Release the inner artist

I have had many discussions with friends about the merits of websites like Flickr, Zooomr(the one I use), YouTube, and software such as Photoshop and GarageBand or Sony ACID if you are Windooze person.

The argument is always about whether anything good comes out of putting the power of these tools into the average persons hands. Has art improved? Has society benefited?

If you look for example at the majority of pictures posted on Flickr or Zooomr, most are poorly taken. If you look at a lot of the videos on YouTube they often barely make the grade as entertainment, let alone art.

However I am very much for the personal artistic freedom these tools give us. If you think about it, since the middle-ages or possibly earlier anyone could pickup a brush or pencil and create a work of art, so its been open to everyone and yet we have still managed to have the likes of DaVinci and Monet. Now if back then painting required the equivalent of what is today a laptop, perhaps we would not have seen their likes since a lot of great artists were horribly poor during their lifetime.

Today you can buy a laptop and put a few hundreds pounds worth of software on it and create music that 20 years ago would've taken a multi-million pound professional studio.

And music is wherein lies the interesting thing about this development. In the past being noticed artistically was always a difficult and time consuming if not expensive process, which often required going through 'gatekeepers' such as record companies to get noticed, and we all know how much record companies care about quality vs the bottom line. Now it doesn't have to be.

Is that a bad thing?

In my opinion, no. Its really just the democratization of art.