Assignment 4

Ad ill probably use for this critique.

What does make an ad successful?  If your trying to sell a product i suppose you could judge the success on how many items you sell.  For other things I think a success full ad is based on how well you can get your message across.  If your ad can easily and correctly get a message across that is successful.  I think this particular ad is successful due to the simplicity and shocking nature of the ad.  The simple nature of it comes from the fact that anyone can look at this ad above the age of 8 and know whats happening.  If you don’t your in denial or way way to naive.  The colors in the ad are also very simple.  They chose to use alot of white in the picture to accentuate the main focus of the ad.  By doing that your are immediately led to the important parts with out having to wander about.  By making the ad so simple the flow of the piece is very easy to follow.  Due to the color and the lay out of the ad you just focus on the center, while slowly looking around after the shock value has worn off.

How does digital art/ new media relate to or impact different aspects of our western culture?

How does it not?  I am having a hard time thinking of anything that is not effected by digital art or related subjects.  Lets delve into this a bit.

Do you watch television?  Doesn’t matter what show, because every show has commercials.  And every other commercial has some form of digital modification or work done to it.  They use it to add those cheesy graphics and explosions to car sales men commercials.  They use it to meld the video feed together in all those commercials for fine liquor and such.  What about the news?  Or better yet the weather.  That thing the weather man stands in front of is all digital.  Its called a green screen, he can stand there and have anything put in front of him so that he can interact with it, its all done by a computer.  It may not be what some would call art but you could easily turn it into art and some I’m sure consider it art.  If it was my job to edit all those intros to the news stations and have the crazy graphics go on I would consider that my artwork.

Moving on to even something smaller.  Look at your clothes.  Your shoes, your watch, wallet and purse.  All of these items were probably at one point designed on a computer.  That LV purse with all the snazzy print all over it was done on a computer.  What about that Kraft macaroni and cheese box in your pantry?  You guessed it, digital artwork all over that blue box.  Your phone?  What about all the cool games, and graphics and designs for the phones?  A computer did that, shocking i know.

Lets try something more difficult.  The museum perhaps?  Well what about all these new artists who are recreating old masterpieces on the computer with new twists?  Or the Huge collages with all of the tiny pictures of the picture they create.  At first those were done by hand.  After about a month people started writing programs to do it digitally.

Movies, video games, magazines I am sure you have heard of them.  Weather you think they are art or not is of your own volition but most people tend to think they are.  All of the special affects in movies tend to have at least some digital editing if not all of them.  Video games are obviously done on the computer and can be truly inspiring when looked at like a piece of art.  Not all of them but there are always exceptions.  In magazines no one looks as good in real life as that!   Want to know why?  Because a digital artist goes in and airbrushes all the blemish’s and wrinkles and birth marks off of the model.  They are made into perfection overnight by some digital mastermind.

After reading the first chapter in the book it felt like the author was pigeon holeing herself.  She gave a few examples of how we use computers and digital art in our western civilization over here.  But truth be told is that its everywhere and its not going anywhere.  We will probably always enjoy the older arts of painting and sculpture and drawing, but digital is where its at and where its going.