{"id":8007,"date":"2021-01-11T14:25:07","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T21:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/community.wacom.com\/en-us\/us\/?p=8007"},"modified":"2026-06-05T12:15:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T19:15:10","slug":"2020goodnews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/community.wacom.com\/en-us\/2020goodnews\/","title":{"rendered":"7 Good Things That Happened to Digital Art in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"
Header from Gorillaz Wrap 2020\u00a0<\/a><\/h5>\n2020 will mainly be remembered as the year that made us want to give 2016 a big, wet kiss.\u00a0 But it also looks like it\u2019ll be the start of a decade of great change.\u00a0 It was the product of problems that were allowed to fester for a long time, societal issues that we\u2019re now being forced to address.\u00a0 Here in the US, especially, it was a warning of how many of the systems we rely on are broken, a reckoning with old social attitudes, and a reminder that sometimes the most devalued jobs are truly the most important.\n\nIt was a year of contradictions.\u00a0 The pandemic brought out the best and worst in people.\u00a0 Protests and counterprotests showed us both solidarity and racial terrorism.\u00a0 It was a year of telecommuting and DoorDashing, community spirit and isolation, social justice and parasocial relationships.\n\nIt was also arguably the single most important year for digital media.\n\n2020 changed the internet, online events, advertising, social media, and distribution platforms, and digital art with them.\u00a0 People were more online than ever.\u00a0 Artists lost cons and galleries, but gained animation commissions, design work, and even ad agency jobs\u2014Digital Arts Online went as far as to say<\/a> illustration is now more important than ever.\u00a0 Freelancing in the current climate is high-risk, but also potentially high-reward: Some lost their entire living, but one I talked to made over $200,000 last year making downloadable assets for online Dungeons & Dragons games.\n\nThe art world made some truly groundbreaking changes to adapt, some of which might set permanent precedents.\u00a0 And in the background, some other cool things happened that were unrelated to the pandemic.\u00a0 So, here are some of both:\n

Virtual events were normalized<\/h1>\nBack when cons made all their money off ticket sales, the best you could hope for would be to find videos of individual panels on Youtube.\u00a0 And even then, you\u2019d have to get your hands on the con schedule to even know to look for them.\u00a0 And it was unheard of for an entire major convention to be livestreamed.\n\n...Now, of course, the pandemic\u2019s taken us too far in the other direction, getting rid of the physical part altogether.\u00a0 But consider the price of this year\u2019s online conventions versus their real-life equivalents in previous ones.\u00a0 Lightbox in 2019 was $135 for the weekend.\u00a0\u00a0Lightbox 2020 started at $1<\/a>.\n\nAnd that was just one of many online events and webinar series, some of which flew under the radar at their airing times but are now archived to watch and learn from at any time.\u00a0 There was Adobe MAX<\/a>.\u00a0 There was Wacom\u2019s Connected Ink, which\u00a0I wrote a retrospective of<\/a>.\u00a0 There was\u00a0Comic-Con@Home<\/a>, featuring the casts of Walking Dead and His Dark Materials, and many similar events that weren\u2019t explicitly art-themed, but featured artist vendors and guest speakers.\n\nIf they take the lessons they learned during the pandemic to heart, we might see future cons become simultaneous live and digital events.\u00a0 Perhaps we\u2019ll see panelists interacting with live audiences and stream viewers simultaneously, maybe even taking questions from chat.\u00a0 Perhaps the days of having to fly to San Diego to see a single artist speak are nearing a close.\n

Over 500 museums uploaded their collections to Google<\/h1>\nArt museums were hit by the pandemic in a strange way.\u00a0 They closed, then opened, then closed again with the second wave, many forced to shut down in the middle of exhibits that took months to build.\n\nBut they were some of the first institutions to respond to quarantine orders by giving away free content as an incentive for people to stay home, and they invested a lot of their newly-freed time into making sure their digitized paintings were better-organized and more available than ever before.\u00a0 This is in large part thanks to Google Arts & Culture, one of the tech giant\u2019s unsung side projects that\u2019s been doing some amazing cultural work behind the scenes.\n\nMuseums have been uploading photos of collection pieces to their own archives for years, but Arts & Culture has not only done an excellent job of compiling them\u2014they\u2019ve posted walkthroughs of the real buildings in Street View format.\n\nThe iconic Guggenheim museum\u00a0can be viewed in its entirety<\/a>, along with the D.C. National Art Gallery, Paris\u2019s Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, Amsterdam\u2019s\u00a0Rijksmuseum<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Van Gogh Museum<\/a>, Los Angeles\u2019s\u00a0Getty Museum<\/a>, Doha\u2019s\u00a0Museum of Islamic Art<\/a>, Seoul\u2019s\u00a0Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art<\/a>, and\u00a0over five hundred others<\/a>.\n

