Is a bias showing?

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by iVanDuzer

But we need more. See, Dean got art wrong. It's changing just as fast as technology is, if not faster. He's right that we constantly reiterate the classics - the Shakespeares, the da Vincis, etc. - but what is cool is how each of these old art works are being appropriated to different times. A production of Romeo and Juliet today will be a lot different than the one Shakespeare originally performed. The production from today is a reflection of today's culture, not Elizabethan England's. It's a completely different work, one that helps us understand the times we are living in.

Art is continuously proving itself to be the best way to understand different cultures. It's every country's biggest export! What easier way is there to see what a society values than looking at how a society portrays itself? And once you understand how a society works, then you can work with it. At least there is no more misunderstanding there clouding people's judgement.


I'd like to point you towards early 20th century America. This was a society in which the industrial revolution ruled. Ford's innovations on the assembly line fundamentally changed America, and out of this technological upheaval came a quest for greater and greater efficiency at the cost of the working class. Despite images of prosperity from this time, in the 1920's the gap between the wealthy and the working class was greater than ever. Good thing the working man had Charlie Chaplin movies to go see, or else some historians believe America just couldn't have coped with its new emphasis on productivity. People need a coping mechanism, and art is consistently it.

Henry Ford may have pioneered the modern assembly line, but he also invented the forty hour 5 day work week and doubled the average wage at the time for assembly line workers. (link) Furthermore, I think you could make a pretty good argument that the assembly line has enabled the way the middle class lives today, but that is probably a topic for another thread.

I get that art is reinvented and reinterpreted all the time, I seem to be in the minority that really enjoyed Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet and I like West Side Story too. While I appreciate those, I really can't see it as equivalent to the massive jumps made by technology. The industrial and airplane turbines of today are engines that spin a shaft, just like James Watts' walking beam steam engines of the 1700s. While the modern engine is a descendent of those early engines, they are not created equal. While the steam engine was revolutionary in it's day, 1770s technology just doesn't cut it today. We don't teach people how to design walking beam steam engines, they just aren't relevant. (which doesn't mean they aren't cool! )

SNL has a light-hearted view of it