The younger generation of artists in the 1880’s were anxious to adopt new ideas which would enable them to strive towards a new optimised vision of art, attacking all that was old, replacing it with something that was completely new. The Internet was the place for new ideas in the 1990’s; it was the hotbed for new artistic and business concepts for that generation. The web has now become the new establishment with its virtual shopping malls. The major players have been staking their claims and the ‘shopping carts’ have become homogenised with everybody buying the same products. Search engine wars are almost over and the (SEO) rules have been laid down – all credit cards accepted.
There were many artists trying to claim freedom from nature, to allow themselves the pleasures of more self expression but they were held back by the simple fact that man himself was tied down with his links to nature. We have now become at home with the Internet and its optimized retail opportunities. The steps the artists of the 1880’s were looking for was a break from observed representation. Symbolism and its search for new boundaries of creativity within literature and poetry began to point the way for these young men, their almost post modernist approach to their art looked to steal ideas from every form of intellectual discipline. Web designers and SEO gurus are doing the same now; they are copying code, search words, keywords and optimization tricks from each other. These painters, over a hundred years ago, were a clique and were accused by their contemporaries of being too intellectual to be serious painters. Search Engine Optimization is also a mysterious clique with its differing ethics. Now is the time to break through this structured discipline and re-invent Search Engine Optimisation.