Abstract
At the height of the industrial revolution in Europe and the United States there emerged a burgeoning market for works of art which conveyed a bucolic agrarian past, particularly in the form of landscape paintings which depicted people living and working in harmony with nature in a poetic and prosperous manner. In reality, the patrons of this art lived and worked in cities, which had been dramatically transformed by factories and industrial zones, and their interest in such imagery was driven by a poignant nostalgia for an imagined bygone era. In the digital age we may be confronting a similar cultural paradox, and one which has produced a powerful nostalgia for the recent analog past. Not surprisingly, contemporary visual artists are among those that have been influential in expressing an emerging nostalgia for an era of pre-digital originality and authenticity. One such artist is the American painter Wade Guyton, who has made his early career out of digitally-generated works that are often concerned with appropriating the analog uniqueness of late modernist aesthetics. In considering the recent works of Wade Guyton as emblematic of the technological transformation of painting in the 21st century, this paper explores the degree to which our digital present is filled with a predictable, and perhaps understandable, nostalgia for the imagined glories of the recent analog past.
Presenters
Michael FreemanProfessor of Art History, Art Department, Western Oregon University, Oregon, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
New Media, Technology and the Arts
KEYWORDS
Digital Nostalgia, Analog Authenticity, Contemporary Art, Wade Guyton
