on the "future of art" (part 2)

ive read a few musings from other people in the past year about the hard pivot to analog, "handmade" aesthetics that's gripped the art world in the past handful of years. i say a few, but really, there was a time at the tail end of 2025 where you couldnt get away from it in culture headlines. "gen z and analog revival", those are some words i saw a lot. go ahead and plug that in duckduckgo or whatever else, youll get a ton.

this is a trend that just makes sense. started to notice it around 2023, right when generative AI got scary good. that entire art-for-livelihood world held its breath for a second, waited to see if it was a fluke, and inched just a few more paces away from their adobe suite. better to wait some storms out.

art responds to the present. when the present entails the designed obsolescence of an entire merchant class-- and with such raw, devil-may-care market-melting acceleration-- i think it makes a good deal of sense that art responds in turn: indignant, feverish, craft-forward, texturally insistent.

in practice, this might look like digital oil paints piled high on a flat jpeg. it might look like revivals and reintroductions of industrial typefaces as variable opentype fonts. increasingly, i see it looking like revitalized, community-wide interest in makerspaces, sculptural and installation pieces, and "hands-on" creation.

it makes sense that most of the analysis ive seen irt the analog boom has leaned individualist and existential, with a pointed focus on a return to analog aesthetics as a political statement. i say analog aesthetics because this distinction is absolutely necessary-- the digital toolset is just the TOOLSET now, and a significant portion of the artwork born from this analog boom has little to no material basis in the analog it intends to evoke.

this isn't to call it dishonest, either. that, too, feels like a distinction worth making, because the flavor-of-the-week cultural analysis topic seems to be nostalgia poisoning -- something i'm always happy to see more musing on in the current landscape, for the record, but this is not my angle. when i put my ear to the ground, the rhythm in the artscape right now does not really say "RETVRN" in the ways we sometimes fear. astroturfing is astroturfing for a reason-- i am not naive to how easily fascism takes hold, but some lines of thinking simply aren't sensible or sustainably popular. did you hear tucker carlson's only got 7.2k paid subscribers?

we're adaptable, and the ways we use our computers for art often feel as natural to us as the ways we use traditional tools. i say "i want to draw", and i reach for my ipad.

it's not that there isn't a dissonance-- if there wasn't, we wouldn't be in the middle of a nostalgia movement-- but i'd argue that this dissonance is so small in many of us as to be negligible, not unlike the ways drivers start seeing cars as extensions of themselves on the road. in that way, i feel that a melding of digital and analog aesthetics+toolkits is as truthful to the human present as it gets.

i understand the phenomenon of this analog reclamation, and the marrying of these toolsets as an expressionist political statement. it is not a statement im inclined to make my own-- it is the statement of a merchant class attempting to rejustify itself after accelerationists have shaken its foundations completely loose. it is, in the most textbook sense, a petty bourgeois artistic concern of reaffirming neither self nor expression proper, but legitimacy.

i say this as an economic statement, not as a judgment of character. this distinction is one i'm learning to remember saying out loud, because i am among fellow artists. i am under no illusions that artists are collectively living comfortably right now-- i'm only saying that this is a trackable pattern for artisan classes during major market upsets. were i a career artist and not a sick guy who paints -- no actual distinction, by the way, just what class structure you have to fall back on-- i think id be coming at it from this angle too.

but i'd like to posit a different reason for leaning into faux-analog. it isn't even that i'm opposed to this expressionist angle-- i've just done a lot of chewing on what draws me towards mirroring traditional mediums in digital toolsets, and my answer is underwhelmingly utilitarian. it rests in the economic.

the answer is "it's here". yknow, my mother always thought it was a statement that i didnt shave my legs. i just didnt feel like doing it.

i've been using procreate for about seven years now. it's a great all-purpose set for illustration, and it's done me a lot of good. i imagine i'll keep using it for years to come. but illustration really is just one angle, and i know myself to get bored quickly. once something is too routine, its ability to scratch a creative itch becomes very limited for me. the true ROUTINE that keeps me coming back to art is more about finding rhythm and sustainability-- i know i'm "succeeding", artistically, when my nerves settle in a bit and bask in the relief of getting to speak.

and the methods to do so just keep expanding! i like that part. im starting to feel a bit behind the curve there. procreate is a delight, but artset gripped me with a rush of pure novelty. i didnt know we could emulate traditional tools like this now! when i remember being a kid futzing with autodesk sketchbook like it was yesterday....! i dunno. its nuts. the way you can digitally mix and pull paint around a canvas now is just nuts.

i like to play with traditional mediums when i can, but i run into two walls very quickly.

