Electronicmedia Culture
Joseph Nechvatal
homogenization, of world trade will now begin in earnest. There has been,
during the long drawn out negotiations, much to-do about the international
film and television market, the so-called cultural preference, about the
necessity to defend European culture from the invasion of a certain
American industry and its value system - or lack of - reflected in US media
products. I tend to share that European alarm, having already seen the
damage done to American culture and the price US society is paying for the
orgy of violence the media has promoted in the name of profit. I also
accept the argument that media products are more than commodities to be
exchanged freely on the international market. But, if we accept the
argument about cultural protection and the need for a healthier and more
intelligent media environment, we are immediately faced with the question;
who is going to invest to produce the European alternative?
in its definition of humanity as any marxist formulation, defining
everything and everyone as commerce, a uni-dimensional expression of man as
an economic entity. Every human endeavor is reduced to a state of brute
competition, survival through selling, the only legitimate activity
underlying and justifying all others. The mindless materialism resulting
from this reductionist behavior is a signpost of our era. It is the
"democratic and free-market" societies that are producing the worst forms
of media barbarism today, accelerating a decline in values and standards
while mobilizing populations politically and economically. The violence
around us is partially due to a general brutalization of the spirit
resulting from a systematic elimination of higher values whoes expression
is considered irrelevant or too expensive. When other societies around the
world reject western values, our own media give them powerful arguments to
throw out the good with the bad.
schools is reaching epidemic proportions? What models have kids had for
the last 30 years? Exposed bicepes with a 357 magmum attached. Media,
with a continuous diet of mayhem, promote savagery as a legitimate model of
human comportment, violence as a form of problem solving. The schools,
having given up years ago on any kind of moral content, any education in
civic responsibility, any form of cultural training, any discussion of
values, have become nothing more than adolescent baby-sitters, keeping down
unemployment statistics, and providing meeting places for the exchange of
unhealthy ideas garnered from the media. America has been there for many
years and is paying the price. Europe is rushing headlong into the same,
heedless of what has happened in the States, with profit as its clarion
call.
the gladitorial atmosphere, is accepted as part of the visual environment,
the on-going parade of society's role models. In "Art of the Third Reich"
by Peter Adams, Nazi art is described as "the art of seduction, aimed at
synchronizing (and thus eliminating) taste. The iconography was clear, the
painting accessible and banal: art that asked no questions and gave all the
answers. Its effect was immense." The entertainment industry has picked
up the standard but, of course, only for fun and profit.
an enormous expansion in broadcast technologies; satellite, cable, the
omnipresent cassette recorders, videodisks...., and more to come. In
computer networking we have been experimenting with interactive visual
tele-communications. The "in" word today is "cyber", interactive on-line
exchange of text, sound and image, virtual reality, a potentially enormous
market moving out onto the information highway. The means of moving images
and the amount we can move are growing rapidly. Again, who is going to
produce the material to be shown on all these systems? Who is going to
make the programs for all these new channels? Who is going to develop the
software to operate the information highway? Who is going to digitalize
and organize the hundreds of thousands of pages of information and images
to be consulted, exchanged...? Who is going to build this new virtual
world and why?
to be left alone to grope toward some finality. We have seen what that has
done to the US where the entire visual environment was left to be dictated
uniquely by commercial concerns. That we are moving toward a form of world
culture may be inevitable. That that culture be based exclusively on
commercialism of the crassest kind is unacceptable. We need a general
mobilization of resources to begin producing a new environment, one that
reflects cultural diversity, intellectual depth, real information as well
as entertainment. What appears on screens, large and small, cannot be
designed uniquely for how much money can be rung from audiences. While few
people deny the need for a market presence in the visual media, domination
is quite another thing. Sooner or later we will have to wake up to the
fact that the visual environment, the most powerful cultural influence for
the majority, is more than a commercial issue. If not, the consequences
can be very serious. There is more to culture than distraction. The
malaise produced by the profound social transformation which we are all
living, has put to question several fundamental assumptions about society
and culture and the definition of art itself and it looks like business
will win again.
in the field of communictions, has created an ambiguous situation for the
art world as artists have begun to recuperate the technologies of the media
for their experimentation, creating new works which do not fit any previous
defintion of an "objet d'art". It is hard to market a video tape or a
computer screen image. The work of artists in these areas not only
questions the media and what they are doing to us, but it questions the art
world itself and the relation, as it exists today, between art and culture.
proliferation of possibilities, calling for a return to the classics, which
unfortunately often means a return to canvas or stone, a seige mentality in
an ivory tower, turning a blind eye to what is really happening to culture
today. Others are calling for a closer association with industry,
particularly the media industry, in order to train practitionners and
provide the necessary workers for a quick expansion into the new
technological areas with an up-dated rerun of the same old media content,
meaning, of course, commerce not culture.
what is seen by the public is a product of the arts and it is probable that
it will become even less so. It is no wonder that images from publicity
have become part of everyman's wardrobe, or that even high fashion items
are covered with corporate logos. Publicity has for so long been a part of
our visual environment that its images have become part of the way people
dress and think.
situation has to be in the field of art education where supposedly the
people who will create our culture are trained. The continent's art
schools should be the most natural laboratory for experimentation in the
new media, where at least part of Europe's new visual environment can be
researched. Not "media schools" who's objective is to train people for the
profession with little questioning of content and it's social role, where
training is technical and the acceptance of the quality and content of the
industry total. The traditional role of art has been to renew the visual
environment, to redefine it for each new age, and through doing so, provide
society with models of action. What McLuhan and many others have called
the education of perception by the artist. Simply put, art is a form of
questioning and the interface between public and art is culture. The new
technologies of the emerging visual environment present a particular
challenge to the artist; to adapt these tools to the process of artistic
expression, to define their content, to develop the visual language which
will be their principal means of expression. These evolving technologies
are offering us a new communications space that will be virtual,
international and interactive. It is the role of the artist to define that
space in contemporary culture.
- Re: American Crap Rant Michael Betancourt 00:11:55 2/24/96
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