Page 23 - Arts Management Magazine Iss 1

Brian GormleyAMM ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

Arts Management Magazine: How has the information age, and social media, changed the art world?
Brian Gormley: Social media has made the image accessible to everybody. Everyone that has a computer can find out who a Van
Gogh is, or Picasso, so the world is much better in an art image educated way. That said, it seems to me that artists were much
more creative without the digital age when they were working in the studio not home or on the computer which is an art form in
itself, so the boundaries of what art is, is constantly changing. We just now have immediate access to that constant change which
almost allows no downtime to digest, and I think art is a process of digestion, man is not what he eats but what he digests.
AMM: This immediate change with no “downtime to digest,” seems along the lines of what Arts Management Magazine
co-founder, Alvin Toffler, might have termed, Future Shock. What is art to you Brian?
BG: Art to me is life against death. Once you’re dead you’re not creating anymore. Art is the ultimate act of being alive.
Brian Gormley knew Jean-Michel Basquiat well and was influenced by him to create graffiti art. After working in the streets of New York City, Gormley
began creating graffiti-influenced studio art that reflected additional influences of abstract expressionism. Critic Brian Fallon describes Gormley as an heir
to abstract expressionism seeing an influence of Jackson Pollock in his more modestly scaled work.?

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