As the personal computer has become more widely available in the last decade, computer art has made great strides. The effect of computers in the art world has been and continues to be very profound. The computer has radically changed the way that art is produced and disseminated. A controversy has arisen over whether computer-generated art or computer-assisted art is true art. Computer-generated and computer-assisted art works are true art. The computer is just another tool at the disposal of the artist. The use of the computer as a tool or medium is the choice of each individual artist working in the realm of visual arts. The time-honored art practices of putting pigment on canvas with a brush, cutting images into copper plate with a burin, and welding, whittling, and forcing materials into shape to form three-dimensional forms will not be completely replaced by digitization and the use of computers (Frank 96).
Art does not require the use of any particular types of media or tool to be used in the creation of the aesthetic object. At the vanguard of technological and social change, the computer provides a new tool, medium, and way to look at art. Most artists in the pre-Generation X eras have not been exposed to the computer as a tool for creativity. As the result, the computer is a foreign object which they are unable or unmotivated to master.
The current generation of children are growing up with computer familiarity and playing with graphics and paint programs as an extension of crayons, markers, and paint. The computer gives these children the ability to experiment with color, style, line, size--in reality any of the parameters of their art work to the limits of the software they are using. This same flexibility is available to the professional artist. The professional artist is able to use the tools the computer software provides with greater finesse than the non-artistic computer user.
The compu...