Part Five: The Shock of the New

First, the essay means to establish a set of rules slightly larger than Hughes'. Using, in part, the previous material The Day The Universe Changed. 
What is meant by that?
The continuation of a kind of gnosticism: police would be remote controlled robots, more virtuous than Plato's Guardians.
Plato bringing a mind separate from a body: the disembodied mind being idealized, but also realized in the polis. This is like Plato's contemporary Buddha's own mindfulness.
Are they just emphasizing something and not denying anything?

Anyway, the Modern I argue comes from the Greek scientific thinking. I dont want to substantiate that right now, I just want to subtract from the workings of craft enabled by technology as is the story of the Western Art by way of Hughes. Shock of the New has a narrative based also on the methods and means of making Art. This is the most obvious connection.
However, the sub script to "The Day the Universe Changed" could very well be "The Shock of the New", as they dovetail into some abstraction of 'not being where we used to be'.

My approach tunes in around 1870...being a larger context than Hughes, for it includes today's context, which has outpaced his seminal Shock of the New, with about the same amount of sustain as prelude.
In this is Cezanne, Impressionism, which Hughes touches on, though, the utility of Hughes is the chaos of the Modern Art History curriculum in the Academy. Hughes makes better sense of Gardner's "Art though the Ages", but then Gardner was addressing a totality.

What about 1870? Symbolism, as its been a major focus of study (Delevoy Symbolists and Symbolism is also part of the Bookreads lists, which this is the numerical part of the essay). Why Symbolism? Well, its less of a technique looking to provide "a way of seeing" that its more popular brother Impressionism appeals to, as a kind of Scientific sense. Symbolism returns more to the Absence of Myth in the decline of Theocracy..during the Modern, yet appealing back to the mystic and gnostic edge of Catholicism.
It is the more overlooked beginnings of Surrealism (was there always a market to make it seem new? I remember Surrealism from Teen iconography, like album covers and posters...but not really TV or movies).


Adventure Time scores as something slightly beyond Hughes context, simply in years and style. Ren and Stimpy might have scored on his collecting even, but Adventure Time would have to be under his radar if Hughes had been around grandchildren, right at the eve of his death.
Technology and the scientific sensibility overtaking the old processes, foreshadowed in Impressionism. We dont look to painting as an outlet for imagination anymore. It used to be, and therefore, as it public declined the painters made good effort to Shock and draw an audience.
Its a technique old as theater.
But the point is, Hughe's Surrealism had a glory time in Modern as it is to be "the Most Free". But it never really is "free" as it also has its strange attractors, points where the chaos and riot and shock, bring it to comprehension's edge.
Some do configure as puzzles, with astounding logic however, the emotional point is bizarrery, astonishment, old time awe of the gods.
Well, reason had stumped the Greeks. They used it as much as they could, but found it a liability over Technology...as the Iron Age opened, Hellenes met the world with a sword. Greek's would argue it was the unruly neighbors, but then the Macedonians has something to substantiate why they were so Imperial. Athenians would decry, at the moment, and now looking back with the anti-colonial gaze (which is so proper now), yet, Greek civilization needed to be promoted among people. It did...it got a lot right.
Seems very unlike their Athenian culture, which was quite negative toward the mad Tyrannical Warrior and its cult. Ironically, that was the point!
But anyway, the mind, as it is re-modeling itself on the new technology, represents something new. Sometimes this is obvious in mere technology. The overall mission of Art is to humanize material, and not according to a program established by a "dominant generation" of Fathers and Patriarchs who insist they got it right the first time.
Yet it also falls prey to the general critique of the use of rhetoric with the technology, which is ever the drums of War. Hughes gets to somewhat older points...the shock of the new War, but it is part of the story of the Modern wherein, we are extracting ourselves from a incomplete Globe, wherein, the frontier no longer exists and borders are fast becoming solid (from the view of a Satellite and Global News). Even as I write another, perhaps the world's most powerful divine Monarchy, is falling.
The icons of the past order fade in the wear and tear of wheels and gears and pressure and metallurgy- science and technology make a ruin and burden of study for the new generation.
So the icons of this turnover...this market broiling with strange interests, interests which fade in time or some even remain, and then some re-surface, having seemed weak or irrelevant in their own time.
An unintended consequence of Hughes point: the shock of the new becomes too conventialized, wherein, it can no longer be taken seriously. And I think Hughes own good solid useful seriousness finds it limits in the mockery and lightness of Pop Art.
But we both like Oldenburg. I've seen Warhols...I think he is a joker who got lucky and made a point...almost a performance artist before the term or act was identified.

Well, this is all of Art Collecting. Hughes as collector portrays the sensibility of a rule, which is to see what was consumed, and what was not consumed. This is a collector's game, you see. The risk is that the context of lesser artists built up to frame the great artist sometimes is built on sand.

