I love reading your art hot takes so I have one for you!!! Do you think VP is the same as art?
Asked by Anonymous
[𝕷𝖔𝖈𝖆𝖑 𝕲𝖗𝖆𝖛𝖊-𝕯𝖜𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖊𝖗 𝖂𝖎𝖙𝖍 𝖆 𝕻𝖊𝖓𝖈𝖎𝖑 𝕽𝖊𝖙𝖚𝖗𝖓𝖘 𝖙𝖔 𝕾𝖙𝖔𝖕 𝕻𝖊𝖔𝖕𝖑𝖊 𝕱𝖗𝖔𝖒 𝕾𝖆𝖞𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖁𝕻 𝕴𝖘𝖓’𝖙 𝕬𝖗𝖙]
(Not me getting back from the dead (read: cadmium poisoning because of chocolate) to answer a debate lmao)
I don’t think VP and other forms of art need to be pitted against each other at all, honestly. They’re different, not better or worse. Just like sculpture, drawing, painting, stained glass, embroidery, photography, collage, etc are all art, but they don’t require the same skills, tools, or ways of thinking.
Virtual photography has its own competencies: composition, lighting, timing, understanding game engines, camera tools, mood, storytelling. Traditional or digital illustration has others: anatomy, line, color theory, rendering, texture, muscle memory, years of practice.
One doesn’t cancel the other out, and one doesn’t “steal” legitimacy from the other.
Comparing them like “which one is more art” feels like comparing sports. Is fencing more athletic than swimming? Is ballet more valid than parkour? They don’t train the same muscles, but they’re both real, demanding disciplines. Same thing here. Different skill sets, different processes, same broad creative field.
I don’t want to oppose VP artists or gatekeep art in general because every form of art has its place. People create in the medium that speaks to them, that their body/mind/life allows, and that’s fine. Art has always evolved with tools. Cameras didn’t kill painting. Digital tablets didn’t kill charcoal. Games existing doesn’t invalidate drawing.
I think part of why this debate always makes me laugh a little (lovingly) is because I’ve been on the receiving end of the Art Is Supposed To Be Like This police my whole life. I went to art school. I used “beaux-arts” techniques like charcoal, oil paint, watercolor, etc. And I used them to draw morbid shit. Corpses. Zombies. Rot. Decay. And I remember getting comments like “this isn’t the right subject for that technique” or “this style is meant for beauty” and I just stood there like. Okay but who decided beauty doesn’t include the grotesque? Who put that rule in the syllabus? Was there a secret meeting I missed?
To me, that mindset is exactly how art gets locked behind glass and turned into something sterile and intimidating. Like this arcane, high-top, velvet-rope thing where only certain subjects are allowed to sit at the table depending on the medium you use. And I just… don’t buy it. Art has never worked like that in reality. Humans have always used whatever tools they had to depict everything: love, death, gods, monsters, hunger, fear, joy. Cave walls had handprints and animals and violence side by side. Cathedrals have saints and martyrs being graphically murdered in stained glass. Beauty and horror have been holding hands since forever.
So when people argue about “is this real art” based on the tool used, I get the same itch. It’s the same old gatekeeping, just in a new outfit. VP, painting, sculpture, embroidery, charcoal, digital, photography etc, they’re all languages. You don’t tell someone they’re “speaking wrong” because they wrote a poem instead of a novel. You don’t tell a dancer they’re invalid because they do contemporary instead of ballet. Different muscles, different brains, same impulse: I need to make something and show how I see the world.
Look, I can do oils, watercolors, pencils, graphite, ink, charcoal, coffee stains if I’m feeling extra dramatic… but you hand me a game engine and a camera and I’m a deer in headlights. Virtual photography? Totally not my skill set. That doesn’t make me a better or worse artist! It just means my brain and hands speak different languages. And the same goes the other way: someone who can make jaw-dropping VP shots isn’t automatically “bad” at drawing or painting or sculpting… they’re just flexing a different set of muscles, a different eye, a different creative wiring. Art is huge and messy and full of overlapping skills, and no one medium gets to gatekeep the rest. VP is its own thing, and so are oils, and so are graphite sketches of morbid zombies I like to draw in my free time while muttering about cadmium poisoning. Different tools, same impulse: we just want to make something that hits, that breathes, that exists.
I’m sorry I’m a bit ranting about this because I genuinely believe art is one of the few places where we’re allowed to be expansive instead of obedient. Art shouldn’t be forbidden, or sacred in a way that makes people afraid to touch it. It shouldn’t belong only to the “right” subjects, the “right” techniques, the “right” people. If someone uses a game engine camera to create a striking image? Cool. If someone uses academic anatomy to draw the undead? Also cool. That tension, that friction, that misuse of expectations? That’s often where the good stuff lives.
The only hill I will absolutely die on, foaming at the mouth and waving my chalk at the class, is AI “art”. That’s not a medium. That’s not exploration. That’s not someone choosing, failing, learning, or expressing. That’s a machine remixing stolen labor and calling it creativity, and I refuse to put that in the same room as people actually making things.
But everyone else? Come sit down. There’s space. Art is big, messy, human, and contradictory, and it gets uglier and more beautiful the more we let it breathe. And honestly? That’s the point!!!
