Are these inventors doing it to get rich? Sometimes … but as a rule, the people who make the best new stuff are usually the people with no foreground interest in money they just want to make cool stuff-or they just want to meet their production milestones. That would require a spoken and codified agenda which simply doesn’t exist. So who’s making all of this new technology that’s always messing with our lives? Who are these Silicon Valley inventors? And are they inventing things just to torment the world with relentless novelty? No. We’d enter a world of perpetual repetition with nothing new. With seven billion people on Earth, chances are we’d soon catalogue almost all experience available with the tools at hand. I wonder: If human beings stopped creating new technologies as of today, would the art world crater overnight? Artists would be limited to further documentation from within a fixed realm without technological novelty. Implicit in this not uncommon dealer-client exchange is an unspoken assumption that new technologies allow new and hitherto unforeseen dimensions of the human condition to be made manifest. Fifty years after McLuhan’s Understanding Media, the medium that drives the message is still the message-and sometimes it seems like the only hope for any message at all.Ī Marvin the Martian Looney Tunes embodies this USB Flash drive, part of Warner Bros. And finally, does this artist use something that can be related to VR or augmented reality? Yes? Okay then-Frieze, we have a perfect storm. Do they produce actual physical things at the end of whatever it is they do? Yes? Wonderful. Do they know much about the art world? No? Even greater. Does this young artist have any technologies that he or she needs to unlearn? No? Great. Today, when dealers speak with a potential client about a new artist, the client almost always asks, “Is this new artist young? How young are they? And how new is the technology they’re using … has it been released or is it in beta? Is anyone else using this new technology?” The impulse behind this reflexive questioning can be one of two things: a puritanical interest in new forms and ideas-or opportunism wearing a cloak of art-world puritanism. Maybe there’s a next big art thing out there that’s so big as to be invisible.” Here’s another thought: What if tech itself is the next big thing in the art world? What if tech itself is the Duchamp urinal in the twenty-first century Armory Show? Is the notion that technology = art depressing? Are you a hater to think such things? Which is better art: a performative piece whose movements are informed by real-time Los Angeles traffic patterns, or plein air watercolors of delicate song birds done on a foggy morning? Does it drive you crazy when autocorrect always flags the word “performative”? It’s natural to wonder, “Hey, maybe there’s some larger picture we’re missing here. Many people have noticed the sense of increasing sterility in contemporary art. This image is a rendering of the 3-D printable scan file of Venus of Willendorf, the statue itself dating back to c. Let’s look at the art world and ask the same question: What if there’s no next big thing? There was the Venus of Willendorf and Picasso and Duchamp and then Warhol and then came a hundred thousand highly defended micro-niches so microscopic that they make sense only when looked at in aggregate, like a mole of carbon dioxide molecules or a computer model of butterfly migrations in and out of Mexico: “The Emergent Behavior of Early Twenty-First Century Contemporary Art.” What if the micro-niching of art is art’s last broad stroke? What if art is over? Okay, this sounds like Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement on liberal democracy, and it’s probably not true- probably-but it seems a lot more probable than the big strokes of technology coming to an end. All of us will continue our lives permanently vibrating on the tech revolution’s vertical asymptote-screaming like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, mid-coitus with the devil: “Oh my God, this is really happening!” We might dream of a year when people would just stop inventing new things, but in reality there’s going to be more and more new stuff. Does this sound scary, or kind of sad? We can laugh at such a proposition because we know it’s not going to happen. We’re waiiiiiiting-but no, we’ve received all there’s going to be and tech’s broad strokes have all happened. What if, in the tech world, there is no next big thing? First we had fire, then came the wheel, and the PC, then the internet and then Google and then the iPhone and then … that’s it.
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