Mumford -- Art and Technics (viii)

"We ordinarily use the word technology to describe both the field of the practical arts and the systematic study of their operations and products. For the sake of clarity, I prefer to use technics alone to describe the field itself, that part of human activity wherein, by an energetic organization of the process of work, man controls and directs the forces of nature for his own purposes." (15)

"Art, in the only sense in which one can separate art and technics, is primarily the domain of the person; and the purpose of art, apart from various incidental technical functions that may be associated with it, is to widen the province of personality, so that feelings, emotions, attitudes, and values, in the special individualized form in which they happen in one particular person, in one particular culture, can be transmitted with all their force and meaning to other persons or to other cultures." (16)

"...art is that part of technics which bears the fullest imprint of the human personality; technics is that manifestation of art from which a large part of the human personality has been excluded, in order to further the mechanical process." (21)

Given these two definitions, it is more obvious how technics could get out of hand than art could, more obvious that the task of controlling/directing the forces of nature is fraught with invitations to material excess and destruction than is the seemingly private, scalable, immaterial task of "widen[ing] the province of personality." Art for the drawer can run amok in that drawer without doing any damage on the outside. It is not creation or expression per se but rather art's imperative to be "transmitted with all [its] force and meaning" where complications arise. Does whoever is on the receiving end of such transmissions get any choice in the matter? Are the technics of transmission not just as fraught as any other technical questions? Most of all, how much of this personality-widening inheres in mere creation and how much in transmission, reception, and response? This last question is, in my mind, one of the most important questions for artists living in the internet age. I would say that Cage's famous self-imposed belief that a work was not complete until it had been performed was rather out of step with his yet-more-famous conceit to the elision of the will and personality. Willfulness for the drawer is harmless, a tree falling which nobody can hear. Willfulness is not the problem, oversharing is.