Étiquette : contemporary artistic creation

Why Do We Still Need Artists?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 6 commentaires
Artistic portrait in pink, red and orange tones, with a face emerging from light and colour.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi avons-nous encore besoin des artistes ?

An everyday scene:

You go online and open a search engine.
You type: “What is art for?”
Within seconds, you get an answer:
“Art is a way to express emotions, question the world, and connect people.”

All of this is true.
But something is missing.

We are constantly trying to understand the world we live in. Statistics tell us about poverty, aging, or isolation. Scientific research helps us better understand climate change. Economic, historical, and social analyses help us explain the transformations taking place in our societies.

We need all of this knowledge.
But there is more than one way to understand the world.

A statistic can tell us that thousands of people live alone. A poem can make us feel loneliness. A report can describe the consequences of a war. A photograph can make us stop and look at the face of someone living through it. A study can analyze a society. A novel, a song, a film, or a play can take us into the experience of the people who live in it.

These are not competing ways of understanding the world. They reveal different dimensions of it.

This is where the particular role of artists begins.

Artists bring their own way of seeing the world. They can draw attention to what goes unnoticed, give form to an emotion that is difficult to name, or reveal a reality from an unexpected angle. Through their works, they offer us new ways of seeing, feeling, or imagining the world.

But a way of seeing is not enough.

The artist looks for a form in which to share it: words, an image, a melody, a story, a movement, a scene, a film, an installation. The work then becomes a means of communication between a singular way of seeing the world and other human beings.

We do not only need to know what kind of world we live in. We also need to feel what it means to live in it, to imagine it, and sometimes to dream it.

Artists offer us their way of seeing and invent forms through which they can share it with us.

The artistic gaze enriches human experience. Reality is not discovered through rational analysis alone.

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This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

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© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor

Why Continue Making Art in a Digital World?

Publié le Publié dans Understanding Today's Culture (EN)Étiqueté , , , , , , , , , , 6 commentaires
A human hand points toward the orange intersection of two black-and-white checkerboard circles.

Read this article in French:
Pourquoi continuer de faire de l’art dans un monde numérique ?

An Everyday Scene:

You log on.
You ask a search engine to show you some artistic creations.
It presents you with photographs, paintings, poems, films, sculptures, digital works, and sound art.

And you wonder: in a world where technology can produce images, texts, sounds, and videos in a matter of seconds, why do human beings still devote time to creating?

Surely, creating is not just producing.

For a human being, creating is an experience. It means searching, choosing, hesitating, feeling, starting over, sometimes abandoning one idea to follow another. The work is the result of this process, but the experience of creating matters too.

Humans have always created to express what they feel, tell stories about what they experience, understand what is happening to them, imagine what does not yet exist, or share their way of seeing the world. They give form to their experience: a text, an image, a piece of music, a movement, an object, a film, a digital work. From the age of cave art to our age of generative art, humans still feel the need to give form to their experience and share it.

Whether it is seen by millions of people or only a few, a creation can have meaning for the person who brought it into being. Because before a work can circulate, be discovered, transmitted, or recognized, someone first had to feel the need to create it.

Technology has always transformed the means of creation. Photography, cinema, computers, the Internet, and now artificial intelligence have opened up new possibilities.

The question, then, is not about choosing between humans and technology. A human being can create with a pencil, a camera, a video camera, a computer, or algorithmic tools. The tools change. The forms change. The way we create changes too.

But human experience continues.

We continue to love, lose, hope, doubt, observe, remember, and imagine. And as long as we feel the need to give form to that experience, we will create.

We will continue making art.

📚 All Micro-essays

This text is part of the Understanding Today’s Culture series, a chronicle of our global networked culture.

→ Return to the Micro-essays page

Explore Further

🟦The More Digital the World Becomes, the More Important the Human Becomes

🟦Why I Continue to Write and Publish in a World Saturated with Technology

🟦Why Do We Still Need Artists?

🟦Art, Culture, and Humanity in the Algorithmic Age of Artificial Intelligence

🟦Humanist Digital Art: A Global, Poetic and Digital Artistic Practice

© Gilles Vallée | Humanist Digital Artist, Poet, Sculptor