vp181010 Reversing art in the 21^st Century 

I received notice of an event in January 2019, from the MIT Enterprise Forum – Northwest. This is a group I’ve followed for over twenty years – ever since I began working with Carl Chew on our ArtStudent project. ArtStudent was supposed to be “everything an art student needs” on a CD/ROM platform.

Tom Lopez, who was hired by Microsoft to design their CD/ROM publications when Microsoft Press was still active, introduced me to the MIT Enterprise Forum. He was trying to help me with our project, I think. His wife, Margaret Jacobi, introduced me to Tom when she saw my students’ project, a laser video disc, displayed in an artist’s book show at Carolyn Staley’s gallery.

When I saw today’s calendar for January and read they were going to have a presentation, I smiled at their wording describing the event:

“The rise of the digital economy has taken the art world by storm. Even the sacred cow of visual arts, dramatic arts, and music are being infiltrated by the disruptive nature of technologies. How far will these disruptions extend and what sort of disruptions will they be in the next 20 years?”

In my mind clicked the response, “You got that backward!”

It was art that rose out of the limitations of the hand made via printing that gave rise to the digital economy. Art took the technology world by storm; human innovation found its voice through art and re-shaped human kind in its own image. Now people are the puppets of artists, craftsmen and designers. People go around their lives benumbed by the artists’ designs, songs, movies, games and news – every form of mediation made possible by artistic use of technology.

The sacred cow is not visual art and the rest – the sacred cow is technology. MIT Enterprise Forum authors got it wrong.