I don’t know if culture develops naturally today. Not sure. For myself, I have not yet answered this question. What is a work of art today? Has it retained its value as we become more technological, digital? Can technology be or become a work of art? Do technology and culture intersect, and if so, at what points?
Thinking about all this, I did not come up with a formula – a certain feature that helps me to formulate, at least approximately, my attitude to something new from what appears in the cultural space. So this is a sign: I believe that everything, any creative act that can be crammed into a gadget, all of this instantly loses its value, is devalued. In short: great art doesn’t live on a smartphone.
And here it does not matter at all what the speech is about – about cinema, music or fine arts. Cinema packed into a mobile format is dying. Perhaps, by the way, this is why it dies: Big style and gadgets are incompatible. I will clarify: it is the real, big cinema that is dying. And its place is taken (with great success, I must admit – but why is there any surprise?) Movie fast food. Music consumed through smartphones and tablets in the same way turns into background “chewing gum” for our hearing, the only benefit of which is it, at least a little, saves us from information noise rushing into our ears from all sides. Of course, there is no question of enjoying pure, deep and real sound here: for a penny we get our thousand tracks; what quality can there be …
One more thing: museums. The pandemic forced everyone to move, the museum workers were forced to rush to the Internet, gathered, tensed and gave out – what? Digital copies of their collections. This is the ceiling. There is nothing more to come up with. Yes, these collections are unique. Yes, the quality of the copies is sometimes amazing. But all this together turns into “white noise” – one continuous background, which is by no means the same in comparison with living contact with the beautiful. To stand for five minutes in the Tretyakov Gallery in front of Kramskoy’s “Unknown” and look at the reproduction on a mobile phone monitor for five minutes – who would dare to put an equal sign between these events?
But here, against this sad background, one bright and bright spot remains: the theater. The theater is not packaged into a gadget format in any way. Attempts were and are, thanks to the pandemic, something like this is happening right now, before our eyes. But the further, the more I am convinced that it is simply unrealistic to do this. If cinema in combination with gadgets has degraded to the format of some kind of visual attraction (and superhero films based on comics, as expected, become an example of the genre), then theater with gadgets simply does not match. Well, as unipolar magnets repel, so here: some fine-minded and naive people try to cross one with the other, but nothing comes of it – just absolutely! And no ersatz genre is even born to replace. Well, in fact: do not consider the stand-up, popular today, to be such a form of theater degradation. Although, if you think about it, stand-ups came out of KVN, and KVN is a kind of theatrical skits, evenings of pranks for actors, simply ground by television into digestible mince for the broad masses.
Even so: gadgets killed the Big Cinema, but they could not destroy the theater. This meat grinder will not cope with it.
… The debate about whether we are dealing with real art or a pretentious craft before us has always been going on and continues to this day. How do we evaluate what we see or hear? Culture and art are an inconvenient area for such assessments. This is not a sport where you jumped two centimeters further – and you are a champion, undeniable and recognized by everyone. Art is not a competition. But I have found for myself this way of assessing: if something offered to you, calling itself a work of art or, even more so, a cultural phenomenon, is successfully integrated into the digital format, without losing anything from copying and replicating, if the viewer or listener does not care that it is sees or listens: the original or a copy – then I have great doubts.
Maybe this is not a decisive criterion, but indicative. You can disagree with him. These are my personal observations. And, of course, someone can call these my arguments the grumbling of an elderly man. I agree, I don’t argue! I have no complexes on this score. But there are people who were actually born and live on the phone. Whether it is good or bad, I don’t presume to judge. I only understand that they simply do not know the other world. And now, having matured, they adapt this world for themselves. And I see that this makes the world easier. The digital, technological world is easy to calculate. And the sculpture by Michelangelo or the film “Andrei Rublev” by Tarkovsky is impossible to calculate. These are the fruits of the freedom of the creative spirit of their creators. The world of technology is easy to measure, describe and organize, but there is very little room for freedom, including freedom of creativity. The same “Matrix”, the same “Oh, Brave New World”, all the great literary dystopias – about this, in fact.
And in the fact that my favorite theater turned out to be so inconvenient for the authorities of numbers, I see a sign that the main thing has been preserved in it – freedom. Alive, real, warm and therefore so attractive. See you at the theater: it’s easier to breathe there!
Newspaper headline:
Great art doesn’t fit on a smartphone
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