Wired has now posted the article The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine from the latest issue of the magazine. They’ve labeled it a “Gadget” story which just shows they don’t give themselves enough credit for illuminating cultural transformations.
I encourage you to read the whole piece. It gives evidence and examples of products and services to support this conclusion.
We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect.
This is a societal change with immense implications for all artists and arts managers that pride themselves on producing and promoting excellent work that must be experienced at certain hours in a quiet and respectful environment. The article contains a warning.
Companies that focus on traditional measures of quality – fidelity, resolution, features – can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability. And that means someone else can come along and drink their milk shake.
This summer’s NEA report on arts participation told us for certain that arts participation of all types is dropping across the country. Here is information to help us all understand why. The speed of change around us is accelerating, and getting yourself a Facebook fan page does not mean you’ve changed with it.
The glimmer of hope is that people still want to come together in shared experience – otherwise the upcoming Twestival would have no legs. They just want the experience to be flexible, convenient and affordable. Will the arts change fast enough to meet this need for people or keep losing ground? It will take all of us to create an answer in the affirmative.
Remember the proverbial artist who starves to death because he would not let any painting leave his studio until it is ‘perfect’ to his eye.
But perfection is not necessarily excellence.
Perhaps, for an artist, the goal is to be able to achieve ‘excellence’ without apparent effort or lengthy labor. Something so seamless, so perfect as if it had been done ‘in one breath.’
Like the Chinese criteria for good art (including painting, writing or music etc). There is to be no ‘chisel or axe marks; no smell of smoke or fire.’
But how does one do that?