Mumford -- Art and Technics (xii)

"In the case of photography...there was for long a question as to whether it was or was not art. And the answer to that question is: Is there any leeway for choice and initiative on the part of the photographer? If there is such leeway, there is a possibility of art, that is of success or failure in terms that would have significance to the beholder. Perhaps the best effect of machine art is to make us conscious of the play of the human personality in the small area where it remains free, a differentiation so delicate, so subtle, that a coarse eye would hardly take it in and an insensitive spirit would not know what it meant." (82)

p. 93 -- "As with printing, photography did not altogether do away with the possibilities of human choice; but to justify their productions as art there was some tendency on the part of the early photographers, once they had overcome the technical difficulties of the process, to attempt to ape, by means of the camera, the special forms and symbols that had been handed down traditionally by painting. Accordingly, in the nineties, American photographs became soft and misty and impressionistic, just when impressionism was attempting to dissolve form into atmosphere and light. But the real triumphs of photography depended upon the photographer's respect for his medium, his interest in the object before him, and his ability to single out of the thousands of images that pass before his eye, affected by the time of day, the quality of light, movement, the sensitivity of his plates or film, the contours of his lens, precisely that moment when these factors were in conjunction with his own purpose. At that final moment of choice--which sometimes occurred at the point when a picture was taken, sometimes only after taking and developing a hundred indifferent prints--the human person again became operative; and at that moment, but only at that moment, the machine product becomes a veritable work of art, because it reflects the human spirit."

Automation and Autonomy

A friend suggests that live musical performance by human beings could become a species of Vintage Aesthetic when seen against the impending advance of computers and computer-brained robots. No doubt this dynamic has already manifested itself here and there vis-a-vis existing technological leviathans (e.g. "canned" music), and no doubt it will eventually take its place in the canon of anti-aesthetic prescriptivisms alongside moral uplift, the literary imperative, political activism, cultural preservation, and pediatric neural calisthenics. All of which is to say that it promises to have the same chilling effect that such historically contingent prescriptions have always had even as it keeps a lucky few human artists gainfully employed.

To take such a sea change and make it generative rather than prescriptive requires a retreat into the absolute. Indeed, I don't think it is a coincidence that as we perceive the general pace of change to have quickened artistic autonomy has become ever less fashionable, i.e. that feelings of anomie or "normlessness" would beget various desperate attempts to contrive new norms. The word "perceive" is important here, for do we not also see a strong correlation between the more-is-more phenomenon and a certain constitutional fixation on change as against stasis? Change-in-the-air is the supreme rationalization for scorched-earth modernism, whose manifestations range from puerile self-importance to the burning of libraries; hence there is always an important balancing role here for the attempt to step outside the parochial concerns of the moment. I would certainly not place the aesthetic sphere at or near the center of such concerns, but nor does banishing it to the compost heap of history do it justice. Everything is aesthetic, much as everything is political.

We must take the Vintage issue seriously, and certainly the larger one of automation/computerization as well, but only on our (and our art forms') own terms. That is, it behooves any contemporary musician to face directly the formal, technical, and aesthetic questions that automation raises, or raises in the negative, as it were. Fruitful cross-pollenation is inevitable, healthy coexistence is not, and prescriptions are always already constraints, no matter how urgent they might seem to be. Indeed, is it not merely by accidents of history that such urgency ebbs and flows? And is that not a powerful argument for artistic autonomy rather than against it?