the.com/mixed media
Art that refuses to pick a lane, so it crashes into all of them at once.
means An artwork made by combining two or more different materials or techniques — paint, paper, fabric, found objects — rather than sticking to one.
from A straightforward descriptive term from art criticism and gallery labeling, built from 'medium' in its art-making sense (the material or method an artist works in, from Latin 'medium' meaning 'middle' or 'means'). As artists in the 20th century increasingly combined collage, paint, photography, and found objects in single works, curators and critics needed a label for pieces that didn't fit one category — 'mixed media' simply says what it is: more than one medium, mixed.
- origin
- Cubists started gluing newspaper into paintings around 1912
- rule
- if it has more than one material, it qualifies
- flex
- lets glitter and concrete coexist without irony
- pitfall
- often code for we could not decide