It’s been a while since I have done this: I read parts of the Sunday paper the old-fashioned way this morning. Which is to say, on a Sunday morning, holding the actual paper, with ink stains on my hands and everything. The works. A real throwback, and an act of rebellion perhaps, reacting to the excessive E-Reader talk and all of that. Next thing you know, I will be baking fresh muffins and playing chamber music cassettes on the stereo. (No, not really, that would be going too far.) But in this frame of mind I came across the New York Times review of Patti Smith’s memoir about her days with Robert Mapplethorpe some 40 years ago, in the thriving downtown scene of Max’s, CBGB’s, the Chelsea Hotel, which were giving rise to what would later prove to be among the pillars of 20th century culture. With hindsight, the late-60s through the mid-70s may have been to the arts a last hurrah – but at the time this was perhaps more of an inflection point. It could have gone either way, and I wonder if we are in a similar era now, with respect to other things.
The modernists among us will undoubtedly give me grief for saying what I just did about the 60s and 70s inflection point, and the direction thereafter, but let’s be serious: you can’t compare Avatar to The Godfather. I’m being unfair to make my case, but consider the perspective. A span of some six or seven years around the referenced period produced Blood on the Tracks, Exile on Main Street, Martin Scorsese, Thomas Pynchon, Roy Lichtenstein, even the Knicks were good. Don’t scoff, around this part of the world Madison Square Garden is also a cultural center. The list could go on extensively, but I don’t want to get boring and we all have our own memories and preferences. The point is anyway not the 60s and 70s but the contrast to what would follow. It could have gone either way, like I said.
Fast forward to 2010. We have just emerged from an extended period of economic boom, checked in the past year by a massive correction. In the concurrent period, technical innovation has reached unprecedented heights, which in the past year has seemed to gravitate towards a symbolic concentration of contrasting elements: the openness of Google’s web vision, the closeness of Apple’s design product. On the economic front, technical innovation has had a direct impact on capital markets and information flow. On the technical front, both the economic boom and the assortment of busts throughout have given rise to a generation of entrepreneurs with potentially far greater skill and sophistication than ever. In short, the global economy and the explosion of technology have been intertwined and co-existent in the past couple of decades to a far greater and more direct extent than at any time in the industrial era, and have led us to a place, today, that may with hindsight, one day, be seen as something of an inflection point.
It is not only a question of Google’s openness or Apple’s closed design, the efficiency of markets in an era of increasingly perfect information, or the spirit of entrepreneurship that is manifested across multiple sectors and demographics, but more importantly, the question is one of what each of these constituencies will do with their respective resources. The arts have many things to teach us, but in the matter at hand we can look at the direction in which the arts have evolved since the period previously described, and we can hope that other trends and issues touched on in this article don’t follow a similar pattern: which is to say, a tendency to fluff rather than substance, to the immediate thrill rather than long term value. It could go either way, like I said.
