Curtains: Do the arts have a future in the electronic age?
Do the arts have a future in the electronic age? The short answer’s easy: of course they do. The art-making impulse is inextinguishable; the geniuses will keep on coming (on a maddeningly irregular schedule); the forms and media will change, yes, but then they always have.
Still, it isn’t going to be that simple. In Public Speaking, the Fran Lebowitz documentary that came out a couple of years ago, the writer made a striking observation. A great audience, she said, is more important for the creation of great art than great artists are. Great audiences create great artists, by giving people the freedom to take chances. Lebowitz was thinking about the audience that existed in the theaters and galleries of New York City in the decades after the Second World War, the age of George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and so many others.
I don’t need to tell you what kind of audience the computer is creating. Online reading (and viewing, and listening) means skimming and skipping and surfing. It means never starting something without already thinking about when you’re going to get through it so you can move on to the next thing. It means refusing to give yourself completely to any single experience. Inevitably, writers and other creators will adapt themselves to the new conditions of reception. What the audience can’t be bothered to invest the time to get out of a work, creators aren’t going to take the trouble putting in: subtlety, complexity, detail, depth. Sentences will get shorter. Syntax will get simpler. Ironies will broaden. Vocabularies will contract. Stories and arguments will start dropping parts. Everything will have to squeeze itself into the smallest possible space. If you want an example of the way that writing is shaped by the expectations of its audience, just think of academic prose.