Prior to the 20th century, the concept of “traditional art” ceased to exist— all art was traditional art, there was no need to distinguish between traditional art and digital art. As time has passed, however, art has been redefined through the forces of rationalization and introduction of new technologies.
Origins of Art:
The earliest records of “art” trace back to the era of cavemen, predating modern civilization by thousands upon thousands of years. Throughout the centuries, many of the pigments used in the original cave paintings, such as cadmium and ochre, have been continuously used in oil painting, which essentially rationalized the original cave pigments by turning them into more user-friendly commercially available paints. The use of oil paints remained an unchallenged medium of art from its inception in the 15th century, all the way up until 1955, when acrylic paints, a rationalized version of oil paints, entered the market.
Acrylic Paints:
Though most of the “known” artists used oil paints (Vincent Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monnet, etc.), acrylic paint is a much more popular medium in the modern age.
Unlike oil paints, acrylics are quick drying, adhere to any surface, have an even sheen, and don’t require a base coat. The decrease in drying time is extremely efficient, as each layer of oil paint takes several days to dry, whereas it only takes a few minutes for a layer of acrylic paint to dry. Moreover, decreased drying time can give beginner artists much more control during the painting process. Acrylics dry so fast that the paint applied to the canvas does not mix with the paint that is already on the canvas. With oils, paints often mix on the canvas if you are not careful, which is very difficult to control as a beginner artist. Oil paints have a tendency to accumulate on surfaces, meaning that if you apply too much paint, it will build up and create raised areas, giving texture to the previously flat canvas. To combat this effect, artists must use a paint thinner, such as mineral spirits, acetone, or turpentine (1), complicating the painting process even further.
Aside from greater efficiency and control, acrylics are also much more predictable than oil paints due to the fact that they appear the same on nearly every surface. Oil paints are much less consistent when applied to different materials, as they require a porous surface that will not be disfigured by the oils in the paint. Additional primers can be used to try and combat the incompatibility between oil paints and surfaces like glass, however that adds additional material costs, bringing us to the final dimension of rationalization— calculability.
The price of oil paints is dependent on the pigment, making it extremely difficult to calculate the cost of materials. Acrylics, however, are evenly priced across the color spectrum, making it much easier to estimate the cost of a painting beforehand. Moreover, A single liter of oil paint can cost anywhere from “$285 to $1,100” (9), whereas you can easily purchase a liter of acrylic paint for only $18 off of Amazon (10). Aside from the lower base cost of acrylic paint, it is also much cheaper because there isn’t the added cost of primers or paint thinners. On top of that, acrylic paint brushes often cost less and are much easier to clean than oil brushes (11). Calculability is all about maximizing profitability and producing higher quantities of a product for less time and money. By nearly every metric, acrylic paints greatly surpass the calculability of oil paints.
The Rise of Digital Art:
Following the success of oil and acrylic painting as “genres” of art, no new methods or mediums could compete until the rise of digital art. Along with the introduction of personal computers, a company called “Wacom” spurred the digital art revolution of the late 20th century (15). Wacom completely changed the art world by inventing a “technology called electro-magnetic resonance, which allows its styluses to generate energy and interact with a tablet without actually needing batteries themselves” (16). This engendered the rise of a rationalized artform, as the popularity of artists’ tools are often dependent on being efficient and user-friendly. With this new technology, Wacom picked up its first major client— the Walt Disney Company. Disney then used Wacom tablets to streamline the production of Beauty and the Beast (16), giving Wacom Hollywood recognition. Soon, they soon dominated the previously traditional/hand-drawn animation market due to their highly rationalized approach to the creative process.
For starters, tablets follow Ritzer’s principle of efficiency. Previously, animators would have to take out hundreds of colored pencils and/or markers and set up a station with adequate lighting, tracing paper, cel sheets, erasers, watercolors or oil paints, and rulers or proctors. With the introduction of the tablet there is no set-up required, aside from plugging in your tablet to your computer (17). Moreover, the shift to pixel based art brought Ritzer’s principle of control to fruition, allowing animators to size their subjects to an exact pixel count. Lastly, the tablet increased the calculability of the animation industry, as it provided a base cost with no need to purchase extra materials.
