took me 24 hours - what should i improve?
by u/qziiss in DigitalArt
A while ago, as I was scrolling through Reddit community r/ContemporaryArt, I stumbled across a now-deleted post asking about what contemporary kitsch looked like. I thought this was an interesting question, because my prior limited understanding of kitsch covered grandmotherly trinkets and Jeff Koons’s balloon dogs. Someone had responded that kitsch today manifested in r/DigitalArt, a community for contemporary folk art in the form of fanart, anime, character design and illustration, and furries. The comment imparted a derisive tone.
This struck me as someone who was introduced to the art world through digital art. My art practice was revolutionized after acquiring a laptop and a Wacom tablet as a young teen. No longer did I need a lot of space or materials to make art – I could pump out multiple digital artworks a day and then post them online, usually on a social media site for artists (it seems that all information about this one particular site I used was scrubbed from the internet because I can’t even find its name). In fact, many artists were doing the same. And we weren’t making groundbreaking work. Most of the art made and disseminated online took the form of digital fanart, anime, original characters, and the like. The digital medium had become a printing press for content to be spread across the internet.
The art I made was sentimental, fun, and was meant for the communities I posted in. I made fanart for animes I enjoyed. I created my own characters. I made anime music videos (AMVs) when video editing software was a lot harder to access than it is now. Although I can’t look back at what I made, since I didn’t keep an archive, I see many parallels to my own past work in what is being created now in digital folk art. It’s a medium with a low barrier to entry since it doesn’t always require highly specialized skills. In fact, digital artists today don’t need drawing hardware like Cintiq tablets or fancy software to make art; one may only need their smartphone to create and disseminate as many memes and images as desired.
The definition of folk art, in a broad sense, is art that is centered around a community and a shared visual language. According to Wikipedia, A folk art object is one that is “recognizable within its cultural framework as being of a known type.” While folk and kitsch possess different meanings, both have been historically categorized as being lowbrow or unsophisticated.
But as I read more about kitsch aesthetics I came to two realizations; one, that it’s a topic best enjoyed when approached critically, and two, that after approaching it critically and with an understanding that a massive amount of recontextualization has happened since its Greenbergian interpretation, kitsch may no longer function as a stable or useful classification of art today.
Clement Greenberg, in his 1939 essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch, proposed a dichotomy which divided art into high (avant garde) and low (kitsch) categories:
“The alternative to Picasso is not Michelangelo, but kitsch.”
— Clement Greenberg, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939)
Greenberg was concerned about the watering down that would happen with mass production to the formal rigor of avant garde art. Kitsch was seen as art for the masses, easily digestible and distributable. It was the antithesis to the Avant Garde – the new, the sharp and the exciting. With this dichotomy in art, Greenberg also describes a bleak separation in society:
“There has always been on one side the minority of the powerful – and therefore the cultivated – and on the other the great mass of the exploited and poor – and therefore the ignorant. Formal culture has always belonged to the first, while the last have had to content themselves with folk or rudimentary culture, or kitsch.”
It doesn’t take a lot of scrutiny to see the problems in his argument. Why must the ignorant masses be so blinded by spectacle to enjoy true, cultivated art? I tried to put my peasantness aside, and yet, I struggled to find evidence of the avant garde as it manifests today. There is no cohesive movement, no abstract expressionism to keep things pushing along. Instead, art has taken many different directions: conceptual sculpture, video and internet art, performance based art, abstract to hyperrealist painting. Are any of them avant garde or kitsch? I don’t really think so. Like branches forking off from the great art tree, every movement is valid, and has its own purpose in its place and time. The avant garde may no longer exist. So I propose that forms of digital folk art seen today as lowbrow or kitsch, like fanart and memes, should be interpreted no higher or lower than any other art form.
One of the biggest questions I had when researching digital folk art, especially in relation to Greenberg’s concern about mass production, was about the consequences of AI.
I came across two essays: "The Internet Was the Beginning of a New Folk Artist. Artificial Intelligence May Be Its End." by Ruby Justice Thelot, and "The Year in Digital Folk Art: Much of 2025’s Creative Innovation Happened Outside the Art World" by Louis Bury. the first discusses the implications of a content creator society entering an AI revolution, and the second, published as a response to Thelot’s essay, details ten examples of digital folk art.
Thelot draws a parallel to the Industrial Revolution, noting how folk artists were displaced as mass production expanded:
“It is likely that this will become the position of digital folk art, the community-driven creations emerging from internet subcultures, reflecting the values and aesthetics of specific digital communities. In response to the growing volume of AI-generated content, the quaintness of authentic user-generated content, specifically content made by humans, will provoke a revival, what Marshall McLuhan would call a ‘reversal.’”
A rejection of AI art has been occurring in online spaces like r/DigitalArt ever since AI’s capabilities have been good enough to make convincing artworks. Instead, artists have doubled down on the value of human creativity and craft; not something industrially produced for mass consumption but made meticulously by hand, meant to be shared in online communities. The people, it seems, want handmade fanart. Thelot also notes that with the advent of AI, creators must learn to cultivate smaller digital spaces and communities.
Louis Bury mentions that AI complicates the digital folk art landscape and how it’s perceived by the traditional art world:
“It’s not a stretch to imagine that one day we might look back at the early 2020s as a moment when the economics, aesthetics, and reception of visual art began to undergo paradigm shifts that were only half-perceptible at the time.”
It’s clear that digital art as a whole is going to be shaken by artificial intelligence, and yet digital communities are still fighting to retain their humanity. In this sense I think that makes spaces like r/DigitalArt sites of cultural production, rather than harbors for ‘lowbrow’ forms of art; and in such tumultuous times, perhaps it’s important to recognize that distinctions between high and low culture that are still taking place can marginalize these communities and the art they sustain.