In the 1990s I read a book that purported to predict what the new millennium would look like. Technologically, politically, socially, it had it all wrong. Technologically you could expect and forgive. Mapping the genome and going to Mars weren’t even on the horizon and as for the advance of democracy and a just society it was basically a wish list. However, on a social level the complete loss of privacy and data collection on the scale we now understand had only a couple of precedents – Mesopotamian cities and Cuniform records, and the former East Germany. What couldn’t have been predicted was the advent of a new kind of society.

I recently postulated that just such a new kind society had been established through the proliferation of on-line art groups [and others] as thousands ‘gather’ for demonstration and discussion. There is still much disagreement about how to define a civilisation or a society other than that people congregated in a particular place for a length of time. A hierarchical structure is often quoted, perhaps involving a monarch or chief with powers, a propensity to random violence and a form of art or decoration that is peculiar to the time and place but there is ample evidence from across the world in both recent and past history, that many societies show none of these characteristics or that such characteristics were sustained over any length of time.  So, how do we define these groups at all other than that they exist and are ostensibly dominated by women artists who will never meet each other? In hunter- gatherer days women controlled both art and ritual and only the male-dominated guilds of the middle-ages pushed this into the background for a millennium. Are we now seeing a shift back to those days of prehistory?

Art history books ostensibly favour male artists, something that can be seen right back to the beginnings of the Renaissance. We know of a handful of women artists during the Western era but they are a rarity. While certain craft skills have always been seen as more female oriented such as in hunter gatherer times the use of the straw of wild seed crops to make baskets, bags, adobe walls, insulation, ritual objects and ornaments, what we are seeing now is something completely different. The very act of creation has become the ritual.

The number of women who have made it as artists in the sales or auction worlds is small. The 9^th St Women in De Kooning, Frankenthaler, Hartigan, Krasner and Mitchell all struggled to gain recognition or separation from their male counterparts which actively seeking self-expression. Beyond them there are a handful of figures in Bourgeois, Hepworth, Riley, Martin, Kollwitz, Cossington-Smith, Emin and Saville who fought the odds. The idea of matriarchal societies, however they might be defined, is rare and even formidable female leaders such as Elizabeth 1 and Catherine the Great found no use for female underlings, let alone female advisors or court artists, other than as domestics.

How the women artists in the current art groups though see themselves has yet to be explored. Pioneers, warriors, a vanguard? Or none of the above.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t men involved but so many of the leaders and inaugurators are female artists using what they know to educate a whole generation of artists. Whatever their motivation, the artists are seeking ways to manipulate paint and other media to find the means to express themselves. Self- expression through art is a relatively new idea. Given the sheer numbers involved, in some ways this is a seismic shift, albeit a quiet one, at this juncture of time and opportunity in the 21st century. Perhaps what we are seeing here is what has always existed – an undercurrent of art but given new life and dominance though new technology.

One thing that interests me though is the subject matter chosen by the bigger groups. Ostensibly it is painterly abstraction and while there is imagery it is not political, social or concerned with grand themes. After a few centuries of art practice characterised by definable art groupings around headings such as Romanticism or Cubism and the role of nationalism, this internet era and time disavows that such categorisations exist at all.

In early 20^th century Paris you could find all sorts of artists plying their trade largely based around the myth of Paris as the centre of the art world. New York may well attribute that title to itself at the moment, but such titles are fictions just as are limited liability companies. They exist but don’t. Such companies are independent of the people within them and exist only in our imaginations much as do religions and cities.

These art groups are international in ways never before achieved with members never likely to meet or share lives beyond the art they produce. Society and humankind has been moving inexorably towards unity and sameness through currency, trade and culture for some time. Everyone in the world seemingly has a mobile phone for example. With so many choosing Abstract art as their platform some eighty years after its inception, is this a throwback or a belated direction? Most movements in art lasted but a short time and while the dominant strands of more intellectual art derived from Duchamp and more emotional art derived Matisse, among others, are still dictating style and approach, why this resurgence of Abstract Expressionism? Common criticism would have it that abstraction is easy when anyone who has tried it will tell you that it is the opposite. It does not require any kind of qualification, ability to draw or represent anything other than visceral expression and this may be part of the allure but the freedom of the style is also part of the equation. Cultural expectation of both method and content need not hamper anyone.

Images of either women or men for that matter are rare on these sites. We have all been brought up to expect that such images are a cultural imperative for artists even in the midst of the abstract wars of the 20^th century. That is not to say that the status of women, as depicted by women artists, or socially/politically oriented subject matter do not exist on these internet sites but that more women artists have found a mode of self-expression that stands outside of gender politics and nationality.

But why a dominance of women? To loosely quote Yuval Noah Harari, if you put 1000 chimpanzees in a room [our nearest evolutionary ancestors] you get chaos. If you put 1000 male artists in a room more than likely it will end up as war. 10,000 artists, on an internet site though, most of them women, and the mythical glue of creativity takes over in an atmosphere of communal conviviality. Art as self-expression? Art as therapy? Art as a social imperative? Art as a reiteration of hunter-gatherer society and the control of magic and ritual? Perhaps. The collective power that erected pyramids was the result of a collective belief and sense of community purpose but the uptake of a current course on Abstract paint application may leave no such legacy but you can’t deny that one exists.