What we are interested in are the old conflicts, the "Shock..." essay being Hughes own idea, of the drop in interest of a particular style and the picking anew style for the next group aging....it has a Generational rhythm in market exploitation.
The unintended point is the Generations having their own voice. That is indeed modern, for in most other Traditional societies, the upcoming Generation has NOTHING TO SAY, because its established that the former generation was it. The end all be all.
So, we see generational marketing or marketing meant to appeal over generations emerging, and then taking over. This is the story arc of both of Hughes productions, "The New Shock of the New" and his older, 1980 publication, "The Shock of the New".
Art is a good thing for that, to monitor consumption, what means more to that generation. But Hughes collecting agenda missing the risk that the generation may have got it wrong.
Hughes makes a good point in Art seeking relevancy but sometimes Art does not quite get it, and fails, sometimes it does get it, but the collectors do not.
Its easier to see that in older things...and there may be a function of collecting that includes whether the generation that consumed those items are dead or still being championed by family members.
Hughes, and also Ken Burns History of Jazz (they match nicely in time period), go for the Historicity, the obvious, for selling reasons.
There is this academic side which collects everything for the future may revise Warhol, or Rauchenburg, away. We can say Picasso is probably the reference point for the Modern...but Picasso's "shock of the new" subsided in the force of Surrealism. Dali might endure as the sign post!

Yet, I would argue more for a even greater abstracted mind than Wolfe writes of in The Painted Word. In this abstraction, its merely the excellence of execution and the use of content in order to reference outside of itself to History...from a personal point of view, and not a political agenda.

That is not Modern. Modern always has this self conscious of being distinctively new and to the point (not Medieval in overstating iconography), like Peter Brooks production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, wherein, its a white box and the trees are coils of metal...the formally Modern streamlines, chromisizes, because its whats new out there in the minds of the Artist.

This I argue, and its an argument sympathetic with Wolfe (whose criticism of the Modern goes beyond Art into Architecture, and I must include Learning from Las Vegas, moving onward and outward.) Some of the problem is the basic definition is like Contemporary, that is whatever is now...so its label that gets overused immediately! Like Modernism has been, for it really covers the period before the War.
After WW2, Arts penultimate wall hanging, to be taken seriously, if that is what having something on the wall means (do I buy the couch to fit the painting or the painting to fit the couch?), is Pollock.
After Pollock, it seems like Art would be missing the point if you hung it on the wall. One has to go to the museum, see in context, to keep up with the Jones (TV's in the home).

To put it more bluntly, there is a lot of Post Modern Art produced during Modernism. That is, Modernism as coming from Classic Greece values of the mind disembodied and observant.
Modern has its limits, as does the Classic. As does the Romantic, but Modernism limit was desperate: painting died in its survey.
The trouble is trying to escape through labels and definition, when its really all coming from the point of view of someone who contributes enough of their take or feelings or some thought provoking argument, to a aesthetic we call get along with: this is Art too.
Academically speaking Hughes is master of the academically speaking. He sounds almost like a lawyer and he present a defense, evidence, but it is too entertain.
He seems to have a great range and care about collecting, than just collecting, sharing with us, probably for a good fee, the speech of his book.

The Shock of the New can be termed tragic. There is a lot of the tragic in the storyline!

Going back to the Symbolists and the Impressionists, Painting was adapting, with little complaint, to the integration of photography. This was a late stage in the battle...Painters were painting faster in order to catch light that photography could not yet do...photography requiring stagey poses for long periods. This arc of utility was on the wall nevertheless. One can make an quasi-impressionist photo (at least back when it was a chemical process) by using 1/8 shutter speed.
However, only after the turn from the 19th to the 20th century.
The innovation of photography (who can imagine that ever happening? Silver nitrate?) created a complete accident of frisson, or the Modern abstraction, wherein, painting quickly didn't look like anything the Mind thought of as reality, but became more fantastic or subjective...appealing to the subjective, what the Mind thought of itself and other realities.
Now, the subjective is what dies inside of the self, now, and then. This causes all kinds of dramas and changes in our world views and how we take it personal, however, it is a function of the self...a self created by the Western value of the individuals vision (over the Male vs. Female).
The self surges, emerges, finds irrelevancy after awhile, and diminishes. That is, the non-authoritarian self that is the long slow process the West built up...even during the Catholic hegemony, History has all kind of divergences. Divergences in doctrine that were crushed by War, but, the West had enough momentum from the Classic to carry on through, to Protest the monopoly on Truth so many other Asian societies cherished.

