The Tyranny of Newness

"No artist sets out to create a style. Often one is directed by technique or philosophy or a new tool to innovate, but the recognition of a style has more to do with the critic, galleries and academia's that struggle to ascribe words, labels, context and a re-sale price, after the fact, to the artist's work.
All well and good, until the drive to innovate new styles becomes a major criterion for evaluating the relative worth of any particular work of art. Or, until a art form is proclaimed "dead" or ignored by virtue of apparent inability to adequately perform on the stage of stylistic innovation.
Then, we must question if, rather than the art being dead, perhaps it is the person looking at the art that has succumb.

With styles being the actual purview of the critic, we might proclaim it is the critic and not the artist that has failed to create something new."

This is what my friend J.D.Jarvis wrote in his essay "An Art Lover's Guide to Digital Art" in 2002 and I never get tired to quote his words.

THE BETTER YOU LOOK THE MORE YOU SEE