Making a Statement with Original Art
Ever noticed how every one has the same stuff on their walls these days? It's not a new trend – the idea of fashionable art works has been around for centuries, started by the age-old desire of the hoi polloi to copy cat their rich and famous masters. Whenever it became known that a Duke or Duchess had a certain print on their walls – well, then every serf in town set out to decorate their hovel in similar fashion. Not much has changed about that: except, of course, that one now looks more at the glamour palaces of the rich and infamous to dictate the style of one's home. Not very original. Fortunately, all that is starting to change since people discovered that it is possible to get good original art online.
See, the thing about decorating one's home, which is really the same as the thing about fashion, is this: everyone wants to individualise, they want to make a unique statement – but they also want to be a part of whatever trend happens to be current. It's the dichotomy of personal style writ large. One wants to be unique but one cannot be seen to be too different. So one's uniqueness ends up having to conform to an overall idea of what acceptable individuality might be – which, for want of a better metaphor, ends up with everyone wearing boot cut jeans and lumberjack shirts.
Original art, thank whatever power it might be that governs the tastes of a nation, is managing to circumvent this sameness rather neatly, by allowing people to have the same sorts of things in their homes (i.e. original artworks) – but letting those things be individual in their own right.
Let's explain. Unlike any other form of fashion, where there has to be a degree of visual conformity in order for the whole thing to work, an artistic fashion that demands originality as its key point opens a rather marvellous world in which anything goes. The only criterion, in a fashion for having original art on one's walls, is that the art in question be original. Anything reproduced, or the same as something someone else has, is automatically out. And so, suddenly, fashion itself becomes about not being like the neighbours.
If that's the case, and it is, then praise be for the Internet – which is how all this came about. Pre Web, no-one had any access at all to art, unless it was forced on them by galleries (notorious for "deciding" what is, or is not, art) or sold them as repro posters. Who could find original art back then, let alone afford to buy it? Now, pioneering super sites, like UK based Art2Arts, are bringing a world of genuinely original pieces to the everyday buyer – quality controlled, guaranteed original and easily searchable by all sorts of decorative factors: style, size, colour, depiction and so on. Now that's how art should be, original art- available for the masses to decide what's good and what's not – and to buy and stick up on the wall.
See, the thing about decorating one's home, which is really the same as the thing about fashion, is this: everyone wants to individualise, they want to make a unique statement – but they also want to be a part of whatever trend happens to be current. It's the dichotomy of personal style writ large. One wants to be unique but one cannot be seen to be too different. So one's uniqueness ends up having to conform to an overall idea of what acceptable individuality might be – which, for want of a better metaphor, ends up with everyone wearing boot cut jeans and lumberjack shirts.
Original art, thank whatever power it might be that governs the tastes of a nation, is managing to circumvent this sameness rather neatly, by allowing people to have the same sorts of things in their homes (i.e. original artworks) – but letting those things be individual in their own right.
Let's explain. Unlike any other form of fashion, where there has to be a degree of visual conformity in order for the whole thing to work, an artistic fashion that demands originality as its key point opens a rather marvellous world in which anything goes. The only criterion, in a fashion for having original art on one's walls, is that the art in question be original. Anything reproduced, or the same as something someone else has, is automatically out. And so, suddenly, fashion itself becomes about not being like the neighbours.
If that's the case, and it is, then praise be for the Internet – which is how all this came about. Pre Web, no-one had any access at all to art, unless it was forced on them by galleries (notorious for "deciding" what is, or is not, art) or sold them as repro posters. Who could find original art back then, let alone afford to buy it? Now, pioneering super sites, like UK based Art2Arts, are bringing a world of genuinely original pieces to the everyday buyer – quality controlled, guaranteed original and easily searchable by all sorts of decorative factors: style, size, colour, depiction and so on. Now that's how art should be, original art- available for the masses to decide what's good and what's not – and to buy and stick up on the wall.
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