Want to visit the art gallery? Grab your laptop!

For many, viewing art has been an act of looking at pictures, sculptures, or other physical objects identified as "art". Most of the time viewing such objects required individuals to go to an art museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Louvre where you stand in front of the object and attempt to extract meaning from the creator's work. Often this has been seen as a high culture endeavor rather than one of average folks. But is this the only form of art and viewing such work? The answer, no.

Nowadays art is much more than paintbrushes, clay, marble, or welded metal. Art encompasses us in most everything that we do through media arts. Media arts also allows for a much more diverse group of people to participate in and do art--more diverse meaning almost anyone. Traditional art used a relate more to using a defined media in an emulation of a particular style to create art. Media arts are much less constraining and much more open, containing many different vehicles for art creation in the digital computer realm.

Everywhere I look on my computer there seems to be art. Everything from my operating system to many programs, flash games, websites, even web-based ads are artful and aesthetically pleasing. Higher stakes are being placed on digital media and the ability and willingness to engage in media arts is becoming more lucrative and mainstream. If you've ever visited Newgrounds to play a flash game or two, you know that everything on the website is user submitted. The site includes video games, pictures, and videos--many of which are original while others are remixes of other popular media.

There are a variety of digital museums devoted to new media rather than digital uploads from physical museums. One such museum is PrettyLoaded. This particular museum is purely devoted to flash load screens that typically appear while content is being loaded on a website. Another is The Digital Museum which is currently featuring a slew of anti-war art that appears to be primarily created in Photoshop. Large or small, static or fluid, new media art is something that has a relatively low bar of entry. Those who have any computer fluency most likely have already jumped into and already made digital media art. This group of computer fluent individuals is a growing number of today's youth who may not have a particular connection to or appreciation for traditional art.

Digital arts allow individuals to make a lot of what is around them into a personally meaningful work of art. Take a simple photo or even other work of art that is digital (even a digital version of traditional art) and it can be remixed and recycled into something that is meaningful to the individual creator. This also means that instead of cycling through a museum staring at pieces of art being purely a consumer, those creating digital art becomes a prosumer both adding to the art realm but also taking something away--meaning.

Another great example and a relatively low bar of entry is the viral sensation of lolcats. These are pictures of cats to which a funny caption (in kitty pidgin) is added to make a comedic piece of art. While this can be done through Photoshop, the original website allows users to pick a cat picture from a selection to which they can add a caption and post it on the website.

It would appear that many folks have actually created some form of digital art--perhaps annotating a youtube video--but do not realize it as art. While art is typically an abstract symbol, there will always be some contention as to what constitutes art. However, new digital art seems that it more readily can be called art as there is a far more diverse group of "critics" and viewers of the work.