Art and Culture, Art and Technology

Conclusion

We are now living in a period of transition, a statement that to many might sound redundant- However, since many other people, infatuated with their own supermundane materialistic technological wonderworld have come to think of our Time as a new Renaissance, we need a second look at our actual situation:

In Ancient Greece and in Rome, Language reached such a state of Perfection (Classicism) that it became unable to transcend, modify or update itself and ultimately had to be declared "dead". Similarly, Poetry and Painting in Western Civilization seem to have long passed their zenith (and even several last minute revivals) to the point of having at once been supplanted by other means of expression, and lost their function in the life of the people regardless of their cultural level.

Poetry in France, for example, only escapes from being declared absolutely dead because there are always bookkeepers, archeologists of the Present that take an intellectual interest in even the slightest and weirdest remains: Hence the autopsy of Art will have to wait a bit. However, few will contest the extreme indifference that Poetry receives in verbal or printed form, from every class of society, especially as compared with the tremendous increase in leisure and technical literature, television, etc... It is significant to observe here that among the Arts, music has been the only one to show a flexibility that makes it in itself adaptable and adapted to the new technological semantics.

We can therefore ask the question: Are Poetry and Painting fast becoming dead languages as well as any other Art that fails to be translatable into the medium of the day? It is tempting at this point to react passionately in support of or against such a possibility as it is often the case when confronted with any great change, any attempt to draw the line, any advent of a new order. We must therefore examine very cautiously and in a well-documented context such an implication.

Many people will say right away in defense of Poetry that it was never a very popular Art form in the West. Whether we agree or disagree with this view, there was always a popular form of Poetry which has likely been superseded by television and ready-made literature, to the extent that it is now widely impossible to publish Poetry (even of popular vein) unless you actually print and distribute your own book yourself!

It is not up to me to decide the fate of Poetry or Painting but up to the very immediate future, whenever our period of transition will pass and crystallize into a new, more defined shape. Whether Poetry will then become the exclusive domain of Anthropologists or be transformed and revivified thru new means of communication depends largely on the flexibility and destiny of local cultures and also on the degree of transformation that is required to change one language into another (as from Latin to French, etc,). Certainly now is a very trying time for the born poet in our mutating culture. What is this exceedingly rare Panda supposed to do when his Art (and his audience) devaluates like currency in the pockets of third world workers beyond all control and all reason?

The adaptability of beings being a natural result of dear necessity, it is likely that the Poet has already begun a shift in emphasis at least in regards to his means of expression.

However, his/her feeling of utter isolation and a natural sense of nostalgia for the poetical feats of the recent Past are of some concern to us and rightly deserve great compassion. Not that we have difficulty in imagining the Poet using a LaserWriter instead of pen and ink, but rather because of the tremendous challenge to inner motivation it represents for the Poet to be so far removed from both Nature and Soul mates spread so thin all over the Earth. Any period of transition is nerve-racking: we have lost the great Ideals (or Gods) of the Past and our new artistic languages based on computer technology are not yet developed to a level that we can rely on for a lifetime. Hence the actual struggle of Artists to keep up with the latest innovations in their field and their frustration at not having definitive tools with which to express themselves naturally since the current standard seems to improve infinitely by the day. A bit like a cyclist (symbol here of the Artist of the Past) who would have to race against motorcyclists when the speed of motorcycles was increased every week by 50 miles an hour! Or an infantry soldier having to fight with a rifle against tanks, then bombers, then guided missiles.

But this crisis of means is far superseded by the utter absence of spiritual fulfillment since Art has been made into a mere entertaining commodity by the Medias. And the actual motivation of the serious Artist to carry on such a demanding path appears often now so buried, thin and elusive as to be totally insufficient to justify his/her very existence, let alone to support him.

As qualified teachers in the Arts are quickly replaced by economists and statisticians, the new generation learns to use a digital calculator before getting to know how to count; and when we apply this to Poetry, even if we admit that Poetry (or Art) cannot really be taught, we reach nonetheless a rather negative answer to our original question.

The enthusiasts of progress at all costs will speak of reorientation (i.e. like to recycle a mathematician into computer journalism), the necessary step in their view of evolution as if one could readily change a poet into a computer columnist for life without robbing poetry itself!

So what has destiny in store for our late Romantic incarnations, these inevitable lovers of beautiful verse and beautiful melodies who can also believe Rimbaud's "il faut etre absolument moderne"?

If bits and bytes represent the language of the future, it will necessarily take time before it reaches a maturity and a perfection comparable to the one reached by language through more than 2000 years of civilization, and the artist of the Present cannot wait to make the future.

Therefore, in this transition period, the role of the artist is to pioneer new synthesis of expression rather than attempt to copy, revive or transform the realizations of the Past cycle that has now reached near completion. This transition leads us to the dawn of a new era: the Age of Synthesis or the creation of a synthetic mind environment.

Such a far reaching development can no longer be questioned: With the advent of the planetarisation of consciousness, the simulcast feedback of ideas, images & sounds speeds so rapidly back and forth between the individual and the world as to become undifferentiable from the instantaneous play of a collective dream.

This Age of Aquarius that astrologers assure us we are now entering represents the "Hive Mind": the planet Earth as a network of communication that ultimately transcends the possibility of any isolated and unrelated individual phenomena not only physically but psychically as well. In the Arts this also means the merging of all ethnies and the abolition of individual cultures. The Earth as a multidimensional "unicellular" entity should thus become able to eliminate local warfare as well as local belligerous Traditions.

This is the new challenge that we are facing today.