- 1
- 2
The New New Thing: Same As It Ever Was
For the present, though, songs stick in your head only figuratively. Lately I can't get rid of that "Kansas City" number from "Oklahoma"—"They've gone about as fur as they c'n go"—an affectionately condescending sendup of our forebears' quaint failures of imagination. But at the risk of sounding like Aunt Eller, we now seem near the end of the cavalcade of artistic progress. Even with digital generation and delivery systems, the medium is only a medium. Digitization has changed the way the artist works and the consumer consumes—and hold onto your hat, baby—but how could it change what art is: words, sounds, images and crafted objects representing, recombining and reinterpreting our outer and inner worlds? The fences are down, the options open, the technology nearly omnipotent. Isn't that what we've always wanted? Everybody happy now? True, it'll be tough on art's aspiring hero-martyrs: to get persecuted for iconoclasm, they might actually have to step outside New York, L.A., Berlin or Tokyo. Even that may not work: with the Internet, there'll soon be no town time forgot.
So, unless or until we all dissolve into a biodigital slop, or disperse into a storm of radioactive particles, what's new—what's always been new—is only individuals: their sensibilities, and their will or compulsion to offer them to the world. Luckily (and in some cases, unluckily), we keep turning out a new supply of those with every New Year.
© 2007
- 1
- 2
Loading Menu
Member Comments
Posted By: markatos @ 01/08/2008 5:06:01 PM
Comment: Sure, the preponderance of the internet has made it easy for artistic styles to be copied and regurgitated, now more so than ever. And even current forms of music/art/design celebrate "re-appropriation", and we accept this as a culture. This, I think, can lead one to think that there is nothing new under the sun.
Of course, this is true to an extent. We haven't seen a lot of change in music for example, though I would argue its hard to discern sea-changes in an artistic field due to the how much hold commercialism has over how and what we experience.
That's the thing. There might amazing "new" things out there that aren't "commercially viable", hence we don't get to know about them. There might even be things that are 100's of years old, that are phenomenal that we don't know about for this same reason (or they were burned by barbarians etc...).
Early innovators stick out not just because they blazed new trails, but also because there wasn't a viacom saying "this is just too...loud (or whatever)." Jimi hendrix is a good example here. He was rejected commercially in America at first, and if he didn't go to Europe, we'd never have known about him probably.
Each of these unknowns can lead to innovation and evolution of an art form. To say nothing new will happen is to say that we know all there is/was/and will be.
This, clearly, is total fallacy.
A perfect corollary would be in the world of physics. Newtonian physicists said the same exact thing before Einstein came along.
You want something new? Just ponder for a second how quantum mechanics might effect art. The possibilities are beyond imagination.
Posted By: markatos @ 01/08/2008 5:05:39 PM
Comment: Sure, the preponderance of the internet has made it easy for artistic styles to be copied and regurgitated, now more so than ever. And even current forms of music/art/design celebrate "re-appropriation", and we accept this as a culture. This, I think, can lead one to think that there is nothing new under the sun.
Of course, this is true to an extent. We haven't seen a lot of change in music for example, though I would argue its hard to discern sea-changes in an artistic field due to the how much hold commercialism has over how and what we experience.
That's the thing. There might amazing "new" things out there that aren't "commercially viable", hence we don't get to know about them. There might even be things that are 100's of years old, that are phenomenal that we don't know about for this same reason (or they were burned by barbarians etc...).
Early innovators stick out not just because they blazed new trails, but also because there wasn't a viacom saying "this is just too...loud (or whatever)." Jimi hendrix is a good example here. He was rejected commercially in America at first, and if he didn't go to Europe, we'd never have known about him probably.
Each of these unknowns can lead to innovation and evolution of an art form. To say nothing new will happen is to say that we know all there is/was/and will be.
This, clearly, is total fallacy.
A perfect corollary would be in the world of physics. Newtonian physicists said the same exact thing before Einstein came along.
You want something new? Just ponder for a second how quantum mechanics might effect art. The possibilities are beyond imagination.
Posted By: John Luma @ 01/03/2008 12:52:56 PM
Comment: Great article about America's identity as the land of the perpetual New. And the world following our lead. But if the artists and the people can focus on the facts, they will see that a better imperative would be to experience what has already been produced over the last millenium in art and culture, and then see how New we feel. There is so much literature and art we've never experienced -- thousands of great achievements -- it would be smart to even try to absorb it for the rest of our lives. Most of us only scratch the surface -- while we complain that there's "nothing new."