Puppet art is a symbiosis of various arts and techniques: sculpture, painting, modeling clothes, mastering the technique of hair implantation, hairdressing, footwear, sometimes engineering is needed and much, much more. But we are now living in the digital age. This is neither good nor bad - this is a given. Many admire the masterpieces of 3D graphics in modern films, cartoons and games. So after all, heroes in films are invented and developed by living real people for other people. And all this is created by young people, for whom augmented and virtual reality is much closer and more understandable than a trip to a real museum.

A doll, like any work of art, is created in order to "please the eye" and encourage a person to think, evoke emotions. And if you manage to win the viewer's attention and call him into an internal dialogue, then this is success. The ability to invent and create an image is what is important for the artist in the first place, and what technologies were used in this case, the viewer will not even think about it, and it is not so important. Technology is just a tool, and people determine how important a work is.

Now we are facing a global crisis of scripts for films and books, as well as worthy images in culture, in particular in dolls. Exhibitions are littered with works of the same type, copying better or worse what is already on the market. And here the problem is not that someone is using porcelain casting or a three-dimensional model to create a piece, but that society is becoming more and more infantile. There are no global high goals at the state level and people simply do not find a goal in life as such.

The desire of new artists, after the very first steps, to present their work to the world is absolutely natural and understandable (many may remember their irrepressible impulse when they start a new interesting business). But the drop in the level of puppetry is dictated by the market:

• absolutely everyone who paid for a place is allowed to participate in the exhibition, regardless of the level of skill
• at competitions, the jury is often people who are not familiar with the puppet world and do not have information that maybe student work is presented for the competition or parts of old dolls are used in the work, that is, the selection for competitions is also on the basis of who paid, he passed
• manufacturers of materials for artists are ready to provide everything for creativity from brushes to blanks for parts for a doll, etc.

So if we want to develop culture and our puppetry art, then we need not to close ourselves off from technology, but on the contrary - to use all means and technologies for self-education and enlightenment of other people. And decide for yourself whether you are just creating a “trendy” doll for sale and just doing handicrafts or trying to look into the future and create a work in which people can see a real work of art. And by the way, one is not a hindrance to the other. You can successfully create cute things in order to feed yourself and your family, and slowly create that secret miracle, which will be valuable and significant in itself and will contribute to the formation of the idea of an author's doll as another form of art worthy of the best museums in the world ...

The author of the article is Elena Misyuna, a member of the Artists' Union of DPI, section of the author's dolls.

Instagram @elenamisiuna