How did tattoos became a form of art?
Japanese tattooing
Tattooing in the Western world has a long relationship with art. As mentioned by a tattoo critic Max Lodder in his article, tattoos where represented as art. In London Stand Magazine in 1897, there is mention of England , Japan and the United States as the center of artistic tattoos.
"Stockings" of ink. Butterflies are eternal. 1930s.
In 1970, the years in America the media announces a new era of tattoo - because tattoo masters had art education. At the same time, tattoo art moved to a museum - first as an artistic act : the famous tattoo artist Spider Webb performed a tattoo for Annie Spinkle on the steps of MOMA while the tattoo was banned in New York. Later, in 1977, Ruth Martin, an artist and a key figure of American tattooing underground, made tattoos and showed his work at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the tenth of the Paris Biennale. And more and more people - including experts from the artistic environment - recognize the tattoo is as a fashion, common and also a highly artistic skill.
Spider Webb making a tatoo to Annie Sprinkle
Art historian and tatoo critic Matt Lodder analyzes newspaper articles a hundred years ago and came to the conclusion that («People always say the same thing about tattoos») tattoos have never been only for sailors, bikers,criminals -that myth is just perceived from the media.
If we expand the concept of art to a collective concept, which includes street art and graphic design, and, for example, high fashion - (and remember that today, any object placed in the Museum of Modern Art, in part transformed into a contemporary art), the tattoo he certainly is.
