For as long as literacy maintained
control and integration, viewers, irritated by conventions
foreign to them, physically attacked works (such as
Impressionist paintings) resulting from artistic practices
different from those congruent to the practice of language and
to the associated expectations of seeing.
Art under the scrutiny of literacy is always model driven. Once
the necessity of literacy as the only integrating mechanism was
challenged by the need to maintain levels of efficiency for
which language is not well equipped, new forms of artistic
appropriation of reality and a new notion of reality itself
became possible. Model was replaced by iconoclasm. Walter
Benjamin captured some of these changes in the formula of "art
in the age of its mechanical reproduction." The end of the aura,
as Benjamin has it, is actually the aura's shift from the
artifact to the process and the artist. It corresponds not to
the end of art's uniqueness, but to the artist's determination to
get rid of all restrictions (of subject matter, material,
technique) and to ascertain artistic freedom as the goal of
artistic experience. But there are yet more possibilities for the
emancipation of artists and their work.
As we enter the age of electronic reproduction, massive
communication that supports interactive multimedia, and
information integration through networks (adapted for pipelining
data and all kinds of images), we encounter such possibilities.
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