New Presentations of Art

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Text: Luciana Grosu
Photography: Caroline Hargreaves


During the past centuries, traditional art forms like sculpture, painting or opera have slowly lost popularity among the younger generations. Today’s youth are no longer interested to visit museums, galleries or go to the opera, but are more opened to pop music, cinema and computer visual arts. Literature also ceased to be youth’s number one free time-occupation, maybe because reading a book takes a lot more time than watching a movie, which is more dynamic and easier to understand.

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One may argue the youngest have a different inner structure and that is the reason why they reject older art manifestations. Even if this statement would be true, this would only explain which style of art they prefer (what kind of sculpture, what kind of literature), but not the option for the form of art itself. A certain form of art is not bounded by any ideas, values or socio-cultural concepts. All forms of art can express the “soul” and the “thoughts” of any society at a given time.

So the problem is not that art itself is no longer “popular”, but the form in which it is presented. We may assume that no one ever wanted to give up any kind of artistic manifestation, but, that at a certain moment, many youth simply felt that the way some arts are presented no longer follows the rhythm of their lives.

The new technology makes things move a million times faster and as a consequence the young generation gained the capability to absorb a lot more information in a very short amount of time.

Young people no longer have the patience needed to “perceive “and understand traditional art forms. Reading every page and every line of a book, going to a gallery and observing every artwork, waiting for the actors to give life to the story without any movie-like “special effects”, all these details that are still delighting art-lovers can become a nightmare for a youth who is accustomed to live his/her life at a another pace.

In order to make sure no art form will disappear, artists should transform the way they “present” their art to the young public. The new form of delivery should be more dynamic and syncretic:

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Dynamic. This would mean a more rapid rhythm and a more spectacular way of presenting the artwork. For example, all galleries and art exhibitions should have online portfolios with animations/clips presenting the work of each artist. After watching the clips, the “online” visitor should decide whether he wants to visit “in person” the exhibition. Whenever visiting the gallery, aside of being given the chance to buy the artwork itself, the client should have the possibility to “buy “digital photos/videos of the artwork to display on his mobile phone, computer, or other portable electronic devices.

Syncretic. There should be more than one art involved. In the case of literature, a novel could become an interesting e-book containing both the story and some photos made by the author in order to illustrate the story. A poetry-book might contain aside of the poetry itself some abstract video animations. At the theatre or the opera the public could simultaneously watch on a giant screen an older representation of the spectacle or other images related to, but not part of the play itself.



All traditional art forms could benefit from technological developments and attract the public through rhythm, movement, fusion of different arts. Even ephemeral artistic manifestations like sand art, snow sculptures, food decoration, flowers and vegetal sculptures, fireworks shows, body painting, happenings and performances can now be video-taped, retransmitted to the world and thus, immortalized. Your creation may have been destroyed long ago, but your artist fame could still be growing on You Tube!...

Luciana Grosu is a Romanian artist. She will contribute with articles on society and culture.