SUNDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2024

In some ways, we are the luckiest generation ever. We have masses of information literally at our fingertips, a luxury of riches which would have been unimaginable to past generations. For much of the past, the study of painting, for example, was a privilege largely available only to the rich, who had the leisure time and the money to travel to art galleries around the world. In the field of literature, meanwhile, I can now instantly look up a word I am thinking of using to check whether I am using it correctly, or to be sure that I’m spelling it right, or to find a list of possible synonyms in order to avoid repetition or to get the mot juste. Similarly, if I’m working on an essay, I can do a quick Google search and include information which makes me sound far more erudite than I am. No other generation has ever enjoyed this immediate and effortless access to so much knowledge. However, this is a mixed blessing, and this essay will focus on some of the problems arising from this abundance of goodies, specifically in the fields of art and literature, before going on to offer some thoughts about its more general negative effects.

With regard to painting, books showing the great works of the past have existed for many years, but the reproductions tended to be black-and-white, poor in quality, and limited in number because of the cost of illustration, particularly in colour. This meant that good art books were often very expensive, priced well out of the range of the poor. They also tended to focus on a handful of ‘Old Masters’ – Titian, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt – or a select list of the ‘modern greats’ – Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Van Gogh – but it was far more difficult to find out about their obscure contemporaries who were largely neglected and forgotten. In contrast, we can now see online reproductions of the works of both artists who are household names and those who are little known, who lived in the distant past or are our contemporaries, and who come from every corner of the globe.

In theory, this should be a wonderful asset for anyone hoping to become a working artist. Rather than going to their local gallery and copying its very limited offering of paintings in order to hone their skills, they can surf the internet and access the websites of the finest galleries in the world and see a bewildering range of different styles and approaches from across the centuries and from a range of cultures. There is no longer any need for them to study under a master in his studio, as often happened in the past, being required to finish off some of the minor details in the master’s work while slowly learning and building up their own skills. No such lowly position is necessary for modern wannabes. They can gain inspiration from pictures on the net and, as the cliché goes, the world is their oyster.

However, is this abundance always such a boon? Having more models to learn from as a step in their artistic development means more choices to make and there is the danger that the neophyte flits from one style to another, never really settling on one, and ends up an artistic dilettante who never develops a truly individual style. The potential artist also cannot watch the master at work and follow how he creates his piece or uses his brush or mixes his palette: all he or she sees is the finished product detached from any context outside the canvas. And while it may help the isolated artist living in the back of beyond to have a virtual community, it is doubtful if this is ever as stimulating or as supportive as daily (nightly?) discussions in real cafes and bars.

The modern lover of art will also see most paintings on screens these days. This may not seem radically different from the previous generation’s reliance on illustrations in books, but I suspect that the internet makes us more promiscuous. Books on art written by experts do some of the structuring of ideas for us because they tend to focus on one artist, or a group of artists who worked together, or one period and place, which creates a kind of fundamental ordering of the data. (Admittedly, this is not always an unalloyed blessing because it can blunt some of our instinctive reaction to works by placing them in pre-existing categories.) In contrast, on the internet we are free to click to our heart’s content, flicking from French landscape painting to Japanese ukiyo-e to the works of Frida Kahlo, and I fear that we can end up sated by this flood of images, unable to make sense of this glut, uncertain about how to evaluate it, unsure which works we might learn from or wish to emulate if we are artists, or how to react to radically different works if we are not.

Viewing art mostly in books and on the internet also has stylistic repercussions. Screens (and glossy reproductions in books) flatten the art work and remove much of its material presence. Looking at a painting on a page in a book or on a computer screen is a very different experience from seeing the same painting in a gallery: its two-dimensionality is emphasised, any texture of the brushstrokes is often lost, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the reader gets no sense of the work’s size or scope. Sculpture in particular suffers horribly since we cannot walk around it and share its space, but have to be satisfied with merely imagining ourselves doing so, plus, of course, we can only see it from one angle. Also, the material of which the sculpture is made is a crucial part of the work, and in books and on the screen this tends to become reduced to its visual properties seen from a distance.

One final concern I would like to mention (although I could have listed several more) is that the ubiquity of famous images can suck out almost all of their power. Who can see any of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers with a fresh eye now, having seen them reproduced on tea towels and coffee cups, or Munch’s Scream, when it is photocopied above a list of exam dates and has gained an almost comical edge? Unless we dig deep, Constable is forever associated with biscuit tins and chocolate boxes and jigsaw puzzles, making him seem conventional or even twee, although in some ways his landscapes were a departure from both the French and English traditions. This reflects the superficiality which is always a threat with a mass of information, all of which we cannot possibly absorb: we learn the cliché only, what is most obvious. And all we can end up claiming is, to quote from a song popularised by Earl Hines in the 1950s: ‘I know a little bit about a lot of things’.

