by
Alasdair
Foster
Economic,
social and cultural paradigms continue to change with increasing
speed. The shift in emphasis from the creation of real
concrete products to a virtual world of images and ideas
means that now in Australia (to give an example that’s
local for me) there are more people employed in the storage
and retrieval of information than in the whole of agriculture
and industry put together. Meanwhile, burgeoning online
communities have evolved that bring hundreds of millions
of individuals into personal interaction whether it be
though social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook,
through the sharing of images and video clips via Flickr
and YouTube or immersed in complex virtual societies such
as Second Life and Entropia Universe.
These
changes are fundamental. It is not simply that old modes
find new means. By opening up lines of communication
to the direct access of the individual there is an increasing
democratisation of opinion and culture. With the rise of
technologies of mass production and distribution in the
last century culture became divided. On the one hand there
was popular culture delivering lowest-common-denominator
products on a vast scale to mass markets. On the other
was fine art delivering rare or unique objects and services
to a tiny specialist market with values (cultural and monetary)
jealously controlled by an even smaller taste-making elite.
The role of the home-made in everyday life and the amateur
in art became sidelined. The 20th-century mass markets
and art industry were both controlled by a rigorous division
between producer and consumer underwritten by the belief
in the creator’s enduring rights over what was created.
The
technological developments of digitisation and Web 2.0
have had two significant effects on this duopoly. The
mutability of digital data and its ability to be copied
and reformed without loss of quality has opened up the
possibility of ripping and mashing – the continuous
recombination and reforming of cultural material as an
alternative to the passive reception, acquisition and preservation
of immutable art objects. In the area of reproducible culture
such as photomedia, the focus of art is beginning to shift
from objects to processes. The mode of artistic production
has diversified to embrace both the virtuoso individual
and the creative community action.
Meanwhile, the means of dispersion of digital entities
has expanded radically. The two-way flow of Web 2.0 has
opened up the possibility of reaching a wide audience at
little cost without the need to accommodate the taste of
a mass market or corporate and institutional hierarchy.
The result is a plethora of small niche groups, unconstrained
by physical geography, that actively participate in both
the production and consumption of new forms of art.
I
have for some years sensed a coming dissolution of the
hard and fast division between active producer (artist)
and passive consumer (audience) in the (visual) arts. It
has brought me to the conclusion that we are witnessing
the beginning of a reformation of the arts analogous to
the Protestant Reformation of the 16th-century Christian
church.1
2008 © Pedro Meyer |
That
is, not a revolution resulting in the overthrow of one
system by another, but the development of an alternative
system which places the essence of culture in the heart
and mind of the individual rather than in an authorising
oligarchic profession.
This is, of course, an analogy and I am not proposing
that in every way the new reformation will mirror the old,
but simply that there are a number of resonances. Most
significantly, what the Protestant Reformation made clear
is that the subsequent effects of such a partial shift
of power can be far reaching.
In
effect the 16th-century Reformation sought to ‘de-professionalise’ the
church, placing the essence of religion in the interior
of the individual and I believe we will witness an increasing ‘de-professionalisation’ of
art. This is perhaps most appropriately thought of as the
correcting of an over-professionalisation that
occurred in the second half of the 20th century in tandem
with the reduction of art consumers to passive spectators
where once they had been active participants. I do not
mean by this that we will see an end to professional artists.
The Protestant church has ministers and specialists, but
their role is different from their counterparts in the
Roman Catholic Church. Their expertise is (in theory at
least) at the service of the community not in authority
over it, and there is often the facility for community
member and specialist to swap roles (as with lay preaching).
Creativity and cultural practice will, I believe, increasingly
become a process involving the many not the few.
One of the important conditions for the Christian Reformation
was the invention of the printing press, which allowed
the free flow of information previously controlled by the
monasteries. Today the development of the internet (and
especially the Web 2 phenomenon) is having a similar effect,
as information is no longer constrained and filtered by
institutional authority. Just as the veniality of the Roman
Catholic church of the 16th century and the selling of
indulgences outraged Martin Luther and his followers so
there are those who consider that the art world has lost
its way, corrupted by its self-aggrandising power as arbiters
of taste and seduced by the marketplace. In this view art
has become an industry in which the currency of credential
can be converted to capital and, all too often, vice versa.
Web 2.0 offers not only a way of expressing concern but
a medium through which to articulate new approaches to
creativity.
Once spiritual judgement became a matter of personal conscience
the rule of church and state could separate. With the secularisation
of the state issues of scientific exploration and mercantile
expansion were no longer constrained by doctrinal orthodoxy,
leading to, on the one hand, the Age of Reason and the
Enlightenment, and, on the other, industrialisation and
the ascendancy of the middle class. That is, what followed
as a result of the initial process of reformation led to
outcomes far beyond the scope or interest (or, I suspect,
the wildest dreams) of those that had initiated it.
However, while the strong central hierarchy of Roman Catholicism
maintained, more or less, its unity over the years, the
emphasis on personal conscience in Protestantism led to
a cascade of schisms as new smaller religious structures
were formed that more precisely suited the needs and aspirations
of those who constituted them. Similarly I would expect
that we will not see a singular alternative cultural structure
form out of the social and technological ferment of the
new millennium, but an unstable though potent set of interrelations
with a tendency to sub-divide into smaller systems that
more effectively generate meaning and affect for those
involved. And while these new systems will offer a range
of alternative forms of art and ways to engage with it,
they will not overthrow the pre-existing art world institutions,
though they are likely to cause that original system to
evolve in new, if less radical, ways.
Finally,
the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church embodied very
clear lines of communication (from the top down). The
individual-focused and fragmented nature of Protestantism
led to network communication based on a system of value
exchanges – trade. While trade is based on exchange
of goods of equivalent value, symbolic currency (money)
and of capital became increasingly important as a flexible
translator of that value. The Protestant work ethic is
driven by wealth creation and operates in a network system.
The new network systems of information exchange through
the internet have created an environment in which little
or no financial stake is required in order to become an
active consumer and producer. As a result many of the newest
internet communities are driven by something other than
wealth creation. The Protestant meritocracy that replaced
(or at least modified) the Roman Catholic oligarchy is
now facing a new democratising sensibility arising from
the more level playing field provided by the internet communication
and the social forms and connections that, while not spawned
by it, have been given new life through it.
Nothing
I am saying is specific to photomedia or even the visual
arts, though I think the visual arts are more hardened
in their established divisions than, say, music. The
fact is the flow of information on the internet – good,
bad and indifferent as it is – presages profound
changes in hierarchies of many sorts – the arts are
just one.
It would be foolish to speculate on where the current
reformation of the arts might ultimately lead us, but by
freeing creative communication from the constraints of
the luxury market and the control of an elite profession
we could perhaps liberate the quality unique to humankind
and its most potent attribute: imagination.
1.I
am very aware that the 16th century Reformation and
its outcomes are very much more complex that outlined
here. I have used a broad brush to paint a picture for
the purposes of analogy only, in the hope than to do
so will help shed new light on the way we think of art,
culture and the individual imagination.
Alasdair
Foster
director@acp.org.au
January, 2008
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Alasdair
Foster
is
Director of the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney and Managing Editor
of Photofile magazine.
He is a member of the photomedia research cluster
at Monash University Department of Theory of Art
and Design, Melbourne.
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