Despite its success in the animation industry, the tablet didn’t initially see much use by non-professionals or even professional artists outside of animation. It wasn’t until more art-based (as opposed to animation based) programs such as Adobe Photoshop became mainstream, that digital art really began to pick up with other types of professional and hobbyist artists. Photoshop is a continuously evolving application, existing as the perfect software for digital art tablets. Through photoshop, everything is rationalized to its max capacity. Photoshop maximizes efficiency by making every “traditional” form of art available on a single platform. There are brushes made to imitate an airbrush, an oil painting, charcoal, graphite, etc. Furthermore, there is no need for space or setup when using these tools digitally, whereas you need a designated space for traditional airbrushing.
Even surpassing the traditional mediums, digital brushes give the artist much more control than their traditional counterparts. Artists can choose exactly how many pixels digital “paint” is applied to, as well as the numerical value for opacity, hue, and saturation. With oil and acrylic paints, the majority of the colors used have to be mixed, which can result in uneven tones. It’s also nearly impossible to replicate a color exactly via mixing paints, whereas with digital art you can use the color picker tool to exactly replicate a color, or input the numerical values for the color. Beyond interface benefits, digital art can be infinitely reproduced and reused other artforms, making it surpass the calculability of any traditional medium.
Animation:
In recent years, visual arts have become greatly streamlined by digitalization and technological advancements. Works of art that may have once taken several hundred hours can now be completed within a day’s time; efficiency in the arts has skyrocketed in the past century. One might assume that increased efficiency would result in fewer jobs, as companies can hire fewer artists and still accomplish the same amount of work. However, trends in the animation industry suggest otherwise, there has actually been a sizable increase in jobs since the early 1900s (Gowanlock, 2020).
The animation industry is one of the most “traditional” professions in the art industry; animators often work at an hourly pay rate while employed by a large company like Disney. Other artistic professions are typically freelance or commission work, where artists are employed for a short period of time, or they are paid a one time fee. These artists are often employed by individuals or smaller companies/groups of people, so their employment statistics are much more difficult to track. For this reason, I’ve evaluated the growth of the animation industry in order to best track the effects of rationalization of visual arts.
One of the most well known animation studios, Disney, is a prime example of how— and why— the animation industry has evolved through rationalization, and how the number of jobs continues to increase despite such. On February 15th, 1950, the iconic 2D animation Cinderella was released (Seastrom, 2020), taking six years to complete (History.com Editors, 2009) with only five animators on staff (Seastrom, 2020). Comparatively, the 2018 release Frozen II took four years to complete, but had around seventy-five animators working on the film. The vast difference in production value can be attributed to one major difference between the films, animation style. While Cinderella is a two dimensional frame by frame animation, Frozen II is a heavily rendered 3D animation, with much greater detail.
It’s easy to wonder, why would Disney go through the trouble of producing a labor intensive film such as Frozen II when Cinderella was so popular and required much less artistic talent and time? To put it simply, the artistic industry as a whole closely follows George Ritzer’s third dimension of rationalization, predictability. As technology grows and artists are evolving to create works that far surpass that of their predecessors (3D animation vs. 2D animation), the audience—he consumers—come to expect the most updated and impressive art in the media. If Disney were to start releasing 2D animations like Cinderella in the modern age, they’d quickly be edged out of the market by competitors like Pixar, which could easily outashine dated works with 3D animation.
Even without competition studios like Disney need to increase the number of animators hired. Early animations were essentially flip books that were very costly to reproduce; however, in the current age of technology, animation can be shown indefinitely on a screen. This means that for every animation produced, there is a theoretically infinite amount of profit that can be made, the product (the animation) can be shown to new viewers or replayed to old viewers at no additional production cost. Following Ritzer’s tenet of calculability, it is most profitable for studios to produce as many quality animations as possible, and thus the number of animators employed continues to grow across the nation.
