Within artistic practice, as much as within any other practical
form of human projection, we notice the transition from a
centralized system of reference and values to a system of
parallel values. In the continuum generically qualified in the
market as art- and what cannot be declared art today?-there is a
noticeable need for intrinsic relations of patterns: what
belongs together, and how commonalties are brought about. And
there is a need for disparity and distinction: How do we
distinguish among the plenty accumulated in a never-ending
series of shows when all that changes is the name on the canvas?
The same applies to photography, video art, theater, dance,
minimalist music, and the architecture of deconstruction. An
evident tension results, not different from the one we perceive
in the market of stocks and options. The dilemma is obvious:
where to invest, if at all, unless someone has insider
information (What is hot?). This is not an expression of an
ideal, as the values of literacy marked art to be, but of
alternatives delivered together with the uncertainty that
characterizes the new artistic experience as one of obsession
with recognition in an environment of competition that often
becomes adversarial. (The umbrellas that the Parisians used to
attack Impressionist canvases at the turn of the century are
children's toys in comparison to the means of aesthetic
annihilation used in our time.)
Becoming a practical experience focused on its own condition and
history, this kind of art affects the appropriation of its
products in the sense of increasing artificiality-the shared
phylocultural component-and decreasing naturalness. Accordingly,
interpretive practice is focused on establishing distinctions
(often hair- splitting), more and more within the artistic
domain, in disregard of message, form, ethical considerations,
and even skill. This is the type of art whose photographic
reproduction is always better than the original. This is the
music that always sounds crisper on a compact disk. This is the
art whose simuli of the show, performance, dance, or concert on
television are even better than the production. Meaning comes
about in an individual experience of relating distinctions, not
common experiences.
The specialization of art, no less than the specialization of
sciences and humanities, results in the formation of numerous
networks of recurrent or non-recurrent interaction. Examples of
this are layering, tracing from photo-projection, expanding the
strategies of collage (to include heterogeneous sources), mixing
the elaborate and the spontaneous (in dance, performance, video,
even architecture). The pencil and brush are replaced by the
scanner and by memes of operations favoring minute detail over
meaningful wholes. Music is generated by means of sampling and
synthesizing. We deal with a phenomenon of massive
decentralization-each is potentially an artist-and generalized
integration through networks of interaction, within which
museums, galleries, and auction houses represent major nodes. It
is not unusual to see the walls of a museum become the support
for a work whose life ends with the end of the show, if not
earlier. Many musical compositions never make it to paper,
forever sentenced to tape or compact disk. Composers who do not
know how to read or write music rely on the musical knowledge
integrated in their digital instruments.
With the advent of technological means for the production and
dissemination of images, sounds, and performances begins an age
of a sui generis artistic environment of life that is easy to
adapt to individual preference, easy to change as the preference
changes. The new artistic practice results in the demythification
of artists and their art. Art itself is demythified at the same
time. As a consequence of electronic reproducibility and
infinite manipulation, art forms a new library of images with
memory devices loaded with scanned art, but with no books. Sound
samples are the library of the composer active in the
civilization of illiteracy. Using networking as a matter of
practicability, people could display, in places of living or
work, images from any collection, or listen to music from any
ongoing concert around the globe. They could also change the
selection without touching the display. They could redo each
artwork as they please, painting over its digital double in the
act of appropriating it, probably beyond what any artist of the
past would ever accept, or any artist of the present would care
for. Music could be subjected to similar appropriations. As a
matter of fact, televised images are already manipulated and
r-written. DVD-three letters standing for Digital Video Data-
yet to make it into the everyday jargon reflecting our
involvement with new media, will probably replace the majority
of televised images. With the advent of digital video delivered
via the familiar compact disk format, a tool as powerful as any
TV production facility will support artistic innovation that we
still associate with high budgets and glamorous Hollywood
events.
Art, as much as any other form of human interaction in the
civilization of illiteracy, involves shorter cycles of exchange
and contact at each of its levels: meaning constitution,
symbolism, education, merchandise. The eternity and
transcendence of art, notions and expectations associated with
the literate experience, become nostalgic references of a past
pragmatics. Viewers consume art almost at the rhythm at which
they consume everything else. Art consumes itself, exhausting a
model even before it can be publicly acknowledged as one. In its
new manifestations, not all necessarily in digital format, but
many in the transitory existence of networks, it either comes in
an abundance, which contradicts the literacy-based ideal of
uniqueness, or in short-lived singular modes, which contradicts
the ideal of permanency. Strategies of over-writing,
over-dancing, over-sounding, and over-impression are applied with
frenzy. Grid structures made visible become containers for very
fluid forms of expression, bringing to mind the fluidity of
Chinese calligraphy. Afro-American street dancers, West
European ballet groups, and theaters in which the human body is
integrated into the more comprehensive body of the show,
practice these strategies for different purposes and with
different aesthetic goals. There is also a lot of parody, and
fervor, in expanding one medium into another: music becomes
painting or sculpture; dance becomes image; sculpture lends its
volume to theatrical projects or to 3D renditions, virtual or
real events that integrate the natural and the artificial.
In this vast effort of exploration, authenticity is rarely
secured. Photography, especially in its digital forms, would be
impossible without the industry it created; nor would painting,
sculpture, music, or computer-based interactive art (cyberart,
another name for virtual reality) without the industries they
stimulated. The legitimate market of fakes and the illegitimate
market of originals meet in the illiterate obsession with
celebrity, probably the most fleeting of all experiences. The
extension of art as practice to art as object, resulting from
the aesthetic experience in the space of reproductions better
than originals, is challenged by the intensions of the act
(process). Intensity is accepted more and more as the essence of
the artistic practical experience, impossible to emulate in a
reproduction, and actually excluded in the perfection of a
concert transposed onto a compact disk, for example, or of
images on CD-ROM and DVD disks.
When each of us can turn into a gazelle, a lobster, a stone, a
tree, a pianist, a dancer, an oboe, or even an abstract thought
by donning gloves and goggles, we are projected in a space of
personal fantasy. Creativity in virtual reality, including
creativity of interaction on the Internet, invites play. It can
be in someone's private theater, sex parlor, or drug experience.
As an interactive medium, virtual reality can be turned into an
instrument for knowing others as they unfold their creativity in
the virtual space shared. As opposed to art in its conventional
form, virtual reality supports real-time interactions. The
artist and the work can each have its own life. Or the artist can
decide to become the work and experience the perception of
others. No Rembrandt or Cézanne, not even the illiterate
graffiti artists in the New York subway system could experience
such things.
Surprisingly, this experience is not limited only to non-language
based experiences, but also to the art of writing and reading.
Embodied in avatars, many would-be writers contribute their
images or lines to ongoing fictional situations on chat sites on
the World Wide Web. While art is freeing itself from literacy,
literature does not seem to have the same possibility. Or is
this another prejudice we carry with us from the pragmatic
framework of literacy-defined self-constitution? The borderline,
if any, between art and writing is becoming fuzzier by the hour.