Is digitally created art ART?

Is digitally created art ART?

Let me share my experience from one of my many career paths outside the world of fine art.

As a young man, really a boy of just eight, I sold my first work of "fine art". It was a wire sculpture called "Man Pushing a Rock". The title is self explanatory, it was about 6" tall and no I did not sculpt the rock. I sold it for $9, a real boon for an eight year old then earning (yes earning) $1.25 a week allowance. I went on to sell dozens of these. So let me fast forward to when I was 13. My father had a good friend who was an architect and he hired and trained me to be a Draftsman. By the time I was 14 I was a competent Draftsman (latter to be called Draftsperson). I went on to do well as a sculptor and I continued as a Home Designer and Landscape Designer of the homes I designed as well. I found the idea of taking a weed infested lot and transforming it into a home to be a very large extension of sculpture. Needless to say I found myself in an extremely fulfilling professional life.

Then it happened. CAD was invented. Here's a fact that most people are unaware of, the motivation behind CAD's introduction into everyday design was not ease or speed of use, It is NOT faster and certainly not easier. The purpose was archival. Imagine after a thirty year career as a designer the sheer amount of space consumed just storing past work. Well needless to say, CAD became the standard. It got to the point that if you didn't work in CAD you were out of the loop. The Surveyors plot came over in CAD; the Structural Engineer required the output to be in CAD. So here I am stuck in the middle of the two without the needed training to continue doing something I truly love. It was to the point if you did not design in CAD you did not design at all.

I fought the change for about a year. I tried but found a lack of ability to see the whole on one small screen. A good friend, a Custom Home Builder kind of wrapped into a nutshell. “You are going to learn CAD and that’s that, because you need to keep designing and to keep designing you must learn CAD”. So over that long and cold winter I dove in and came out as a pretty damn good CAD designer. YIPPIE! Did it save time and was it easier, hell yes: especially with revisions, I also found that I could take all my notes and copy and paste them; actually I could go on and on, once competent, the number of things I found to make it easier, faster, more accurate and easier to archive and reference abound!

So back to the original question:

Is digitally created art ART?

Answer:

Is a digitally designed Home and Landscape still a home and landscape.

OF COURSE it is!