Kids Without the Internet

In my previous life as a proper art historian, I thought a lot about paintings in reproduction: the color, the quality, the source, what you could see and what you couldn’t see. I had professors who, early in their careers, wrote brilliantly and eloquently about work they may have only ever seen in grainy black and white, or poorly realized hand coloring. What a giddy luxury it was to be a student in the days of Google Images while museums scrambled to digitize whole collections. And what a luxury, too, to know the difference, to have seen the last of the early days and to recognize, essentially, the difference between a painting and a picture of a painting.

So while if I’m honest the recent trend for super photorealism didn’t really appeal to me aesthetically, I was fascinated by it. It appeared to be distinct from earlier iterations in that it felt so very *digital*. Photography has been an influence on painting for its entire existence, but here we find it mediated through a screen and particular *kind* of screen. Or, better maybe: a ubiquitous screen. It was built from a life generated by computers and experienced through computers.

We've had the discussion over lots of dinners: can you tell? Is it apparent when looking at a painting who grew up with a screen and who didn’t? Whose essential experience of images was paper and whose was glass? Who knows photography as a medium of timing, exposures, blurs and missed opportunities? Who has documented, in banal detail, every meal and outfit?

Kids Without the Internet is a line in the sand. Some of us are just on the cusp, the only one of our siblings not to have a computer lab from kindergarten, our Insta handles owing a heavy debt to early AOL chat groups. Some of us are more essentially analog: memories of sending our mother's checks to order cassettes by mail. Either way, here are the kids without the internet; the last generation to know painting without screens.

-Thea Smolinski