Untitled, 2000 and WebCollage

Andy Warhol has been on my mind recently. I have an ink drawing from years ago that’s in the on-deck circle for posting here. When I was in High School, I thought Andy was a genius. His famous-forever statement that “everyone would be famous for 15 minutes” was inspirational, and his knack for plugging into the zeitgeist with his art was great as well. Pop art inspired me in a way that abstract expressionism didn’t. It was tacky and silly and could be very witty. It was “the in-crowd” I was concerned.

Since I was an ironical young man, it fired my sarcasm and irony neurons very well.

This piece, from 2000, was all digital. A collage featuring various objects I found from around the net. It was hand-made, which is to say it was made in Photoshop using those elements. I surely used an image search to find the pieces.

Thing is, it’s rather dull. A piece like this can be found instantly on WebCollage, which crawls the net and semi-randomly creates a collage using the pieces found. It works like this:

This is what the Internet looks like.

WebCollage is a program that creates collages out of random images found on the Web. More images are being added to the collage about once a minute, so this page will reload itself periodically. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found.

It finds the images by feeding random words into various search engines, and pulling images (or sections of images) out of the pages returned.

This kind of instantaneous art is beguiling. I think it makes a piece like mine, which seems to have, sort of has, a point of view, and says _something_ about consumerism, obsolete. I still like my piece, but the randomness of WebCollage has much more staying power precisely because it’s always changing, as the web is, all the time.