the first is space. physical objects pile up quickly, in ways that demand designated areas to use them easily. barring the space to do so, you have to optimize the space you have as transitory and modular. canvases are bulky. storage containers add up. theres a lot of moving to do.

that leads me to the second wall-- gargantuan energy cost. i am not well.

i need my wife's help to place my laptop over me in bed. i have to watch how much i move my neck. i cant be bending over much. i certainly cant be hunching. i wall-surf or i don't walk. i can only justify the energy cost of leaving my house for medical appointments. you might be able to anticipate why moving supplies to and fro is an obstacle. painting in bed sounds like a great deal of fun, for people who wouldnt mind sleeping in a messy bed. when youve gotta be in one as much as i do, you like keeping it at least a little nice.

artset, or other digital programs mirroring traditional toolsets, is not really a "substitute". it is not my attempt at reclaiming the digital in a more traditional way. it would be, if i needed it to be, but i like that it is what it is. to "evoke" a traditional medium is not my aim-- only to play with the tools in front of me, as they arise. this is not to say that the emergence of these tools is ever apolitical. a commercial yearning for "the authentic" makes this tech happen.

my marriage to this expanded, faux-analog toolset is a marriage of convenience. i think it also tells a story about what facets of living are increasingly not afforded to us.

if i could make it to community workspaces and studios, physically, i very much would. if i could make it to conventions, i would. when living starts looking like multiple days in a row of "if i could make it upstairs, i would" -- convenience stops being optional. it starts being a reliable ticket to doing the things youve always known to make you happy, where otherwise you may not anymore.

self actualization is romantic, and it's certainly worthy of time and effort, for all it amounts to in sustained survival-- but the unspoken implication underneath just keeps ramming up against the floorboards: the artist who can spend their body of work on "who am i in all this, anyway?" is someone who has time and money to do so.

a good deal of artists are hungry to be seen. plenty more are just hungry.

plenty of us sit somewhere strangely in between. food or shelter assured, but medicine out the window. or maybe healthcare squared away, but nowhere to fucking sleep. it is the exact type of strange, cruel limbo afforded to the majority after "the largest upwards transfer of wealth in american history".

my statements of intent take root in my body, because it is what allows me to make art. the world that turns will keep whittling my body down, and increasingly my domain of expression might be one of the tools i am afforded. i respect the drive to imbue the tools with extra meaning, but it feels needless. luxurious in a way that does not suit me right now.

i dont enjoy how self deprecating artists can be as people. i often can't shake the feeling that our ideas, our techniques, and our tools of the trade must be so imbued with meaning only because our bodies are not. the body that makes the work is cheap, or otherwise there is an inherent embarrassment in being the vehicle for art while inhabiting the forms we do. we can realize, hone, and enshrine things like "beauty" and "order". our bodies are dynamic, just as potent with the seeds for further realization and embodiments of self, but they require sitting in the presence of processes we cannot control. this is often too much. i don't resent it. i've lived it. i would not condescend to anyone in such a deep state of pain or crisis that sitting in the body is intolerable -- i have had to learn how, and will need to keep learning as i break new thresholds for pain and sensation.

art is one of the things that makes this not just possible, but enjoyable, against some pretty cosmic odds. getting good at hypnosis and meditation is another. i still slip and need to regain my footing all the time, but when i zoom out and see the progress i've made, it becomes a lot clearer to me that this rhythm is sustainable because my workflow is. with more experimentation, i may be able to expand my physical/traditional workflow in time-- but right now, my ipad continues to scratch the itch, simply because new tech means new toys to play with. it doesn't "feel" like real painting, and i don't create with the intention of evoking a "real" painting, either. that is another way to make art, and very fun, but not often easy to facilitate. what i put in front of you, a digital illustration, logs time my body spent on a particular stretch of screen. that is a physical act.

you could argue that all this pixel oil paint is still part of a wider trend in attempting to reaffirm the real as it starts to slip away, and from a cultural/anthropological perspective, i'd have to agree. theres no escaping being a creature of the present, and that will always include me. ive got a separate but adjacent thread running through my own art philosophies right now -- an itch to affirm my time moreso than my "authenticity"-- and i see ways that modern digital paint open new avenues for this, where flatter splashes of color did not on their own.

but each method of making art relies on the same vehicle. each one relies on my body, which capital renders cheaper and more obsolete by the day. i don't embrace the faux-analog and i don't eschew it-- it is the logical and honest workflow of an ailing body, conveniently reaching for the tools at arm's length because "the real thing" is a luxury.

i said a while ago that i wasn't sure what the future of art looks like. dont mistake me for a pessimist--i think art always has a future.

i also think it's dead in the water, forever and ever, the second the human body has no camp to call home.