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Communities Make the Movement

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The idea of online ‘Community’ is tied so fast to platforms and messaging systems that it’s sometimes hard to look beyond the interactions in these tools and understand the larger forces at work. The bonds we're all forming in discords and twitter are strong, no doubt – and when each day we hear the phrase “this space,” what’s really being said is “us people doing these things together.” It’s this doing that can add up to a Movement, and what better tools has any such movement in art ever had, than us?

While this presents an opportunity to expand at rates and reaches never before achieved, the approach of using focused community to develop the avant garde isn’t new, and isn’t defined in a vacuum. The stories of pivotal art movements throughout history have their leaders, advocates, and figureheads – but are decidedly not Lone Wolf tales. It’s strong groups of people who share ideals, learn from and push each other, and take action together that lead the way in establishing movements. They are the groups who have defined and disseminated innovative practices in their era – and that define canon for generations to come.

Looking at the 20th century alone brings many examples of a tight community establishing an art movement that millions will come to know and love. In early 1900’s Paris, a group of prolific, contrarian artists and patrons congregated regularly at 27 Rue de Fleurus (the ‘Stein Salon’) – redefining again what Art ‘should’ be. This became groundwork for openness and interpretation in creativity that influences most art made today. Importantly, it was not just the artworks of this group that helped define Impressionism and spur later movements (including reactionary ones) – it was the community of believers and advocates who congregated at Gertrude Stein’s salon apartment and frequented Café de la Rotonde that established the lasting movement.

Later in Germany, cultural and industrial dogma was repurposed into a construct for applying individual expression to functional items. Led at the Bauhaus school, all forms of ‘craft and art’ were harnessed as vehicles for intentionally new aesthetics designed to accentuate their function. Try to find a corner of the design world today that is not somehow influenced by this thinking – practices that would not have taken hold without the school to unite prolific instructors and students alike.

In mid-century New York, artists who reigned in once-derelict SoHo, and cultivated creative café culture in the West Village, influenced the arts across media and style. Soon-after, Andy Warhol’s Factory and the adjacent Studio54 scene united artists of all kinds, who then harnessed their community’s influence to cultivate their own importance in broader culture – often collaborating directly to bridge individual audiences.

Look at the tight-knit Seattle-based music scene and its influence on grunge aesthetic in design and fashion. Then look at the art world’s YBA, who established a movement under formative years spent at a single university, and spawned a cult of artists and collectors that dominated the British blue chip contemporary art scene for over a decade.

Examples of innovation-driving Communities like these will continue to bud and spread, but the unique component of exponential reach using social media and online communication tools and platforms will propel the strongest movements of today. Given the course of the last few years with NFTs and Generative Art, the trajectory points upward over the coming years and decades.

Imagine if these earlier movements had been given the power in amplification and global connectivity that we can harness today, over the same time spans they took to gestate?! Even the advantages of today’s environment over technology platforms of just twenty years prior create a unique opportunity to bring extraordinary impact to avant garde movements.

Yet, these platforms are tools that merely fuel the power of community, and are not the Community itself. Art community is driven by an amalgam of forces wielded by people like us – they include evangelism, presentation and dissemination, new ways of working, strong ideals and a vision for the future, and putting these ideals into practice by creating.

We all are this movement – the internet feels big, but Generative Art today is a relatively tight group of believers and instigators who are shaping what’s to come, for millions to see. Let’s use this power – the forces described herein – and the knowledge that advocates like us have moved things forward throughout history, to establish The Space we want to see.

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This 'Movements' was published by Tender on November 5, 2022. Join the Tender discord by collecting a TENDER Pass to get access to the complete Newsletter and all other Pass holder benefits. For updates and generative art postings, follow Tender on Twitter.