There's a fairly short list of genres and/or art media that were either invented or reified in the 20th century. It would include, for example, what we call 'pop' music (jazz, blues, rock & roll, rap, etc.), cinema and its cousin television, radio, comics (including manga, bandes desinée, etc.), and others. Those media/genres seem to undergo rapid growth, expansion, development, all the things we erroneously call 'evolution' in the arts. They do so a lot faster than older art forms seem to. Instead of entire centuries of similar poetics, we have mere decades. I have a few ideas as to why that is and how it works.
First and most obvious, we have communications technology and what Benjamin calls reproduction. More and more people have access to these arts than ever before (if they pay the right price or find the right bootlegging source). That's a big statement, of course, but I simply can't think of another period in which literally hundreds of millions of people could witness the same artistic performance or artifact at practically the same time, whereas in the 20th century, that happens with movies, television, music, video games, even old fashioned book publishing. It's simultaneous and as wide-spread as humanly (or technologically!) possible.[1]
The corollary is, of course, that that same technology allows audience feedback on a massive scale and, again, almost right away. Within hours of the sneak previews for a popular movie, there are already literally hundreds of on-line reviews, and the people at WB would be fools if they failed to read those reviews and respond to them.
And that audience feedback leads to the second kind of technology at work, capitalism[2]. For all its covert and over manipulation, capitalism is pretty good at giving us what we desire, providing of course that it's already molded our desires in the first place. All the communications technology in the world wouldn't matter if the producers of popular art didn't have vested interest selling us the next product. In this way, we're back to that wonderful moment in _Dialectic of Enlightenment_ when A&H claim that every movie is an advertisement for the next movie. It's another kick at the can, another attempt to make larger and larger profits by putting more bums in seats, selling more Happy Meals, or whatever.
Because of that rapid turnaround--simultaneous and wide-spread release of the art, simultaneous and widespread response to the art--there are simply a lot more kicks at the can now than a few hundred years ago. Just to emphasise, the sheer size of the audience has a lot to do with
it, since popular art is aimed at the populace, rather than 'high' art, which is traditionally aimed at the social elites. It's very similar to how bacteria rapidly become immune to disinfectant precisely because we use too much disinfectant. The difference, and it's a big difference, is that art is not an organism, and neither is the populace or the industries that produce the art. There is conscious judgement involved in the process, no matter how controlled by ideology. The desires of the artists, the industrial producers, and the audience members must all be taken into account to map the development of the art.
So what we have is an economic-industrial-artistic feedback loop. Everybody's desires are fed by everyone else's, and because that's the case, any one agent in the loop can conceivably manipulate other members of the loop. They do not have equal power, of course, and it's very easy to actually create hegemony (the appearance of equal influence masking true dominance). If the audience's desires are manipulated before the fact, then the "we're just giving them what
they want" argument from the industry holds about as much water as "we were just following orders" It's actually a really eerie parallel, now that I think of it.
One other possibility, mind you, is that most of the 20th centuries arts, the ones I mentioned, are actually new versions of old forms, and therefore they develop quickly because they're standing on the backs of giants. Film, television, and radio all had thousands of years of drama to build on. Modern musical forms, like jazz, might have worked their way through centuries of musical variation simply because there *was* centuries worth of it to work with. Comics are, of course, built on thousands of years visual arts, including basic composition, visual languages of sequential imagery (Egyptian tomb decoration, tapestries, etc.), and a few hundred years of advances in print technology. Modern arts can do that because they are aware of their history, so perhaps historiography--another technology/ideology--is what creates the opportunity for rapid growth.
But then there's the other possibility, that this whole perception of our present is a trick of perspective, that our era seems to develop more rapidly than any other simply because we live in it and feel its subtle changes much more acutely than we would if we were to study the 17th century. I've always had the nagging suspicion that people who lived then thought they were in just as much of a period of growth and transition as we do now, and that the same is true of any era. So while our 'rapid' growth might have specific, unique causes and explanations that are different than 17th-century 'rapid' growth, the growth itself is at about the same speed and with the same alarming variety, just for different reasons. It's our job as critics and historians, then, to study the unique causes and effects.
[1] I'm finding I'm bringing in more and more cyber culture/posthumanist ideas as we keep talking about comics and mass culture theory. So far, it's just been stuff I remember from Hayles, Harraway, and Harvey Quamen's classes, but I think I'm going to bring it in in a real way later on, during the writing phase.
[2] Capitalism as technology is sort of a 'wave and particle' thing. It's an ideology, certainly, but by some definitions all ideologies are a kind of technology. Any tool or concept we use to understand, navigate, and manipulate the universe is a technology. By the same token, every technology is based on some kind of ideology; there was an initial idea that spurred someone(s) to create it in the first place. This can seem like a chicken/egg thing, a causal loop, but if we think of ideology and technology as different aspects of the same thing, depending on how we observe them, then we bypass the loop, much like how photons are waves when we measure them like waves, and particles when we measure them like particles.
Posted by orion at July 10, 2006 3:14 PM