The individual being, perhaps first mapped out by Plato in The Republic. Individualism having the public responsibility, and this being exceptional, required the recognition of true virtue. Knowingly absent in most men and women! Absent in me, absent in many artist. Just because an artist is socially conscious does not make them an artist. And conversely, the State Artist is a joke.

These virtuous productions became more narrowly scientific and abstracted...like painting began to search for fractals around Picasso and Braque.
I dont know what the point other than thier historical significant, for those boring brown toothpick compositions of Picasso and Braque's! But that is some extreme poopy part of their moving the camera and the object and ramping up the motion blur. I like early Cubism but the experiment wore down fast.
So, our command sees the cheap effect in the past innovation. Cubism is totally interesting, dont get me wrong, but what is was moving around kinda goes fast enough for Pollock, then.

And Pollock, and Kerouac and Braque and Picasso and Duchamp...these fit into an American mentality, occurring alongside the race to greater specificity of seeing and a burgeoning frontier of sight.
That happens to the Modern mind, it looks to atomization...it seeks the smallest bits...its has a capitalist urge to replicate itself. Most of it irrelevant, but encouraging to have the chance to contribute to the Great Leader, without it being some Communist stoog taking advantage of the ignorant peasants in another fit of Authoritarianism. You know, like Ayn Rand.

That world is almost entirely lost. Gallery shows may occur with some patronage, but the heat of the market has moved online. The Artist has to sell online, but there is the spiritual side of Art that can be marginalized under the late overplayed hand of capitalism...to then emerge in the freedom of the internet.

This world of rhetoric can entertain again. The communists are just not seeming to be the same bugaboo over and over again, and there are secret societies that collect things...it might be that Social Realism was not to bad a movement. We will never know in our country!

The overall arc of  "the Shock of the New" pulls us in the direction of how images are traded in talk. But not marketed, Hughes does not have a political axe to grind, nor is he interested in being sold something based on the opinion of another. That is good of a collector, for the true politics of both sides must be presented clearly, or the technique must be innovative. Like "Battleship Potemkin" or "Birth of a Nation". See, there is a problem with both isn't there?

He does frame all the agitation propaganda, but also frames Pop art as a political act of distraction/subversion, a continuation of that old style we are putting to rest. For awhile the literati has it in magazines. But no magazine is supported by the Market these days; they are all subsidized.

This tone he has, is tentative. Hughes "maybe's" and "possibly's" more often than the other Journalistic presenter, James Burke.

Burke and Hughes view of the computer future lacked a consideration of Vannever Bush. It seemed to them (and it seemed to me in 1987) that computer generated art was being predicted, adopted, marketed, way too soon. The real art, one that the old folks had not caught up to (although this is partly what "Shock of the New" was groping toward...the erasure of old methods and old representations, but the scale was beyond Burke and Hughes to understand) was somewhat predicted by Rudolf Arnheim in book about interactive technology using computer published in the late 70's.

Interactivity has taken over, and it superior to, previous Art. Art on walls seems deader than ever, yet certainly now more than ever a academic subject that can be a source of infinite reflection.
For instance a computer program can make distinctions in Art Styles, spatializing them into catagores as well, by mere calculation. It is not the human view, but a program using optical vision to identify style. Style, actually, should be all, here, in this case, down to a computer calculation that dwarfs Man.

Journalistic style is not all style, although Wolfe seemed to want to buck that trend (more so than other New Journalists I have read but that really is only Thompson and Wolfe), it is piecemeal and both these Journalists presenters (more eloquent professors really) are conscious, thankfully, of a beginning and open ended...that is the apocalyptic about the end. Apocalypse being the turning away of the market from the values inherent in those materials. "We were warned" is usually the saying.

Art, unlike Science, is in large part a result of a great deal more useless crafting, unless one is crafting a formula. The crafting, reduced in energy to proficiency, takes a new shape and in that new shape there implied a craft. I mean, hands.
Cezanne looks really sloppy. I mean, as a painter's hands. But here is a moment, perhaps (a Hughsian perhaps) of the first improvisation, wherein, Cezanne is equally interacting with the paint as we could...given a modicum of talent and a capacity to use that talent in play.
The domain of the artist...talent in play.
The joy comes through as well. Problem is, this is rare!

In the sense that subject matter becomes less reference and the value tips more toward style (...and then its off to the races with the Salesmen, as always!) we get this hurry in the line. The hurry gets bigger and larger and more swooping, right? The canvas has to get larger to get more of the message in, to be More relevant.

So, what Hughes seemed to mix with his own interest in History and Journalism and critique was the irrelevant sometimes disappeared in this or that style as the irrelevant also appeared in this or that style. The irrelevant being a blind spot sometimes, but I think Hughes is probably our best weathervane...as a popular writer bringing a recent academic subject to the populace.
The chaos of trying to represent this process failed as TV presentation and as book...one had to go to the museum.
Museum being a place to see some odd things. Hopefully relevant...if the times said so...there is no Art of the Conspiracy. So in that silence there is a need to explore and represent what cannot be represented.

