Confusing as it is, a snapshot of everything that today goes
under the names art and literature conveys at least a sense of
variety. Forget the never-ending discussions of what qualifies
as art and what does not. And forget the irreconcilable disputes
over taste. What counts are practical experiences of
self-identification as artist or writer, as well as involvement
with artifacts eventually acknowledged within the experience as
art or as literature, i.e., experiences through which the art
public and readership are constituted.
What comes to mind when we think about the art and literature of
the civilization of illiteracy are not illiterate
writers-although they exist-and not illiterate painters,
composers, pianists, dancers, sculptors, or computer artists of
all kinds. Rather, disparate examples of works, each remarkable
in its own way (or altogether unremarkable), but above all
marked by characteristics that distinctly disconnect them from
the literate experience of art and literature capture our
memory. Cautionary note ended. Here are the examples: surviving
Auschwitz translated into a comic book parable populated by cats
(depicting the Nazis) and mice (depicting their victims); a
Grammy Award returned by a famous singing group because someone
else was doing the singing for them; the tear-jerkers from
Disney Studios (a company whose audience is the world), classic
stories or history turned into feminist or politically correct
musicals; paintings by a controversial artist (self-made or made
by the market?), fetching prices as high as overvalued shares of
a new Internet company, after he died of AIDS at an early age;
the never-ending parade of computer animation miracles; the Web
sites of uninterrupted aesthetic frenzy that would have
delighted Andy Warhol, one of the authentic founders of art in
the civilization of illiteracy, if anyone could pinpoint the
beginning of this civilization.
These are examples. Period. Originality, aesthetic integrity,
homogeneity, and artfulness are the exception. The process
through which these examples were produced begs qualifiers
different from art produced under the aegis of literate
expectations. Today, art is produced much faster, embodied-or
disembodied-in and disseminated through more media, and
exhausted in a shorter time-sometimes even before it comes into
being! Cycles of artistic style are abridged to the extreme of
being impossible to define. Artistic standards are leveled as
the democracy of unlimited access to art and literature expands
their public, without effecting a deep rapport, a long-lasting
relation, or a heightened aesthetic expectation. Never before has
more kitsch been produced and more money spent to satisfy the
obsession with celebrity that is the hallmark of this time.
Museums became the new palaces and the new shopping malls,
opening branches all over the world, not unlike MacDonalds and
fashion retail stores. And never before were more technological
and scientific means involved in the practical experience of
art, always on the cutting edge, not only because art is
traditionally associated with innovation. These new experiences
make possible the transition from an individual, private, almost
mystical, experience to a very public activity. Open a virtual
studio on the Web, and chances are that many people will
exercise their calling (or curiosity) on the digital canvas. Not
infrequently, this activity is carried on at the scale of the
integrated world: major concerts viewed on several continents,
attempts to integrate art from all nations into a super-work, the
melange of literatures fused into new writing workshops,
distributed, interactive installations united in the experience
of digital networks. Good taste and bad co-exist; pornography
resides as bits and bytes in formats not different from those of
the most suave examples from art history. The Internet is the
one and only uncensored place left on the earth. All these
phenomena deserve to be understood as testimony to the change of
the condition of human experience, and in the context of change
from a literacy-dominated art to an art of many partial
literacies, of mediations, and of relatively vague notions of
value and significance.