The end of internet art is for it to take a life of its own, and then die.

[Punp]

I made an account for Angora specifically to respond to this thread as I felt it was so compelling.

A reintroduction to the internet

The internet is both a blessing and a curse - a place for people to host their art and share it with the world - and a place for normies to steal content and remix it and redistribute it as if they could apply some stolen merit to their new mashup.

There's something of an internet food chain where content will start off as private material among a niche community and will become reposted and recontextualised on other, broader sites, losing its context and stripping its nuance to become mere content which is easily understood, simply consumed and digested by the masses.

The cannibalism of the things you love

What I find most distressing is this want to grab and tear apart existing art and reclaim it and apply ownership to it. For online artists it's often seen in the form of scrubbing out signatures and reposting the content to attain currency or social credit. It's a hunger to devour the original and somehow cannibalise it into their existence and identity. We saw this with NFTs where people came and snatched up online material for profit, and now we're seeing it repeat again with AI art where programmers are making training data scrapes from artstation so those without imagination or talent can type in a general idea for the AI to autocomplete and they can feel like they're artists without any of the effort or invested understanding of the base techniques or material.

While I agree that there's a deep need for folklore which this "online recycling" nicely fills, I think it essentially stems from the following incorrect assumptions:

a) Anything online is public domain and is therefore clipart, created by an anonymous nobody with too much time on their hands (despite these being real artists attempting to carve a living with their skill)
b) A skill is something you are born with, not something you must hone and train. Anyone with a skill is "lucky"
c) If you have not got a skill, stealing someone else's creation is not only fair, but morally correct as a form of distribution
d) Curating and recontextualising content is the same as creating it (see Pintrest)

However

With this initial torrent of bitterness, I must measure it with some sweetness. I can appreciate there is a time and place for collage. There is a skill in spinning a good story and a pleasantness of an evolution of a dialogue which brings people back to the original artwork and keeps it interesting. In a way, it is a discussion on the original piece which keeps it alive in the public eye for longer than its original lifespan. Where would the Mona Lisa be now if it hadn't been stolen?

As mentioned above, it is possible to appreciate original material without engaging in the meta dialogue around it - and sometimes we must make that conscious choice to decide what is and what isn't canon while we wait for the cloud of hungry locusts to pass over.

 

[Pangolin]

Overall, I think that it is a general good that art takes a life of its own and is infinitely remixed and rehashed.

Sure most of the remixes and re-contextualizations will end up as net debris, but we have a good chance it will grow into something unique and special that people want to see. Its trite to say it, but all things are derivative of something else. It is also exceptionally subjective as to whether an item is internet debris or a masterwork and the only way to confirm it is via the passage of time. Does an item have staying power? Does it spawn derivative works of its own? Even if its not popular it may still spawn derivative works among a loyal subset of people.

Generally, for an item to enter zeitgeist popular it has to be easily accessible to the normie. So even here we have different levels of popularity depending on the point of view. I'd venture that 90% of internet content is esoteric to the tikTak-facebook-twatters of the net.

 

[raccoon//aphrodisiac]

i think in a lot of ways a piece of art's memetic potential (that is, its ability to spread, not necessarily funny haha memes) can make it so much indirectly better and spawn even greater things. this isn't true for every piece of art, of course, but i find it's especially effective with a lot of horror - probably the most obvious example of this is creepypasta, which often times spawned tons of stories, art, and more from just a single image or short piece of text. the biggest example of this is slenderman, which spawned tons of legends, games, artwork, writing, webseries, everything, all from just a couple of images.
creepypasta, for the most part, aren't really a thing anymore which is really sad imo, and it even seems like people seem to actively disincentivize now in a lot of spaces; i follow a lot of horror artists and it's awfully common for them to get upset at people spreading their horror art and re-contextualising it in spooky ways or with their own take on it, sometimes because they don't want people to be "tricked" by urban legend type shit, or because they're just so attached to the idea of owning their art, despite actively participating in "creepypasta" style culture and art. personally i feel like getting your art spread around, leaving it to grow a life of its own, would be one of the highest honours as an artist rather than something to avoid

 

[Punp]

personally i feel like getting your art spread around, leaving it to grow a life of its own, would be one of the highest honours as an artist rather than something to avoid

This is the opinion of someone who doesn't create art for a living and has never had their content taken from their portfolio with the signature and credit removed and had their original content forced into the public domain so that Hollywood can come along later and try to make a film out of it claiming "they didn't know".

