Website = Fine Art?

, — Rebecca Cottrell on November 26, 2007 at 11:12 pm

Right now, websites are the domain of the graphic designer. I’m not sure why the web hasn’t been leapt upon by modern fine artists as an exciting new canvas and set of media. Video can be fine art. Sculpture can be fine art. A banana dangling from a string attached to the ceiling can, apparently, be fine art.

Why not a website?

A webpage is a blank canvas. It’s been utilised well by writers and graphic designers, so why can’t artists use a webpage as a canvas? The obvious negative side to this approach is the fact webpages are unreliable, and typically look different depending on the technology of the viewer. A canvas is static, a webpage is scalable. (Surely, an artist could keep that in mind and accommodate this idea into the thesis behind the work?) I think it’s definitely something that could be experimented with.  You can make a mark on a webpage in lots of ways: HTML, CSS, images, text, space …

One of the things I’ve really wanted to do is to experiment with telling a story through a sequence of pictures. The pictures could be scrolled to or clicked through. I’d like to try doing something really unusual (and, of course, not functional, which is part of the beauty of it) with a webpage. Something that makes you stop and stare and paste the link to your friends. Something that breaks with all the convention of what we’ve seen visually on the web.

3 Comments »

  1. Good point!

    Comment by waikit — December 14, 2007 @ 12:34 am
  2. bernard hills…

    I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….

    Trackback by bernard hills — December 27, 2007 @ 9:51 pm
  3. Spot on. Have tried to experiment with mine, and am still learning.

    Comment by Jag — February 17, 2008 @ 11:01 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

© Rebecca Cottrell 2008 | @rivalee