The Matrix of Sensations | Donald Kuspit
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-5-05.asp
“I present to you what I think is a radical thesis: that the period of avant-garde painting, which officially began with the so-called color patches of paint in Manet?s Music in the Tuileries Gardens in 1862, and climaxed almost a century later in the dynamic tachisme of European art informale and American modernist painting, was a time of transition from traditional analogue art to postmodern digital art, that is, to an art grounded in codes rather than images. […]The grid of the computer screen is the postmodern realization of the traditional perspective grid that isolated the figure in sacred space. It involves the same universal geometry, with its ideal proportions — refined with great precision — that appears in Renaissance architecture, with its grid-like plans and facades, suggesting that the computer signals a new Renaissance of art-making. Like the Renaissance artist, the digital artist must be a learned craftsman — an artist who has to learn a craft that is at once material and intellectual — at a time when a good deal of art seems craftless and pseudo-intellectual, that is, not rigorously logical inwardly and outwardly. Digital art offers new hope for art at a time when the traditional media seem to have exhausted their potential — however useful they undoubtedly are for individual expression and however socially meaningful they remain — and thus a new way of revitalizing the traditional media.”