Signing In: The Internet's Clown

Hopper painted 'Soir Bleu' in 1914, after returning to New York from Paris. It depicts a range of individuals, each apparently from different social worlds, cut off from one another. In the centre sits a clown, wearing the stock outfit of “Pierrot.” It is possible to read in this clown a certain reflection of Hopper himself - stubbornly committed to realism, despite the growing popularity and success of European abstraction. It perhaps expresses a sense of hopeless identification with a supposedly dying craft. Translated here into 'The Internet's Clown', the central figure takes on the role not of the realist artist, but the digital artist. It does so to ask how digital artists position themselves in relation to the wider art world; do they see themselves isolated and rejected, like Hopper's clown in 1914, or, with full knowledge of Hopper's development and the rebirth of realism, see the clown and themselves as on the cusp of something greater.