Lastly, the increase in animators can be attributed to Ritzer’s final point of rationalization, control. Animation is a product controlled by a schedule, they must absolutely be complete and ready for screening by their release date. In order for animations to be completed on a timely schedule, it’s best for studios to hire more animators over a short period of time rather than less animators over a long period of time. Again using Frozen II as an example, the film took only four years to complete, its production was 33% shorter than that of Cinderella which was a much earlier animation.
The applications of rationalization explored within this paper suggest an increase in jobs for the art industry (particularly animation), though at the cost of more labor intensive artworks. As artistic technology continues to grow and transform, the standard of work produced will likely continue to increase with it.
In George Ritzer’s theory of rationalization, he predicts a transition into the “robocalypse,” which replaces workers with machines. While the robocalypse looks different across various industries, it is becoming increasingly prevalent within the artistic discipline.
In 1973, University of California, San Diego professor Harold Cohen began working on an AI program titled “AARON” (4) with the intent of using machine learning capabilities to produce autonomous works of art. AARON exists as an ongoing project, currently containing approximately 1.5 megabytes of LISP code (5). With this data, AARON is capable of producing still lifes, human portraits, and abstract works, mostly mimicking the painting style of its creator, Harold Cohen (5). Notably, AARON does not produce digital art like many would come to expect— AARON mixes fabric dyes and paints similar to how humans paint. Much like gig economy workers, AARON and other robots don’t carry expenses like healthcare or overtime pay. While they have a much higher entry cost and require some level of maintenance, robots have the potential to be much more profitable than human artists.
Digitization of the Portfolio:
In the early ages of traditional art, artists had but one portfolio, which was a physical collection of their best works. As technology developed and social media came into play, the concept of an online portfolio rather than a physical one grew in popularity. Through any online portfolio site, traditional artists are able to directly upload scanned images of 2D artwork or photographs of multidimensional pieces. Moreover, the online portfolio serves as a bridge between digital artists and traditional artists. While the pride of traditional artists usually delineates an absence of technology in the artistic process, the way in which traditionalists’ present artwork holds no bearing on the integrity of said works. As a result, artists of every calibur and medium (digital and traditional) have flocked to online sites such as Artstation, Behance, DeviantArt, Patreon, Instagram, etc. to create a digital portfolio (Myle, N., 2021). On these sites, traditional artists can simply upload a photo or scan of their work, and it will be added to a collection of their existing artworks. Similarly, digital artists can upload a PNG, PSD, or JPEG file to add it to their portfolio. As long as the profile is public, anyone with internet will be able to view the image. This is a great example of George Ritzer’s third tenet of rationalization, predictability. Having a social media platform for art portfolios allows artists to gain recognition and amass a large following and perhaps get recruited by a studio, or receive commission work from individual followers. In this situation, the employers are able to gauge the extent of the artists skill via their online profile. This allows studios to “predict” the quality of their product, an artist with lots of amazing works will likely continue to produce impressive art if employed. Furthermore, studios can gauge how successful the artist will be based on their following. If an artist has x amount of followers on their portfolio page, the employer can predict that at least x amount of people like their content.
Conclusions:
As visual arts has grown from paintings made by cavemen with minerals to paintings made by AI with pixels, several things have been made abundantly clear. Firstly, rationalization greatly contributes to the popularization and production of art. With the addition of more user-friendly hardware and software, art has seen an exponential growth from the prehistoric era to modern day. The introduction of oil paint founded an explosion of the arts during the Renaissance era, followed by the popularization of art as a hobby rather than solely a profession with the introduction of acrylic paints. With digital art currently on the rise, art is more popular than ever. Even if it isn’t so obvious as a painting on a canvas, in the modern age we are constantly surrounded by products displaying graphic designs, watching animated movies, etc. And with the growth of the art sector, what humans (and AI) are capable of continues to flourish. Each increase in technology has created more jobs for artists, as more refined work is expected with more refined technology. It seems likely that visual art jobs will continue to grow, though there is a looming threat of automation in the distant future.
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