The year is 2000 and the place is Chicago, Illinois. I am just one among I have no idea how many painters in this city producing work that goes from easel to storage without anyone ever having seen it. I know why I am painting, and will go into that subject in more depth at a later date. Here, I will discuss only two aspects of why I paint - for the work to be seen, and to earn money. Until recently, the principle ways for a painter to accomplish these goals has been to enter competitions, and to find gallery representation. For the purposes of this particular discussion, I am deliberately ignoring all aspects of skills promotion (illustration, advertising, etc.) and focusing exclusively on the production of fine art.
My experience with entering competitions has been pretty limited. I have been painting for 4.5 years now, and the closest I have come to a competition has been that I have been showing my work in a local Chicago art festival every fall, and for the past two years, that festival has had a selection process, where all of the festival artists' work is reviewed, and then a small number of them are given special notice by the reviewing body, so that they are the featured artists of the festival. My work was never chosen for this special recognition.
Some of the work that was chosen was obviously deserving of special recognition, and some of the work that was chosen was just as obviously incompetent. I am not talking about a matter of personal taste here. I know the difference between good and incompetent work across the board; realism, abstraction, shock art, I won't try to name all the different styles and 'isms.' I'm not even the tiniest bit unsure of my ability to judge good from incompetent art, and I will not pretend to be, even though it seems to be politically correct to do so. The people who reviewed the work all had important sounding titles to go along with their names, gallery owners, museum curators, etc., but some of the work that was chosen for special recognition was pretty sad. I just couldn't believe my eyes. In a way, I was sorry that my work was not chosen for special recognition, because of the very talented people whose work was selected, but in another way, I was glad it was not, because of the stuff that should have gone into the dumper, and which was instead set out as a fine example of what art should aspire to.
My experience with having gallery representation has also been pretty limited... in fact, it has been zero. Of course, I have only been painting for 4.5 years, so this may not seem surprising. In fact, I am not the least bit surprised. There are not enough galleries in the city of Chicago to represent all of the painters, sculptors, etc. who reside in the city of Chicago, so there is no physical way that they could all possibly be represented by a gallery. Of course, a lot of those artists are incompetent, and do not deserve gallery representation (I'm not going to try and pin down who is who, here, I'm just focusing on the overall numbers). At the same time, however, a lot of gallery owners are bound to be incompetent as well, just as not all doctors, lawyers, etc. who practice are competent, either. I am not referring to their competence as business people here, just their competence where knowing art is concerned. In fact, some are brilliant business people, and wind up selling all sorts of garbage at unbelievable prices. One would expect the percentage of incompetent gallery owners/ artists to be considerably higher than the percentage of incompetent surgeons or bridge builders, due to the fact that no one (as far as I know) has yet died from looking at incompetent art, and in fact, there is a lot of controversy over what constitutes good and bad art. (which is why I am using the word incompetent here, as distinct from the concept of 'good vs. bad.')
So what we wind up with, is an art gallery and competition scene that is riddled with incompetence, more interested in making money and advancing careers than it is in advancing art and the human condition. This isn't too surprising, it is pretty much the human situation in most pursuits, some more than other, to be sure, but to some degree true in everything we do. Still, the question arises: Is art, which seems to be so basic to our human nature, deserving of better than this, and if so, how can better be achieved? The first half of this question is easily answered in the affirmative. Art, science, and religion/ philosophy are all basic human pursuits; us trying to figure out who/what/when/where/why we are and what to do about it/each other. That is about as important as anything I can think of. Art, along with its cousins mentioned above, is part of the evolutionary process. I am not referring to genetic evolution here, but rather social evolution, although I do believe that they are really parts of the same thing - an organism adapting to its environment to insure its survival. While genetic evolution proceeds at a more leisurely pace, social evolution can move much more quickly, because it acts not on the information stored in our DNA, but on the information stored in our collective consciousness. Where does this collective consciousness reside? Lots of places; in our religions, political philosophies, cultures, systems of law, arts, applied arts, sciences, applied sciences, etc., and most recently (answering the second half of that question posed above).... on the Internet.
One of the earliest uses of the World Wide Web was for scientists to publish their papers, so that they could easily share information with one another. In fact, the language of the Web, HTML, was developed with that in mind, so that geeks of a non-computer nature would still be able to easily learn and use it, unlike the more complicated programming languages. Since its humble beginnings a decade or so ago, the Web has grown into possibly the largest repository of our collective consciousness in existence today. If this is not yet true, it is only a very brief matter of time before it will be true.
Especially for those visual artists who work in two-dimensional formats, the Web has already become a very friendly environment, and as technology continues to improve the visual acuity of computers, the situation will continue to improve. It is now possible for any artist with a computer, a phone line, and a very minimal amount of money, to publish his or her work on the Web.
This changes everything. Setting aside for a moment the question of selling art on the Internet, there is now the means available for ones' work to be seen, by anyone who has a computer. Social evolution is driven by ideas and knowledge, not so much by sales. For better or worse, artists no longer need to have gallery representation to give their work public exposure, and the public no longer has to depend on galleries and contemporary art museums to decide which work merits being seen, and which does not.
Gallery owners, curators and critics will have to contend with this new reality. The power to decide 'who shall be seen' has already passed to a large extent out of their hands. Individual artists now have the ability to present their work to the public and to their peers, in a manner and on a scale that was unimaginable to previous generations of artists.
To just very briefly address the potential for artists to sell their work online directly to the public, without the help of middlemen, and the consequent doubling of the price that is usually the case in work sold through galleries, it is my opinion that it is already happening, and that the trend will continue to grow, and will reshape the entire value structure of fine art worldwide, lowering the cost of new work substantially, and in so doing, increasing the size of that market accordingly. How could it be otherwise?
What will then happen to all the gallery owners, and VARPS (various art related persons) who find themselves no longer able to derive a living from tacking a percentage for themselves onto the sale of another person's work? I don't know. There will always be a need for brick and mortar galleries, museums, etc. Whatever form these institutions survive in, though, they will be by necessity a great deal different than the forms they had at the end of the twentieth century, given the shifts in power that are already happening in art as a result of the World Wide Web.