Will Art History remember Furry Porn?

All digital work produced on the internet is fated to become kitsch, no matter the level of elegance or skill with which it is executed. As technology and technique advances, cutting-edge artworks march towards their date of expiry.

Image credits: @painttress on Instagram

A dear pastime of mine and my friends’ is to cast our gaze to yesteryears and crack our ribs laughing at the pure distilled cringe that was our early entries onto the internet: flower-crown Snapchats taken with iPod touches, chainmail hearts drawn to decree our sympathy for cancer patients, Youtube videos where the lone commenter was our mums, and Musical.ly accounts we swore were famous back in the day. 

2012: my brain had freshly grown in and I had only just gained agency over my limbs. The respite of the weekends meant it was time to spend daylight scrawling dragons into copy paper, and nights leaning into the glow of my dad’s Windows X. Spidery threads of image and words formed the tapestry of my imagination and trickling binary scattered to form the rich digital landscape. Paper and an LCD display. Analog and digital. Long ago, the two nations lived in harmony. 

One decision threatened to change it all. The 64x64 icon for FireAlpaca peeked over the hypergreen hill of Bliss. My brother had recommended this software to me. It allowed you to create digital drawings. Digital images. Like, my art could really exist. Properly. It wasn’t something I could completely comprehend, but I was intrigued. Surely I would get sick of it and return to the art and the digital world I was familiar with. Separate things. Each realm was so peaceful on its own, surely the product would be just doubly peaceful. I clicked the icon. It was violent. Days spent at the screen. A mouse dragged across the desk. Discordant lines threatening to leap from the page. Black muddy airbrush. Retina-sizzling colours. Program crashes leaving me in the quiet ash of my own creations. Jpegs swarmed my desktop, as a floodgate was opened and the distilled contents of my mind took form in the digital space. 

My overflowing confidence prompted me to begin sharing my creations on the internet. DeviantArt was likely not the safest sect, but it allowed me to construct a raft on the void of the bottomless web. Drifting aimlessly, broadcasting drawings of any whim to propel me forward, I encountered travellers who had also obtained the ability to will their imagination into life through synthetic brushstrokes and neon colours. Vessels crowded my passage–  I went with many others, past 2016’s animation meme epidemic, 2020s infatuation with boba tea, and now at 2023s cyber nostalgia. Sometimes I would encounter an ancient nomad from the early 2000s bearing withered scrolls of their Warrior Cats OCs.

Formally, digital kitsch encompasses all works of art created digitally, more often those of low-modality. However, I personally define Digital Kitsch as digital works of art made in indulgence, self-expression, or trade. They can be high-quality, such as @clockbirds’ furry portraits backdropped by captivating landscapes, or they can be low-modality, such as @crushing_on_spongebob’s gaudy self-insert OC ship art with the eponymous Spongebob Squarepants. Despite the visual dissonance between such works, I would consider them both digital kitsch. For the garish works of @crushing_on_spongebob, this assignment is obvious, however, if you have had the honour of seeing @clockbirds’ art you may criticise this categorisation as their art is created with resemblance to fine art.

All digital work produced on the internet is fated to become kitsch, no matter the level of elegance or skill with which it is executed. As technology and technique advances, cutting-edge artworks march towards their date of expiry. The pride with which an artist views a work is inevitably soured to terse endearment by the rapid cycle of progress. The evil witch drawing which I was enthralled by 5 years ago now appears nauseatingly airbrushed, effects-abused, and obsolete. Digital works are afflicted by the fast-paced fads of the internet. This ensures that styles of digital art cycle in and out of fashion quickly.

Though the time-worn pieces no longer present their original appeal, they become artefacts of the digital age of art. Ramshackle pngs clodded together with the skills, forms, and influence available at the time incidentally represents the unique zeitgeist of that point in internet art. In the mad scramble to become more out of touch than their ancestors, art elites produce appropriations of internet culture. From the perches of meritocracy, they produce art which attempts to overwrite the products of the internet art community. But digital kitsch is alive, angry, and demanding to be remembered. Art elites dismiss internet artists, they forget digital kitsch. But the internet remembers. 

Seth Price mirrors the notion that the internet has transformed art. He regards himself as “earlier” in representing the confluence of art and the digital medium in the early 2000s. I suppose he had found residence under a large and very insulative rock during this time as the internet was already creating spaces for sharing and creating art, for example DeviantArt which was founded in 2000. Price frames his perspective of internet art on the canvas. This item sits on the wall of his studio, and appears in exhibitions only available for his peers. He proudly lacks a social media presence and is discussed only within elite spheres of art. He represents the technological identity, yet denounces it by holding it at a distance from his practice.

Internet artist Qing Han, better known as @qinniart, uses pen and pencil to create celestial-themed character art which are coloured digitally and shared on Instagram. Qinni tragically lost her battle with cancer in early 2020. Her passing shook the entire internet art community. Under the Instagram hashtag #galaxiesforqinni, there are over twelve thousand posts which form a tribute to Qinni’s presence as a beloved internet artist. The tributes ripple beyond Instagram and are also seen on Deviantart, Twitter, and Tumblr. The style of her artworks has become kitsch in the eyes of shifting fads, the tendencies of digital art moving away from blue and purple galaxies. However, her art is expansive in its cultural value, representing the unique sense of community that blossoms in the online art sphere. 

Where Price peers in, Qinni demonstrates. The life of Qinni’s art will last as long as the internet and its citizens. Price’s works, existing only physically and in limited images online, will inevitably be drowned in the sea of elitist art which homogeneously attempts to suggest meaning from arbitrary smatterings of digital assets.

In the year 2999, people will roam the chrome corridors of an art museum. Instead of gazing upon snobby computer collage, fanart of long forgotten characters made on MSPaint will adorn every nook. Instead of digitally textured sculptures, tapestries of anime cat boy-sonas will be draped lavishly on the walls. Maybe instead of exhibiting Price’s pedestrian insights into digital art, there will be a showcase of Qinni’s affectionately kitschy renderings of celestial bodies and imaginations of freedom. Through the survival of the internet and the cultures it fosters, digital kitsch will live on. So maybe in a century, furry porn will indeed be remembered by art history.