Spit & Polish : 04 September 2011

Will creative cellphone apps be the end of art as we know it? Lamborghini to the horse cart?

I hate fads and I am a technophobe, so the new generation of cellphones have not freed my life or opened my world. They just make me feel like Winston Smith, the central character in Orwell's classic novel 1984.

That society was brainwashed into dumbed-down drones, living repetitive lives under the domineering tyrant Big Brother. Anyone who complained was shunned and made to vanish. That's how I feel about our own personal Big Brother Cellphone.

I switch my phone on three times each day, and it stays on for an hour and then it must shut up.

When I showed my colleagues a phone I bought just a year ago, and they fell about laughing as if it were a relic of a bygone day, they produced their array of sparkly phones, tablets, notepads and other things that I suspect I will never use.

Nonetheless, I decided to embrace the inevitable, so my colleague, gadget-fundi supreme Aki Anastasiou, suggested the perfect phone for me. Now I am dangling from new ropes of silicone.

I have also undertaken to learn the new vocabulary of this field, but it is hard going. Do you know what an "instagram" is? I certainly did not. I had to scrabble around to find that the "instagram" is the brainchild of a guy who was christened Brian Roberts, but has come to be known as Doctor Popular. His mission is to create unique instant art on an iPhone with the help of various apps.

If you are a technophobe like me, let me explain that an "app" is a short form for "application software". Once you download it, an app can manipulate, enhance and transform original images into something new and amazing. There is a huge range of apps that will break down your image and rearrange it into a surreal version of the original object. What Andy Warhol did when he deconstructed stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, can now be done within minutes - indeed, in seconds - on a cellphone.

Also, instead of hanging the image on a gallery wall and selling it for a fortune, a mere flick of a finger on the phone's keyboard will send this image to any number of people, instantly, and at no cost.

The range of choice is huge. You can drain all the colour out of the image; or you can fill it with incandescent, hallucinatory colour. I saw an image of one person's eye, shot in close-up that was built into a mosaic of staring eyes, looking back at you. It's paranoia on a cellphone.

In his CV, Doctor Popular tells us he is a world-ranked yo-yo master, a detail that worries me bit. Does anyone really have time in their life to become a "yoyo master"? But then again, who am I to judge?

Doc Popular tells his fans: "The big shift happens when you go from using the camera to document daily life, to using your phone as a tool for your creativity." To demonstrate this quantum leap from the mundane to the magical, he invites people to take pictures in some unusual or beautiful place.

Traditional replica images are forbidden. The issue is to break down the reality of an object or place, and transform it into something radically different and so beautiful that a brand-new creation has occurred. That's what an "instagram" is: a transformed image created on your iPhone that you can e-mail to whomever you like.

Take a picture of a fruit tree in flower, then use an app to make it look like a Van Gogh or Monet painting. You can make it look like a faded old photograph or you could make it glow like a Rembrandt portrait.

I can see why people might enjoy this. It's an easily accessible way to express their own creativity, but I can't get my head around the idea of what this means for what we call "art".

Does it mean that "art" - in the form of painting, drawing and sculpture - has become redundant? A bit like a horse and cart that has been overtaken by a Lamborghini?

If you have a range of apps that will do anything you want them to do, what happens to craft, knowledge, skill and inspiration? I hear it being called the "democratisation of excellence" and that gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Doesn't "excellence" mean something unique? Don't we all want to have something - even if it is just a remembered image - that is personal to ourselves? Isn't that how we like to present ourselves to the world - as special or different?

But with millions of "instagrams" whipping from one cellphone to the next, in what must surely become a blur, I think I hear the echo of a 1960s play which caught the imagination of the Hippies and expressed the counterculture of that time.

It was called Stop the World - I Want to Get Off and, even today, nearly 50 years later, the play, the music and its meaning are still intact.

I wonder if I will find an instagram that still has meaning in 2061?