The internet and the art world are no longer rivals. Online exhibitions are on the rise with no sign of slowing. From the Tate’s enormous showcase of its collection, DIY-scale student shows and virtual galleries like the Panther Modern (panthermodern.org), cyberspace art is more popular than ever.
Why has this medium exploded from obscurity to a major artistic force? Though we might be tempted to just blame the en masse turn to online culture during the COVID-19 lockdowns, online art didn’t just appear in 2020. Institutions have showcased their collections online for far longer than that – a convenient feature of the online space having no real limit on storage space – and internet-based art has been in the collection of the Guggenheim since its commission of the 1998 html work “BRANDON” by Shu Lea Chang.
But what motivates artists to take on an online format instead of the physical standard? To find out more, I asked artist Gabriel Lovejoy about his choice to release upcoming quarterly zine ‘MAN*MADE//MADE MAN’ as a digital rather than print work. He responded that “online means I don’t have to pay to produce, so I don’t have to charge for it! It also means it can be accessed by ANYONE and include hyperlinks so there can be more mediums involved!”
Online exhibitions have the capacity to make showing, selling, and making art, that little bit more accessible. The relatively low cost of running a domain and a website mean practically anyone can create an online exhibit. It might be a little more polished depending on your skills in web design, and marketing an online exhibit can take a different skill set, but ultimately anybody with internet access can participate with few barriers to entry.
Online exhibitions become accessible in ways physical exhibitions cannot. They are open around the clock, for a start. There is only the cost of keeping the website online to think about, with no staffing costs or risk of damage to the artworks – nobody can slip and break the picture of a priceless vase on a cyberspace podium.
In the wake of current economic difficulties across the world (especially cuts to creative spending), we can expect to see an exponential rise in online galleries and internet exhibitions, as more creators see the online space as a legitimate way to showcase work without hosting fees, praying for successful applications to group shows, and other barriers to art display.
By the side of the rise of the online exhibition we find the increasing number of open calls for artists to contribute to online shows – for a fee. Paying a small fee to enter an exhibition where hopefully you might find a buyer, or at least scribble the name of the show into your CV, is generally considered standard practice, but something about paying to have reproductions of artworks shown online doesn’t feel the same. Will online exhibitions eventually carry the same pedigree as the physical? Only time will tell.
A few qualities of internet-based shows make me reluctant to see them as competitors to “the real thing”. As somebody who spends perhaps too much of her free time walking around galleries, it just doesn’t feel quite the same. I want to see objects as 3-dimensional objects, I want the smells, the lights, the sound of others chatting about little details.
Online exhibitions lack the qualities that make it feel real to me, and so are that much less valuable to me than walking through a real, living, breathing gallery. Walking through art and history gives me a welcome break from the blue-light saturated screen-based world I live in. It feels even more important when the exhibitions are looking at historical objects. Do I really feel like I’ve stepped into a moment of history, when I’m looking at a 14th-century painting on a laptop screen?
I welcome artists using any and all tools in their disposal, especially in the pushing of new creative boundaries. As skills and spaces and ideas of the digital overlap with fine art, I’m excited to see how online shows can play with the qualities of cyberspace to make something new and wonderful. Online shows aren’t going away – and maybe they’re headed somewhere breath-taking.
“Red Scarf and iPhone, after Sir William Orpen” by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.