Is digital art really art?

1. Digital tools are used by artists just like physical ones are, and it can take a lot of time to finalise a painting.

I know it took me quite of time to make the Umbrella Dragon Art piece which you can see below. Sure, there are many tools which can be used using different software programs, but in terms of skill and energy, the volume invested is just as big as in traditional art. 

2. Some work may be less about meaning and may be totally about aesthetics. Some digital art is automated. But wasn’t it a kind of art to make the robot? To make the automation? Plus plenty of digital art is made painstakingly by hand, which i did with the Bliss Lines work. Even the simple forms were very hard to paint, my back hurt but i kept going. It's even more challenging for more then doing sports.

3. There are old books about painting, in which it is written that you can not become a really good artist, if you don’t mix paint pigments by yourself and prepare the canvas By Yourself. And yet today, professional artists commonly use ready-made solutions. In some conservative countries, the problem also applies to the type of paint: only "oil" is an art, and "acrylics" are still a suspect medium. So, by yesterday standards, many "traditional artists" of today would be considered at best amateurs by those purists of the past. Well, in the next piece of work called Trippy Waterfall, i haven't used any special technique other then thinking and imagining the final result from the overlaying of different pictures. Is it still art? You will be the judge of that.

4. The world is changing and the tools are developing. Photoshop and Illustrator are just another tools. And they are great tools that give extraordinary possibilities, not available without graphic programs. I am 100% sure that without my design programs i wouldn't be able to make the type of art that i want. I don't agree with the common perception that art is not art until it achieves a certain type of prestige. That is a really snobby attitude. My next work has zero prestige, and still i like it a lot. It is called Church Exstasy  and some can say, well, it is only photography. At the advent of that technology, photography was considered a kind of cheat, since it didn't require the same kind of skill to capture a scene or portrait that a painter has. Today though, photography is very much viewed as an art.  It was just as hard to make this photo and others, as it was to paint. I had to overcome the inertia of "i'm too lazy to do anything", which i need to do if i wish to paint or write. 

5. There are lots of methods of recreating the real world in some small form. You can take a soft mass and mold it. You can take something harder and sculpt it. You can make thin rows in sand to represent the outlines of something. You can take a sheet of white paper and create smudges with a small bit of charcoal. You can make blobs of color to imitate patches of light and shadow. The weird thing is that we don't have a word for all these activities. It's not really "creating"—we don't create a thing, we create an image of it. In the end, we tend to call it sculpting (for built forms) and drawing (for shapes on paper). People more familiar with art add another category to it, painting, to distinguish it from line-based works. Drawing a line on paper or dirt is no different than drawing a line with a stylus pen. The result is created in a different format, but it doesn't change anything. You wouldn't say that these aren't art because that are in pencil. 

6. Digital art is simply a tool. A very popular tool, because the colors are limitless, and so vibrant (look at the Hermina Love creation), there is no drying time for paint, it's easy to transfer from device to internet to website to store or publishing, you can keep your art even once you've sold it and it has many ways to just make life easier for the artist. Which makes me believe if the old masters that you see in the Louvre were still alive today, they would most likely have some digital paintings, among other mediums.