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Art and Technology: An Old Tension

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Anthony O'Hear
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Extract

This is not the first time the title ‘Art and Technology’ has been used, but to distinguish what I have to say from Walter Gropius's Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, I am subtitling my paper ‘an old tension’, where the architect spoke of ‘a new unity’. In a way, Gropius has been proved right; the structures of the future avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy, the cathedrals of socialism, the corporate planning of comprehensive Utopian designs have all gone up and some come down. We have a mass media culture also largely made possible by technology. Corporatist architecture, whether statist ‘social housing’ or freemarket inspired, films, videos, modern recording and musical techniques are all due to technological advances made mostly this century. Only in a very puritanical sense could what has happened be thought of as inevitably bringing with it enslavement. All kinds of possibilities are now open to artists and architects, which would have been imaginable a few decades ago. No one is forced to use these possibilities in any specific way.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 38 , March 1995 , pp. 143 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1995

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References

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In writing this paper. I found myself increasingly drawn to Ruskin, and to what he has to say on the subjects of art and technology. This paper is not a paper on Ruskin, nor I do not accept everything Ruskin said on everything. (How could I when Ruskin is notoriousl. inconsistent?) But even though Ruskin is not normally regarded as a philosopher, what I write could be nevertheless regarded as a philosophical homage to our greatest writer on art (not that he would have been pleased at being so described).

5 All this was revealed in the great exhibition of Titian and his contemporaries in the Grand Palais in Paris in 1993. See the catalogue of that exhibition, Le Siecle de Titie. (Paris, 1993), especially illustrations 176, 250,251.

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In what I have said about cleaning I have relied closely on Mrs Walden's excellent analysis.

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