How Shocked Are You

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It must have been in the later Seventies that underground sociologist Alvin Toffler wrote his best seller Future Shock. He had garnered a whole lot of facts to support his idea that change was going to happen so fast and furious it would be all but impossible for folks to keep up. This change was going to impose previously unknown stress, and he predicted major problems to the individual psyche and society as a whole.

Tofler’s first prediction has been absolutely correct. Rapid advances in technology mean it is hard for people in many good jobs to ever stop learning. Those people who do have the good jobs also have the problem of insecurity as much as anybody else. Even public bodies such as Social Welfare often only offer short-term contracts to new employees. And need we point out that getting to work at all in a big city is a major stress problem.

However, the second part of his prediction seems to have overlooked the adaptation abilities of mankind. People seem to have ways of dealing with these problems. Change has become a way of life and some people seem to welcome it as refreshing in some ways. Why not go for another job in three years then uproot and move to another location.

Change for the corporate companies means growth and new markets, plus a lot of stress for those who have to create them. For the rest of us it means being at the end of massive marketing drives, being told what we have to buy, need and should want to make us feel better. And since nothing much we buy is going to last long, shopping has become a major item. So part of the marketing hype is about getting us to change our likes and dislikes. It’s about selling dreams, and the technology is making so much possible. Do I really need to replace my 4 year old computer? Of course I don’t, it’s quite fast enough, but sooner than later the new demands of the software force me into it. I end up buying what four years ago would have been a massive workstation to do my typing. So, I can use it as my family entertainment centre, use the Internet for the shopping and never leave the house again. I can even do my work at home it’s less stress. It’s called cocooning. Some people are telling us that’s the way our society is heading. Marketing people are not ignoring this trend.

Have we bought the dreams? I think of those people who get truly distressed when their favourite soap character has to die, because they’ve been written out of the programme, those who use credit to buy the car of their dreams. It’s live now and pay later all the way.

But I’m asking myself, have we really adapted to all of this change, or just found ways to avoid the consequences in the short term. Are their ways we have decided to live in a world of dreams made possible by the advanced technology of our age and has the price yet to be paid?

I’m sure these things have been talked about many times, but my question is how should artists face this issue. Nice paintings for the home have long been the backbone of the art world and no doubt will continue to be so. Artists have to make a living. However, we could say this work is only a kind of first aid for the ills of society. Something more is needed. We can all enjoy a trip to dream-world at times, and in some societies it’s thought to be a necessity. If it help us to live with day to day realities, then why not. Well, maybe sometimes it doesn’t.

Another option is carry on dishing out the shock, as if we haven’t had enough already. Some of the big movers in today’s art world can’t get it to us fast enough. If it’s destructive that’s just too bad, it is often exciting.

Should art have an answer at all? Should artists be expected to provide an answer for the ills of society? It’s a big call, if that is so. Is it something, which local, relatively unknown painters can begin to address? If it were a truly important issue, then would it not require a great artist to produce important art? I think there are a lot of artists who just never got to be in the right place at the right time, and a lot of others who never got hold of a vision. There is plenty of potential; artists of sufficient merit, just missing greatness by a margin.

Artists shouldn't be expected to "have all the answers."

But they should always "seek the answers."

Frequently, as you know, there is one answer for one person, another for another.

Just because there are "trends" doesn't mean people cannot buck the "trends."

We've had minimal art, which came down to a blank white canvas. They said the important thing was not the art but the idea behind it. What was the idea? Maybe that it was time for a new beginning. Everything had been done, so what was there? I'm not sure a lot of artists put meaning into there work. Over the past decade or so realisim has been popular and some it has been brutal and take Gottfreid Helnwein with his deformed infants some fetuses as an example. http://www.helnwein.com/artist/news_updates/

I wouldn't want to limit the definition of art to painters but there can scarcely be an issue with writers. I forget who said that art should give sensation, but should that be the end of it?

There must be beauty in art as well.

Objective beauty in an aesthetic sense.

I remember it as more like the "late Sixties" than the "late Seventies" .


Googling it confirmed that:it started as an article he wrote in Horizon magazine in 1965, and grew into the bestselling book of 1970, and the documentary film based on the book narrated by Orson Welles in 1972.

And the book got a lot of things right: like how we can now do things like...instantly google facts like that.

The main themes of simultaneous change, and "over choice", and the resulting stress, have kinda come true.

Have you heard of The Chapman Brothers？ Their work is said to be entertainment. It certainly gives sensation. I am old fashioned enough to call it filth. I greatly admire Helnwein's ability as a painter, but am not at ease with some of his content.

Thanks for the information naturalplastic.

I think the best and most enduring art always has something to say... depending on the medium, it might be clear or it might be not so easy to decode.

My favorite artist is William Blake. He said a lot about his society in words and images. Some of it was pretty clear, but his later work was very cryptic.

As one scholar put it, the best we can hope to do is catch "Blake in the act of meaning something we can understand”

That's a fun game.

I was not Shocked. I had a wide ranging interest in technology, and thought it past time to apply some of it.

For those of us in science and science fiction, Toffler was not a Futurist, he was a shock writer.

He scared people by telling them they had to learn to push buttons. He did not tell them they had to understand what those buttons did, how machines worked, and this was before the digital era.

The Interstate Highways had just been built, mobility had more to do with change than technology.

Social Alienation had always existed. The stress of modern life is nothing compared to growing up poor in Podunk Corners. The Post Industrial Wasteland of modern writers looks like a cleaned up, educated, better dressed, view of Appalachia over the last few hundred years.

Gottfried Helwein seems affected by the Mass murder just before his birth. He is perceptive enough to see that he the child was injured, innocence lost, as he discovered the people he grew up with had killed millions.

That is what I see in his work, how the day to day behavior of adults maims the innocence and spirit of children.

How much is too much? His daughter watching mother dressed as a whore, least clothing possible, injecting drugs, shows our educational system.

One part is we are toxic to the future. The whole Calhoun's Rats thing. The artist is supposed to express when things are going wrong. Problem is he just discovered that things have been going wrong for thousands of years.

He finds it shocking, but does not have an answer.

But who wants the answers in practise?