“It is in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
–Steve Jobs, in introducing the iPad 2 in 2011
Historically, the arts have been a major custodian of culture. That assumption may reflect my prejudice, but I stand by it even though language, religion, economic systems, cuisine, social rituals, and so on encompass large shares of what constitutes culture. But, surely, art with a capital ‘A’ tops the list when most of us think about a defining element that showcases a civilization's culture. Because of my old school education, the first thoughts that come to mind when considering ancient Greece’s culture, for instance, are The Iliadand the Odyssey, scenes painted on vases and terracotta sculptures, and the Parthenon of Athens. We think of the things that they made, artful things, which become the touchstones of much of what we know about a culture in question.
So, what do we think about when we reflect on America’s ethos? After considering all the moving parts of our malleable culture, for better or worse, technology takes its place at the head of the parade. What else? It is complicated. Not long ago, I would have said much of America is expressed by cars and Hollywood and NFL football and fast food joints that line the highways and byways of America: those core definers of American culture. I would have said that we are a “melting pot” of sub-cultures all mixed and comingled into an unlikely conflation. But let’s admit it, lowbrow mass media have saturated our screens. We are watchers and clickers and tweeters. We google more than we look others in the eye. Many of our places of worship employ high-definition monitors above altars and daises. In our colleges and universities, course offerings in literature, visual arts, and music that cover periods before, say, 1800 are disappearing from catalogues. Brick and mortar classrooms are being replaced with online classrooms held in the ether and recorded in the Cloud. Even Shakespeare courses (and other backbone offerings that once served as core courses) are being taken off the books in many institutions of higher learning. Let’s face it, artistic expression, the sort we once studied in college humanities classes, has yielded to movies, television, computer platforms, other forms of mass media with cookie-cutter corporate imprimatur.
Literature, painting, sculpture, music, dance, cuisine, and other arts once defined the better part of our culture. We could understand in context a certain historical period by the artistic expressions left for us to examine. These arts conveyed experience, allowing us to feel alive within the historical moment taking us beyond wooden descriptions and dates, permitting us a visceral understanding of another time and culture.Alas, lofty art lost its place at the head of the culture queue. It no longer serves as a trophy that the elite, the clergy, the aristocrats, the educated, and privileged enjoyed. It became, one may argue, increasingly hollow. “Art is what you can get away with,” said Andy Warhol, and in no time, we witnessed manufactured art: tee-shirts, bulk produced so-so art, if art is even the word for it, which certainly is disputable.
As ideas, images, audio clips, and words were mass produced, high art lost its matchlessness. Once a potent prescription for society, art was diluted, attenuated, spread to everyone (Extra! Extra! Read all about it!). The middle class, the working class, even the classless had access to the full treatment of what now passes for our culture. And it is our culture, like it or not. We have become the billboard, the sound track, the thirty-second Coke spot, the laugh-track culture. Our “headpiece(s) filled with straw,” if that. Duh.
Measure how quickly we progressed from quill to printing press to digital communication to all of us awash in information and sensory overload. As a result, the sui generisof high art, art with a capital A—once housed in the Louvre (or some other such cathedral of Art) is now found on placemats, in gift shops, on t-shirts, on coffee mugs, on every surface the commercial forces can think to leave their mass-produced litter.
Religion once was the sun around which art orbited. Now with meta-information (film, television, computers, streaming devices, mobile phones) screens have become the center of our attention. Artistic expression, then, has become either less identifiable, or more so. Widely duplicated (like pressing a finger on one letter on a computer’s keyboard as the image scrolls down the page), art has become the opposite of iconoclasm, an outcome as welcome as a stuttering opera singer.
Okay, we should not be worried that art will somehow become irrelevant. It will, as always, express the spirit and passion of the human experience. But, like Waldo, it will be harder to recognize in a crowded field.