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Communication Breakdown?

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It's taken me awhile to find a response to Ben's last two posts. I can't help but hesitate to make sweeping condemnations of our own generation. It's so hard to see the whole picture from within that it's rarely worth trying to make judgements. On the other hand, a couple of thoughts have come to mind. The first is simply a question, why are we reacting to the modernists? Poetry is (besides visual art) the oldest form of Art. It's been around for thousands of years – from Gilgamesh right up to today. What's both fascinating, and scary is that in the past 100 years there has been more opportunity for formal innovation, and technological change than has ever happened in the history of the art. We can read what Eliot and Pound and Joyce and Woolf all have to say about writing, but it's really worse than meaningless.

This sounds dangerously like a diatribe against listening to / reading anything critical about a creative art. I hope it's not. I think this is actually a consequence of the Internet. The number of ways we can communicate with people instantaneously nowadays is astonishing if you compare it to even 25 years ago. The change from letters sent through the postal service to email made communication around the world much easier – and meant that a person's own community kept expanding, rather than staying more or less at one level. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, they're all part of the same phenomenon. We have more ways to communicate with an ever growing number of people, with far greater speed. This allows us (almost forces us) to place less importance upon the content and shape of our communication. Why spend a few days composing a letter to a friend when you know that you'll be talking to them at least a couple of times over those few days?

Of course the Arts are affected by these changes in technology. It's easy to see that there's more and more Art produced every year, and in more and more different and new mediums. I'm not sure that this is a problem. Nor do I think (as Ben does) that we have yet to find our “urgency,” and that as soon as we realize what truly matters to us, great Art will be produced. If the environmental situation doesn't count as urgent, I can't imagine what does (and there's a large enough movement behind it to produce an urgency for artists). No, I think what we're seeing now is a direct result of the overabundance of communication in our world. The whole point of Art is to communicate something with other people. To make a connection with them, and show them what you think is important. If we don't need to be as careful in our communication, then why should we expect our Art to stay the same?

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