Within artistic practice, as much as within any other practical form of human projection, we notice the transition from a centralized system of reference and values to a system of parallel values. In the continuum generically qualified in the market as art- and what cannot be declared art today?-there is a noticeable need for intrinsic relations of patterns: what belongs together, and how commonalties are brought about. And there is a need for disparity and distinction: How do we distinguish among the plenty accumulated in a never-ending series of shows when all that changes is the name on the canvas? The same applies to photography, video art, theater, dance, minimalist music, and the architecture of deconstruction. An evident tension results, not different from the one we perceive in the market of stocks and options. The dilemma is obvious: where to invest, if at all, unless someone has insider information (What is hot?). This is not an expression of an ideal, as the values of literacy marked art to be, but of alternatives delivered together with the uncertainty that characterizes the new artistic experience as one of obsession with recognition in an environment of competition that often becomes adversarial. (The umbrellas that the Parisians used to attack Impressionist canvases at the turn of the century are children's toys in comparison to the means of aesthetic annihilation used in our time.)
Becoming a practical experience focused on its own condition and history, this kind of art affects the appropriation of its products in the sense of increasing artificiality-the shared phylocultural component-and decreasing naturalness. Accordingly, interpretive practice is focused on establishing distinctions (often hair- splitting), more and more within the artistic domain, in disregard of message, form, ethical considerations, and even skill. This is the type of art whose photographic reproduction is always better than the original. This is the music that always sounds crisper on a compact disk. This is the art whose simuli of the show, performance, dance, or concert on television are even better than the production. Meaning comes about in an individual experience of relating distinctions, not common experiences.
The specialization of art, no less than the specialization of sciences and humanities, results in the formation of numerous networks of recurrent or non-recurrent interaction. Examples of this are layering, tracing from photo-projection, expanding the strategies of collage (to include heterogeneous sources), mixing the elaborate and the spontaneous (in dance, performance, video, even architecture). The pencil and brush are replaced by the scanner and by memes of operations favoring minute detail over meaningful wholes. Music is generated by means of sampling and synthesizing. We deal with a phenomenon of massive decentralization-each is potentially an artist-and generalized integration through networks of interaction, within which museums, galleries, and auction houses represent major nodes. It is not unusual to see the walls of a museum become the support for a work whose life ends with the end of the show, if not earlier. Many musical compositions never make it to paper, forever sentenced to tape or compact disk. Composers who do not know how to read or write music rely on the musical knowledge integrated in their digital instruments.
With the advent of technological means for the production and dissemination of images, sounds, and performances begins an age of a sui generis artistic environment of life that is easy to adapt to individual preference, easy to change as the preference changes. The new artistic practice results in the demythification of artists and their art. Art itself is demythified at the same time. As a consequence of electronic reproducibility and infinite manipulation, art forms a new library of images with memory devices loaded with scanned art, but with no books. Sound samples are the library of the composer active in the civilization of illiteracy. Using networking as a matter of practicability, people could display, in places of living or work, images from any collection, or listen to music from any ongoing concert around the globe. They could also change the selection without touching the display. They could redo each artwork as they please, painting over its digital double in the act of appropriating it, probably beyond what any artist of the past would ever accept, or any artist of the present would care for. Music could be subjected to similar appropriations. As a matter of fact, televised images are already manipulated and r-written. DVD-three letters standing for Digital Video Data- yet to make it into the everyday jargon reflecting our involvement with new media, will probably replace the majority of televised images. With the advent of digital video delivered via the familiar compact disk format, a tool as powerful as any TV production facility will support artistic innovation that we still associate with high budgets and glamorous Hollywood events.
Art, as much as any other form of human interaction in the civilization of illiteracy, involves shorter cycles of exchange and contact at each of its levels: meaning constitution, symbolism, education, merchandise. The eternity and transcendence of art, notions and expectations associated with the literate experience, become nostalgic references of a past pragmatics. Viewers consume art almost at the rhythm at which they consume everything else. Art consumes itself, exhausting a model even before it can be publicly acknowledged as one. In its new manifestations, not all necessarily in digital format, but many in the transitory existence of networks, it either comes in an abundance, which contradicts the literacy-based ideal of uniqueness, or in short-lived singular modes, which contradicts the ideal of permanency. Strategies of over-writing, over-dancing, over-sounding, and over-impression are applied with frenzy. Grid structures made visible become containers for very fluid forms of expression, bringing to mind the fluidity of Chinese calligraphy. Afro-American street dancers, West European ballet groups, and theaters in which the human body is integrated into the more comprehensive body of the show, practice these strategies for different purposes and with different aesthetic goals. There is also a lot of parody, and fervor, in expanding one medium into another: music becomes painting or sculpture; dance becomes image; sculpture lends its volume to theatrical projects or to 3D renditions, virtual or real events that integrate the natural and the artificial.
In this vast effort of exploration, authenticity is rarely secured. Photography, especially in its digital forms, would be impossible without the industry it created; nor would painting, sculpture, music, or computer-based interactive art (cyberart, another name for virtual reality) without the industries they stimulated. The legitimate market of fakes and the illegitimate market of originals meet in the illiterate obsession with celebrity, probably the most fleeting of all experiences. The extension of art as practice to art as object, resulting from the aesthetic experience in the space of reproductions better than originals, is challenged by the intensions of the act (process). Intensity is accepted more and more as the essence of the artistic practical experience, impossible to emulate in a reproduction, and actually excluded in the perfection of a concert transposed onto a compact disk, for example, or of images on CD-ROM and DVD disks.
When each of us can turn into a gazelle, a lobster, a stone, a tree, a pianist, a dancer, an oboe, or even an abstract thought by donning gloves and goggles, we are projected in a space of personal fantasy. Creativity in virtual reality, including creativity of interaction on the Internet, invites play. It can be in someone's private theater, sex parlor, or drug experience. As an interactive medium, virtual reality can be turned into an instrument for knowing others as they unfold their creativity in the virtual space shared. As opposed to art in its conventional form, virtual reality supports real-time interactions. The artist and the work can each have its own life. Or the artist can decide to become the work and experience the perception of others. No Rembrandt or Cézanne, not even the illiterate graffiti artists in the New York subway system could experience such things.
Surprisingly, this experience is not limited only to non-language based experiences, but also to the art of writing and reading. Embodied in avatars, many would-be writers contribute their images or lines to ongoing fictional situations on chat sites on the World Wide Web. While art is freeing itself from literacy, literature does not seem to have the same possibility. Or is this another prejudice we carry with us from the pragmatic framework of literacy-defined self-constitution? The borderline, if any, between art and writing is becoming fuzzier by the hour.
A nose by any other name
The art of the word, of language, as exemplified in poetry, novels, short stories, plays, and movie scripts, takes place in a very strange domain of our existence. Why strange? The languages of poetry and of our routine conversations differ drastically. How they are different is not easy to explain. Many a writer and interpreter of poetry, plays, and stories (short or long) used their wisdom to explain that Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose," (or for that matter, Shakespeare's "A rose by any other name…") is not exactly the same as "A nose is a nose is a nose…" (or "A nose by any other name…"). Although the similarities between the two are so evident that, without a certain shared experience of poetry, some of us would qualify both as identically silly or identically strange, there is a literary quality that distinguishes them.