Why not create physical artworks from the digital artworks? Just like eg. photos can be printed in series, signed and numbered? Giclee could be a start. But the technology must be improved.

You may never have heard of the word ‘giclee’. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Giclee is a neologism, ultimately derived from the French word gicleur, coined in 1991 by printmaker Jack Duganne for fine art digital prints made using inkjet printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on a modified Iris printer in a process invented in the late 1980s. It has since been used widely to mean any fine-art printing, usually archival, printed by inkjet. It is often used by artists, galleries, and print shops for their high quality printing, but is also used generically for art printing of any quality.

So, a giclee is a sophisticated word for a print of a digital image on canvas, that looks – a bit – as if it was painted. You can buy lots of them at IKEA, for instance. It feels fake, unworthy for ‘serious’ artists.

Still, there is a rising challenge. More and more art is created digitally, both (sort of) ‘by hand’, using eg. Adobe Creative Cloud (good old Photoshop etc.) on an Mac or ProCreate on iPad or with use of artificial intelligence tools, such as DALL-E 2 for image generation or ChatGPT for idea/inspiration generation. Ultimately, all resulting in digital art.

And not the least artists, eg. David Hockneys iPad art.

Now, of course, digital art can be sold, esp. using NFT’s. But the NFT hype earlier this year largely turned into an anti-hype, mainly because of sad people – not artists – who tried (and still do try) to “get rich quick and easy” by stealing artworks and selling those as if it were their own creation. Hopefully, one day we can separate the wheat from the chaff soon, and then we can seriously proceed with NFT’s as ownership token for digital art.

In the mean time, there may be an alternative. And, it may be a valid alternative for the long term.

Why not create physical artworks from the digital artworks? Just like eg. photos can be printed in series, signed and numbered? Giclee could be a start. But the technology must be improved.

How? I don’t know right now. Let’s work on it.