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Name-June Paik\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>The More, The Better<\/span><\/a>\u00a0at the MMCA<\/span><\/p>\nThe zoom resolution is incredibly high, almost, but not quite, enough to read the placards.\u00a0 But for that, there are annotations on the paintings you\u2019re currently viewing in the bottom toolbar, some of which are more detailed than the ones you\u2019d find in the museum.\u00a0 It\u2019s as close as you can get to the gallery experience at home, with everything but the scale.\n

But wait!<\/h3>\nThere\u2019s one way to get the scale, though: VR.\u00a0 Google Arts & Culture has a VR app available for Android and iPhone.\u00a0 It can be viewed through Google Cardboard or cast to Daydream View, and as you walk through the virtual museum, audio guides will be provided by actual curators.\n\nOther museum tours have been uploaded to regular Street View, albeit without the supplementary information, and can be viewed in Google Earth VR. Arts & Culture has also been releasing 360 views of historical sites to their Youtube channel, like this one from February of Chauvet Cave\u2019s famous paleolithic paintings<\/a>.\n

The Smithsonian released 3 million images for free use<\/h1>\n

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Albert Bierstadt\u2019s \u201cAmong the Sierra Nevada, California,\u201d\u00a0<\/span>from the American Art Museum<\/span><\/a><\/p>\nOn February 25th, the Smithsonian announced the launch of Open Access, with the goal of releasing their entire collection into the public domain.\u00a0 They launched with 2.8 million images, which they emphasized was just the beginning, and are now at well over 3m.\u00a0 They not only allow the images to be used for photomanipulations and concept art, they encourage it with the slogan, \u201cCreate.\u00a0 Imagine.\u00a0 Discover.\u201d\n\nPaintings have been scanned in high-resolution, sculptures and artifacts have been placed on white backgrounds and photographed from sometimes tens of angles.\n\nSo,, I hear you ask, what are some of the things in it?\u00a0 3,000-px-wide photos of every piece in the American Art Museum.\u00a0 High-resolution scans of Japanese scrolls and illustrations from the Bhagavata Purana.\u00a0 WWII propaganda posters.\u00a0 Turnarounds of rare violins.\u00a0 More scientific illustrations than you can count.\u00a0 3d scans<\/a>\u00a0of dinosaur skeletons, the space shuttle Discovery, the Wright Brothers\u2019 plane, Chinese vases, Charlie Parker\u2019s saxophone, presidential statues, and women\u2019s clothing from several eras.\n\nThe gallery can be found here.<\/a>\n\n(Thanks to\u00a0allstrangenature<\/a>\u00a0on Tumblr and\u00a0@SarahLovesHam<\/a>\u00a0on Twitter for passing this one on.)\n

There was a renaissance in animated music videos<\/h1>\nI can\u2019t find an official confirmation of this, but 2020 seems to have blown away the record for the most released in one year.\u00a0 Consider July:\n\nOn the 10th, Dua Lipa debuted the Disney\/Cuphead-inspired glam fantasy\u00a0Hallucinate<\/a>; the same day as late rapper Juice Wrld\u2019s action-packed, anime-esque\u00a0Come and Go<\/a>, one of several this year for his posthumous last album.\u00a0 The 20th saw another one of Gorillaz\u2019 trademark live-action\/animation fusions,\u00a0PAC-MAN<\/a>, part of their ongoing video series \u201cSong Machine.\u201d\u00a0 The Weeknd tapped the black-owned anime studio D\u2019ART Shtajio for a Boondocks-ian video for his hit single\u00a0Snowchild<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>and dropped it on the 22nd.<\/span>\u00a0 On the 24th, the Strokes put out the multimedia\u00a0Ode to My Mind<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>On the 28th, Noah Cyrus and Sony released their collaboration for her single titled\u2026 well,\u00a0July<\/a>, animated (by the studio Media Molecule) with only the Playstation 4-based game maker Dreams and its controllers.\u00a0 And within\u00a0two minutes<\/span>\u00a0of each other on the 30th, Billie Eilish posted her Studio-4C-esque\u00a0My Future<\/a>, and BENEE, whose animated avatar looks strikingly similar, her ghostly\u00a0Night Garden<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\n\n