Charles Lewis Art - California

Is Wall Art Dead?

Painting has a problem. Actually, all wall art has a problem. We’ve run out of walls. Is wall art dead?

When I say we’ve run out of walls, I mean that here in America, and Europe is even worse, all the wall space is taken up. There is junk packed tightly on every wall. We never take anything off our walls to make room for something new, or fresh, or just different. We treat wall art like it’s a lifetime thing.

Unfortunately, it’s almost all bad art. It probably doesn’t apply to you if you found this blog, but the stuff on our continent’s walls is horrible junk. I bet that 95% of the people who have walls and art on them never really look at the stuff on their walls after the first month. Hell, maybe after the first day. I wouldn’t look at it either! It’s horrible.

The only time wall art gets changed out, if it even does, is when we move to a new house or apartment. That’s a grand opportunity for new wall art (yaay!), but it usually gets botched by trying to cram the art into the color scheme of the sofa (probably some variant on dirt color, usually beige) and the wall behind it (probably off-white).

There is a simple solution, really. Refresh all the world’s wall art in a monster fit of joyous rejuvenation! Tear it off the walls and replace it. Let’s have “Tear The Bad Art Off Your Walls” day. Fill those dumpsters! Trash those old Jimi Hendrix posters. Dump those English cottage prints.  I’m standing by to fulfill the demand for great new stuff.

We’re gonna need some education, though. People don’t really know how to look at painting (for example) anymore, and people don’t evenneed to know how to look at photos, if that’s the gig. We don’t want the old bad art being replaced by …. uh…. more bad art, do we? Well heck, why not! At least we’ll get some much-needed income to those starving artists who naively bet their farm on the unchanging continuation of wall art as a venture.

However, getting those walls filled with … uh… GOOD ART… will be a small problem, because the bulk of our citizens don’t really care what’s on their walls. It’s like iPods – the sound quality of downloads from iTunes and most other portable music sites is terrible, but the listeners have no experience of really good sound so they don’t care if it sounds like junk. It’s the cute little jingle and refrain that matter. Nobody listens to instrumentals, anyway. Same with painting – good, bad, doesn’t really matter much anymore. But nothing new is going on the walls, anyway, is it?.

There is yet another issue. The art viewing experience is migrating to screens. As in computer screens, TV screens or cell phone screens. For still images, like the digital rendering of a painting, this automatically confers a crappy viewing experience – weird colors, low resolution, no sensation of something more than a digital experience. Looking at art on a computer screen is like looking at the world through a window screen. It’s parsed into little bits. If all your art is on a screen, who needs wall art? That old AC/DC poster from 1982 is plenty good enough to cover up the puke stain on the wall. For life with screens, what you want is motion. Motion disguises all the bad stuff (resolution, color) and keeps your animal brain fed with…. whatever.   

Join the movement: This the chant - New Wall Art, Yeah!, New Wall Art, Yeah!, New Wall Art, Yeah!, New Wall Art, Yeah!