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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1196 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 3, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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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.

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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