And I am not into the impossibilities of some Modern ways. Pollock would be impossibilities to you? Not to me, I totally get it, but it looked like a frozen tornado...you know, like it was painted in a fraction of second...the very bottom of the swirling funnel of the tornado.

This tornado gave me an entre into the analogy that the tornado is a fixation point of the most conflicting "opposites" or meaning and non-meaning, or thesis vs. antithesis, etc.
Created by two symbolic magnet forced together where you can feel this energy slipping out in and another direction (but not chaotically).
That tornado of energy. See, it worked on me.
Hughes likes Pollock as well though frequently Pollock is the point where people would see Abstract Art mainly as decoration. You know, will it work on this wall?

Where we met as well is with Oldenburg. Oldenburg to me is funny, a satirist of great subtlety. How about this, Oldenburg makes Warhol seem like a fart. Funny too, heh?

Oldenburg makes one think about scale and brings scale to imagination that is not sophisticated or informed, but intelligent in the alteration of space...like any good hick fixing the jeep engine during gunfire. Like he had practice! I dont have to graduate from the Bauhaus to get the increase, the ridiculous increase, in scale.
No, Oldenburg is not only the "gee I coulda thoughta thatta", but these days, why cant I do that?
Somehow, his simple play with ordinary things, mutating them (in Modernist scare hyberbole), to larger than life, fits in like the practical applications of using a home 3-d printer.

Shock of the New presents a good compression of the Modern. We can really see it beginning with Picasso as a visual applied science based not just on a perspective, but a moving perspective...yet the visualizations in science were already exceeding what representation, photography and painting and theater...I am thinking of the medical surgical teaching theater and Grand Guignol, visually, these things could actually represent more shock than Paintings.
Painting started to separate from reality at the juncture of photography. Also, painting began to diverge from Aristocracy, a most important shift in the ascension of the Dutch Empire and the advantages of rule by liberal (Protestant) Oligarchies over Divine Aristocracies.

The separation of the Modern Mind was already in import from ancient times. When the Bible had been the only book available (sorry, getting ethnically bound here)...it was presented as a fine piece of work, and those Iron Age people could feel the old Bronze Age coming through the words, though, they had seen it die around themselves as well...this old style adaptation of talking to stories that had a Patent one couldn't violate because it included, in a mash of vision, Law.

The sense of just learning this edge did not mesh well with the Scythian roaming the Great Plains..oh, I mean the Russian Steppe. Conversion was not really the problem...those Scythians would impinge on the literate..yet they also could see many literacies before the Bible was impressed upon them at the point of settling down and bottling up the European penninsula
This was rolled back from the coast of France up through Ireland and across over Norway while coming up through Sweden from Poland. This created a literate barrier to illiterate, lawless, militant Scythians.

The Scythian had been bred for action. Their habits may be best described as an action painting...seen from above the Scythian moved around, for some four hundred generations, in a great swirling pattern from East Asia to West Asia...I can see the older civilizations forcing their ADHD kids up into this horde of horse-riders who seemed to have enough to settle down now and then and enjoy the good life...eventuallly establishing trade, having a city to bank stuff at...yet then the Mongols, who read that writing coming to them but reaching back into the dwindling edge of their own atavism came over Asia to pummel the settling of the Scythian.

The Mongols picked it up fast, happened on a fractious time in Islam and took advantage of that (as had Islam to the Byzantines).

But this brief Christian spell receding to the Mongols, who naturally prefer the more Warrior ethos of Islam, set up a Authoritarian wall that impinged on Greece, and closed its sense of freedom down in a constant threat on the border, and the Greek idea of the Modern moved West and North.

Northwise, this was visible at the time: here it comes, the people with a book. The contrasting customs presented a picture of doubt, when cross indexed. And Cross indexed is the great function here both in Burke and Hughes's presentations.
Because, they could sense the book, and the TV show, and the Gallery/workshop/lab.

Yet they could not see it exactly. This makes the two series fascinating, for the view in the Amber of the 80's wherein, Interactivity was not in the public mind.

We could make it clear that the hysteria of the Cold War is no longer the possession of the Millineal's Generation. This has receded, and always, that "Art of Hysteria" fails to convincing the future hearts! I wonder what Apocalypse they can take seriously now? All of them have been over produced.
However dire, the age of it now lends a view of reassurance as it never came to be, and beyond which we have yet to go even as the forms, computationally, so quantitatively as to produce a Eon shift in Humanity only equaled by the introduction of writing. The Qualitative has progressed beyond imagining.