It's reasonable for artists to have the choice to be credited for the things they create. The idea of their image being spread around is only valuable to that artist if it pays back in social numbers or """exposure""" in the hopes of getting work. Having your art recontextualised and stripped of all its depth just so it can be a spooky, badly-written SCP is a low.

Shockingly enough, people aren't spending years at art school and then pouring literal days into making art for their concept portfolio just so Greg from youtube can illustrate a le Rebbit creepypasta without linking back to the place they scraped it from.

 

[raccoon//aphrodisiac]

This is the opinion of someone who doesn't create art for a living and has never had their content taken from their portfolio with the signature and credit removed and had their original content forced into the public domain so that Hollywood can come along later and try to make a film out of it claiming "they didn't know".

It's reasonable for artists to have the choice to be credited for the things they create. The idea of their image being spread around is only valuable to that artist if it pays back in social numbers or """exposure""" in the hopes of getting work. Having your art recontextualised and stripped of all its depth just so it can be a spooky, badly-written SCP is a low.

Shockingly enough, people aren't spending years at art school and then pouring literal days into making art for their concept portfolio just so Greg from youtube can illustrate a le Rebbit creepypasta without linking back to the place they scraped it from.

i'm literally an artist making money from it, certainly not enough to call it a living though
i should clarify that in that quote i'm talking specifically about horror artists who are making art in the same vein as old creepypastas, photo edits, etc. of course i believe artists should be credited for their art and that it shouldn't just be stolen.
i just find it bizarre to see that exact aesthetic reproduced but with the polar opposite intent of the original aesthetic, which was for it to go viral and reproduce on its own

 

[Punp]

i'm literally an artist making money from it, certainly not enough to call it a living though
i should clarify that in that quote i'm talking specifically about horror artists who are making art in the same vein as old creepypastas, photo edits, etc. of course i believe artists should be credited for their art and that it shouldn't just be stolen.
i just find it bizarre to see that exact aesthetic reproduced but with the polar opposite intent of the original aesthetic, which was for it to go viral and reproduce on its own

Oh I see what you mean. Kind of leeching off the popularity of the topic of creepypasta without trying to feed back into it. That does suck.

 

[Punp]

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PopCulturalOsmosis

Saw this and thought of this thread.

 

[Jade]

bros the undertale porn is quite intense. wtf. FORTUNATELY, my kid is back on BOTW.

That game looked so cool too, are there any like it w/ out the attached degen activities?

I recommend Mother 2 ("Earthbound" in the international release), the game Undertale and Deltarune were inspired by. It's a pretty old game so some features are a bit clunky, like the inventory management and buying stuff from shops being way more of a hassle than it should, but it holds up phenomenally. Other games inspired by Earthbound are Lisa the Painful and Omori.

 

[Some_porcupine]

i, too, got inspired by these pool memefications:

View: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9CUfp200TTMlLcH6TDNBZwfnm_uYvcC6

 

[AlienHoliday]

Personally I think this phenomenon vastly predates the internet. Rather, we forgot about it when copyright become an enforceable common law, and now it's coming back because the internet makes copyright unenforceable. Every mythology and religion around today worth studying is universally the amalgamation of thousands of retellings & modifications on some "original" work. It's well known to historians that many works that have survived to this day didn't do so without being modified or subsumed into other works. In fact, it's commonly believed that stories of heroes like Beowulf in past societies were actually at one point the stories of many different heroes, and over time they eventually all came to be one massive story.

 

[Some_porcupine]

What do you guys think?

Ｌａｚｉｎｅｓｓ　１００。
たけ　it，subvert　it、destroy　and　レインヴェン．
そ　easy、childish　がめ。

 

[Pseudiom]

shaking the grave
my weeping voice
autumn wind
- Matsuo Basho

Or in the Western tradition:

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
- Chidiock Tichborne

Perhaps later parodied by Shakespeare in Romeo & Juliet:

The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave, that is her womb.
And from her womb children of diverse kind
We, sucking on her natural bosom, find;
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some, and yet all different.
- Shakespeare (as Friar Laurence)

All content which springs forth is eventually classified away. I believe it is due to the wiki-fication of fiction. All things now exist to satiate an endless turbine of classification and compilation.