In many ways, the changes wrought by modern technology have not been as radical for the wannabe fiction writer or poet, probably because novels and anthologies have always been more freely available and are more or less the same regardless of the medium we use to read them (although personally I feel that my poems subtly change when I read them on-screen compared to when I see them on a page in a book). Unlike a painting or sculpture, there is little of Benjamin’s ‘aura’ in a particular iteration of a piece of literature because its impact is generally unaffected by where it is written (although the difference between a poem read aloud in public and one read silently in a private study is obviously very marked).

One key difference between art and literature is that the online world has done little to dislodge dealers and galleries from their role as the ultimate gatekeepers in the art world, whereas publishing has changed enormously over the first quarter of this century, with options such as self-publishing and online webzines democratising the world of writing to some extent (the same has been true of music). Anyone can put their work on the internet and hope that it goes viral (the sad reality is that it almost never does, of course), and try to bypass completely the traditional routes, although I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of this as a road to success – there are literally millions of books out there which sell almost no copies at all (I know this all too well, as a writer of some of those books). And for every Arctic Monkeys, there are thousands of bands languishing in obscurity.  

I think one contemporary trend driven mainly by modern technology which is not helpful to writers is that genre has become all-important. Whereas we tend to stereotype artists as individuals, in fiction the focus is on genres, and it is often writers who pin these labels on their own work: go to the online sites for groups of people who hope to become professional authors and the discussion is dominated by genre. It is true that painters are sometimes coralled into tight categories or placed within a movement or -ism, but I think the process is more relentless with fiction writers, who have a greater number of slots into which they can be fitted: thriller, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, detective, literary, gothic, and so on. In my opinion, these rigid categories encourage wannabe authors to place their writing in a sort of box and limits their imagination, and to focus too much on the selling of their work rather than the work itself. I am especially concerned about the category of ‘literary fiction’, which encourages the idea that this is somehow superior to other work, which can be relegated to the level of ‘genre’, something commercial and inferior. (This is nonsense, as a quick read of Chandler shows, or indeed of some of the pretentious trash which calls itself literary fiction.)

Another problem writers face because of modern information overload is that the internet tempts all of us to read rapidly and impatiently. I’m certainly guilty of this: I read more restlessly online, always thinking of the next article or the next poem rather than giving time and thought to that which is in front of me. I find it hard not to believe that the sheer quantity of stuff available is leading to a reduction in quality. I’m not just thinking of grammatical errors or lexical carelessness such as the famous distinction between ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested’ which so agitates language mavens, but the general slapdash nature of so much online writing. I recognise that journalistic writing has always had this trade-off between speed and quality, but it seems that the latter is now often totally sacrificed for the sake of the former. But I can’t blame writers for this: why should they bother to write carefully, to take time to choose exactly the right word or to use language with sensitivity, if the reader’s approach is that of someone gulping down junk food in McDonalds? I honestly believe that we are losing some of our sensitivity to language, especially written language, in a modern world dominated by images, and our writing is becoming increasingly coarsened as a result.

This is where I broaden out my argument to claim that the internet is coarsening our culture in general, and not only on a linguistic level. I know I am sounding like an old curmudgeon wrapping myself in nostalgia about an idealised past, but I’m not denying the huge positives of the virtual world and the wonderful opportunities it offers. I simply feel that the level of public discourse has declined, with cultish conflicts exacerbated by too much time spent in echo chambers, in a world where emoticons are a cheap and instant solution to the problem of trying to say exactly what we mean or feel. And that knowing so much about the world at a superficial level is not really making us more informed and is certainly not making us happier: as surveys show again and again, levels of happiness have dwindled in the west over the past fifty years. In my opinion, the decline in the standards of art and literature over this period is symptomatic of a larger malaise. With twenty-four hour news and an avalanche of random information, we know too much about a world we cannot change or even influence and this is making us simultaneously cynical and depressed.

Ultimately, however, we cannot unlearn modern technology any more than we can unlearn splitting the atom, so we have to live with the consequences of a virtual world that bombards us with information 24/7. I only hope that we will adapt to this new reality and that it becomes a normal, but not an overwhelming, part of everyday life. Then perhaps we can make the most of what it offers while avoiding its potential to coarsen not only Art, but what it means to be human.