Fellow Brainstormer Mark Bauerlein’s recent post (along with the comments it elicited) on what the digital revolution has done to young people got me thinking again about the effects of all of this on art.
Yesterday a colleague who teaches painting emailed me that it’s hard for him to get his students to go to a museum to look at a work of art. They just can’t see the point. Why schlep into New York to go to a museum to see a painting, especially since, as often as not, the hyper-bright, clean crisp image of it that’s posted on the museum’s Web site makes the real thing look limp and lame by comparison? (The brightness of Web color is always several notches higher than that of either pigment or natural color.)
Most of us can agree that sustained, undistracted linear thinking challenges many of today’s college students to the point where it’s hard for them to slog through an essay, let alone a book. Try getting them to look at a painting or a sculpture. Young people who’ve grown up stirred around in a digital soup approach the world as a place that’s always hot and always in motion. It’s always moving for them, around them, and at their command.
From the time our students were able to purposefully push a button, they’ve been able to manipulate images more easily than either a Leonardo or Picasso. By the age of twelve, they’ve seen thousands if not millions of images, most of them for about a nanosecond, all of them easily and cheaply obtained, tossed around, tossed out, and swiftly forgotten. By the time they come to college, they’ve seen everything from the high to the low, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the pornographic to the noble. Images have become a matter of ho-hum, what’s the fuss. They’re all easy come, easy go.
Going to a specific place in order to stand in a room and look at something that can’t be changed by a mere click and isn’t instantaneously about to morph into another image leaves a lot of the under-30 crowd utterly nonplussed. It’s easy to look at pictures, they think. They’ve been doing it their whole lives. They’re right — but what they don’t know is that they’ve been smothered by them, and no longer can really see them.
Of course, art has been moving this way for a long time. It’s been speeding away from the changeless, material object (paintings and sculpture) toward the non-object that’s always moving ever since the end of the 19th century, when movies were invented. At first, movies frightened people so much that they ran out of theaters, but the natural allure movies possess quickly pulled people back to them. Today — computer art notwithstanding — movies (more and more seen either on a laptop or on fabulous flat screens) remain the dominant art form of our age, but the digital revolution is causing video games and texted novels (in Japan, in particular) to give movies a real run for their money.
Jackson Pollock once said that every age invents the technology it needs in order to express itself. The digital era invented the click, which reflects the deepest held conviction of our time — namely, that the truth is accessible to everyone.
Of course, since that accessible truth endures for no more than an instant, it’s best to click and click, and click some more, right up until you die.
