How about starting in reverse by asking why does art always advance whilst knowledge and technology decline? The Turner Prize always has something new to offer, whilst who today can knock up a cartwheel, construct (or even know what is) a scarf joint or build a cathedral?
If I state that here in East Anglia we can at least do the latter it would be a lie, as those who have just completed the tower of the Bury St. Edmunds cathedral had to be gleaned from far and wide and might soon be the last of their kind. Technology is in a state of great decline when considered from the point of view of those in society, once the majority, who have advanced skills to now a tiny minority such as those at Microsoft (so some say) and our pals at Bicester.
My own dear daughter has just got a first from Oxford, yet I have to admit that her knowledge of basic history, geography and the world around her is as abysmal as is that of her peers. Knowledge is no longer of the people, but for libraries and Google. I understand from today’s papers that a third of the population have no idea what percentages are, yet you can be sure that it is that very same third who most use the technology on offer to sustain their lifestyle.
Great art always has to have a long gestation period and a new medium. Hayden burst out after centuries of music because of Bach and the new instruments suddenly before him, spawning Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert because of the fortepiano suddenly becoming the pianoforte. The new instruments of the fifties spawned the sixties.
Shakespeare was nothing if he couldn’t attract the pennies from the groundlings, and the groundlings would only be there if they could understand and love the hundreds of new words coined by him derived from Greek and Latin. He was but the best who burst forth at that time from a love of language, created out of a new ‘English’ formed from many others.
I somehow feel that the great science fiction of HG Wells onwards didn’t in some way lull us into the false belief that progress was inevitable. Democracy in the Western countries has already shown itself to be a sham in the impossibility of the poorest having the greatest say in the way forward, as if they could possibly have the knowledge to achieve this to any good effect. It will take a true artist indeed to get us out of this mess.
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