Saturday, April 7, 2012

I love a good manifesto....

While the less gifted in Austin last month were looking for the new Lena Dunham or Mumford and Sons, Bruce Sterling was attending the panel on The New Asethetic, which is a British art and design movement devoted to digital technology. Kind of like the Futurists, only eighty years on, and not, you know, fascists. He's blogged about it... A good idea first to check out the related Tumblr.... and the blog of movement godfather, James Bridle. These guys all link to one another and tweet like berserkers. A good Saturday morning project, and less time consuming than watching the NCAA tournament.

What is kind of cool about this is that Sterling is not consumed with love of the results, only of the process. He's rather wistful about it all, and, unless I'm projecting, is both passing on the torch and telling these guys that "new" isn't enough. Poor Bruce, in short, sounds like somebody has just walked over his grave....

Sterling says:

This is one of those moments when the art world sidles over toward a visual technology and tries to get all metaphysical. This is the attempted imposition on the public of a new way of perceiving reality. These things occur. They often take a while to blossom. Sometimes they’re as big and loud as Cubism, sometimes they perish like desert roses mostly unseen. But they always happen for good and sufficient reasons. Our own day has those good and sufficient reasons......

It requires close attention. If you want to engage with the New Aesthetic, then you must become involved with some contemporary, fast-moving technical phenomena. The New Aesthetic is inherently modish because it is ferociously attached to modish, passing objects and services that have short shelf-lives. There is no steampunk New Aesthetic and no remote-future New Aesthetic. The New Aesthetic has no hyphen-post, hyphen-neo or hyphen-retro. They don’t go there, because that’s not what they want.

It is generational. Most of the people in its network are too young to have been involved in postmodernity. The twentieth century’s Modernist Project is like their Greco-Roman antiquity. They want something of their own to happen, to be built, and to be seen on their networks. If that has little or nothing to do with their dusty analog heritage, so much the better for them.

So. These seem to me to be fine things. They’re not my own things, but I can see why they make good sense. They show promise. They have depth and breadth. They matter. They will have lasting consequence........

That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow.

That is my thesis; that’s why I think this matters. When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with the conviction that something profound had been touched. Touched, although not yet grasped.

1 comment:

David Chute said...

Seems like Chairman Bruce might agree with me.