When we talk about cultural disciplines — dance, theater, fiction, and so on — we tend to speak of them as if they are self-contained. Theater may respond to evolving stage technology and alternative spacers, but it’s still roughly theater in the way we know it. And because significant changes to the environment have tended to happen rather slowly, it’s been easy to maintain that illusion for quite some time.
This overview of the past and future of the novel, in Time magazine, reminds us that forms of artistic expression are entirely intertwined with their environment. They form and evolve in response to that environment. And they change when that environment changes. The birth of the novel in the 18th century was one such response to environmental change. Says the article:
New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books
cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could
sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly
literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them.
Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson
showed up to take advantage of them.
When you stop to think of it, all of the cultural forms we now consider as self-contained and place-independent were born this way. Sacred choral music of the distant past was born to fill the cavernous cathedrals and lingering acoustics that technology and hubris and social hierarchy had built. What we now call chamber music evolved to fill aristocratic spaces. And on and on.
Architecture defines art — whether it’s physical architecture, or financial, or market, or economic, or social, or even legal. When that architecture changes, by intent or by tidal force, art will change in response.
The challenge comes when we’ve built institutions, infrastructures, and business models that serve one particular architecture that are unable or unwilling to adapt to a new one. Consider the Time article’s description of old and new publishing:
Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive.
New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money
or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy,
well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and
trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered
treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.
Clearly, the architecture of our universe has changed. The forms and means and methods of artistic expression will change too. It’s not that our traditional means will vanish, but they will certainly recede as smaller players in a richer ecosystem. Sounds like a task and a challenge for a brave new batch of cultural entrepreneurs.
It’s interesting to consider the arts and environment relationship which has traditionally surrounded the actual creation or making of the artwork in the first place. What you write about are changes in the *forms* of arts performance which have always responded in every way to more sophisticated science and technological innovations in our built environment. But for millennia the personal *subject* of all the arts has been recognizable — across cultures and across time, no matter what the vehicle used. We can respond as humans to the cave painter as much to Miro, to monks singing Gregorian Chant as to massive modern orchestras in great halls playing Shostakovitch. But an arts creator’s work to compose, paint, write the script, is done in private, in an attempt to relate the person to the larger human experience in society and on/in our planet. The great divide today may be the substitution of the digitally created virtual world for the natural one at the moment of arts creation, rather than at its performance.