New media in context
From WikiContent
This essay may leave readers dubious about prospects for greatness among the potential art forms and media. But please remain optimistic about the power of human thought and communication. No one has reached the level of Shakespeare at his art, or Michelangelo at his, but new traditions have brought new joys. And the new media rarely start with masterpieces; it takes time for a culture to assimilate the medium.
Furthermore, old forms hardly ever disappear, and artists often move in quite a protean manner between media. The flexibility of their participation in the arts may inject new life in, and give a boost to, old media.
We can assume that when people find they can instantly update their favorite works, they will jump in with a vengeance as they have on Wikipedia and some free software projects. The number of people engaged in art will go sharply up; imagine if you could be even the least of the students in Michelangelo's studio? Perhaps the word studio will be reclaimed as a place for intensive reflection and creation, rather than referring to a corporation that throws the efforts of a staff into a grinder and emerges with a commercial product.
The new media is not as conducive as the old inner-expressive culture to individuation, but more conducive than mass-media culture to independent and analytical thinking. People ask themselves what they could do to change the artwork; this awareness of potential empowers them in a different way from the texts of the past.
The evolution of advertising on the Internet is a token of what the new media are doing to social relations. As mentioned in the Social differences section, advertising is a feature of centralized twentieth-century media. While advertising has taken hold on the Web and even made possible the existence of such major corporations Yahoo! and Google, the medium's interactivity and "pull" aspects (readers tend to choose for themselves what to view, rather than be passive recipients of "pushed" information) lead companies as well as individuals to search for more collaborative ways to generate interest in their work. Networks of respected commentators seem to do more to spread an idea than an advertisement.
Like the twentieth-century mass media, the new media creates community through shared experience--but the new media is critically different (pun intended) from the older media in that the shared experience is built from contributions by many and embodies the thoughts of the viewers. We have a romantic notion of a lone artist or writer struggling with her soul in an attic; the new artist and writer may still be physically alone in the attic but isn't withdrawn from other people; in fact, artists are increasingly taking to writing weblogs about their thought processes and experiments in an explicit bid to market their work more widely. Now the artist or writer has to consciously unplug her optical fiber in order to have a moment alone with her soul.
The imagery of Internet media is probably even less realistic than the romantic moments, gun battles, or hospital scenes in the twentieth-century mass media. But the participation of many people in creating the media undermines its hypnotic danger, making the artifice behind the imagery more obvious. When anyone can potentially help construct an online reality, its becomes less of a medium for controlling viewers' reactions to the world and more an expression of their own experiences.
The goals and aesthetics of what emerges in this experimentation may turn out totally different from the goals and aesthetics of what we currently think of as the arts. Perhaps what's described in this article won't be called "art" at first (although the trend in the past thirty years has been to use the term "art" quite broadly).
We must remember that when Impressionist painting began, its masterpieces were banned from traditional art galleries. And the old-fashioned gallery owners may have been justified, because what the Impressionists were asking of their viewers was so different from the standard artwork on display. Similarly, at least one late twentieth-century composer recommended that modern compositions not share programs with Mozart and Beethoven; again, what was being asked of listeners differed too much.
Eventually, the shocking becomes the familiar, and the continuity between old and new styles becomes evident. So Impressionists now share galleries with Old Masters, and audiences accept recent compositions on traditional music programs
This article has achieved its purpose if it encourages traditional artists to try some of the experiments suggested here, and if it points out areas that need further attention to experimental artists already pushing forward the new media. But the article is important for potential viewers too: it calls on all of us to look for great things in the new media, to tolerate the sometimes sophomoric quality of early experiments, and to give artists in these media the resources and encouragement they need.
