would go about looking for that. They have an "artist studio tour" in my area, and although there are something like 40 artists, I didn't find anything I felt any energy from. They were mostly boomers painting hills, or sometimes textural abstract sorts of things.
I don’t know where you live, but assuming it’s in the West, I would recommend searching out the more prestigious art colleges/universities in your state/province/region.
If it’s anything like my home then you’ll find that the graduate exhibitions display some pretty out there work, 90% of which is garbage with no value or meaning (you could argue that about the boomer hill paintings too).
Point is: the young are who drives the new directions in the art world. It might be limited to the “underground” world for 10 plus years but eventually someone will come along and commercialise/ruin it. So get in while it’s fresh!
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