Can anyone give an example of “multimedia art?” I have heard six thousand different definitions for the term…so I ask, what is it, really?
Art that combines video, audio, painting, sculpture, and all sorts of things. See Nam June Paik for some examples.
Whatever you work with is your medium; clay, acrylic paints, chalk, charcoal, oil paints, etc. When you combine more than one into a particular piece, it’s a multimedia piece.
My wife is an artist who experiments in multi-media pieces. She’ll paint with both oils and acrylics on a canvas, attach some torn paper here and there, incorporate a few knicknacks she has lying around, and Voila! - a multimedia piece.
I think this would usually be called “mixed media”; multimedia is usually reserved for things involving, say, visual and auditory aspects-- performance art or Nam Jun Paik-y video installations.
Concur. ‘multimedia’ usually means audio-visual/graphic/tactile, as opposed to ‘mixed media’, which means using more than one of a selection of different artist materials to create a single work.
Good point. I retract what I said earlier.
It’s an artificial distinction based on past technologies, guilds, etc.
E.g., if you were a stonemason in the Middle Ages, you weren’t allowed to work with wood. Some of those distinctions are natural to the technology – different tools are used stone than for wood. Different techniques are used.
So the definition of a medium stretched as far as the materials could take it. Even much later, materials dominated the definition of a type of art. You could be an accomplished oil painter, without being especially good at watercolor, for example.
As we got into modern times, in the last 100 years, what with the collapse of guilds, and the interdisciplinary nature of synthetic materials, dyes, glues, and tools the boundaries started to blur.
Most lately computer application developers such as Microsoft have made a big show of how their tools are cross-compatible: Graphic art goes in spreadsheets, video goes in Web pages. At this point, the word “multimedia” has been adopted as a marketing term, often meaning nothing at all, except that a computer application can do many things.