'Everyone has the potential to become an artist,’ Duggie Fields once said. He was by no means the first contemporary artist to make the claim, and with the coming of a new century it felt like old news anyway.
By the end of the 1990s anyone with sufficient funds and a steady hand had the potential to be a post-pop artist, following the launch of the Apple iMac. Those of us who never picked up a paintbrush could use the mouse and the minimal palette of shapes and colours supplied by the software to copy objects or artworks. (Battenberg, Colonel Sanders, and Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ in my case.) These were the fledgling days of the internet when websites created by design agencies were virtual works of art. They were impossible to navigate — but it didn’t matter. What was evident was this platform didn’t merely have the potential to make everyone an artist but a film maker and a musician too, such was the scope of the brave new worl…