I’ve made more than a few posts on this blog about how technology has changed the business and art of photographic sexual imagery. I’ve made posts about the VCR, posts about the CCD chip size in digital cameras, posts about how fantastically capacious and inexpensive DVD replication is; and how all of this has contributed to how today’s porn looks, feels, and is sold.

Throughout my now two decade “career” as an artist, I’ve always felt like there’s a certain antipathy towards this view of the creative process. There’s this notion that the creative impulse is pure, that it (should) transcend technology and rise above money. The notion that art might be inhibited (or empowered!) by technological or financial considerations seems to lay at odds with our culture’s romantic notions about the artist as a pure and unfettered being, beholdent only to her vision, and willing to make any sacrifice in the pursuit of that vision.

So imagine my fanscination (and perhaps a sense of vindication) when I heard “How Painting Advanced with Paint Tubes” on NPR on my way home from dropping my daughter off at school this morning. I had long been familar with the way that the new, vibrant, synthetic pigments had helped to usher in Impressionism, but I had never considered how the portability of putting that paint in a tin tube had effect where an artist would paint, what an artist would paint, and how an artist would paint.

(In school I did get into a bit of trouble writing inflamatory essays about how the Deguerreotype had, in the space of about 10 years, rendered painting utterly irrelevent as an art form, but that’s a subject for another post on another day.)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 6:28 am and is filed under Filmcraft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.