Right Before Our Eyes

By Christopher Porterfield

Our pell-mell 20th century wasted no time in sounding its characteristic theme in the arts. That theme was--what else?--change. Radical, rapid, sweeping change. And more of it than had ever been seen before.

Within the century's first two decades, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky and James Joyce--the advance squadron of modernism--created works that broke dramatically with the past, tearing apart traditional artistic structures and reassembling them in startling new ways. The convulsion of World War I only reinforced the modernists' conviction that the West's moral and cultural heritage had collapsed. All that remained, in T.S. Eliot's vision, was a Waste Land crying out for creative renewal. To Virginia Woolf, what had happened was more fundamental even than geopolitics or culture. Looking back in 1924, she concluded that "on or about December, 1910, human character changed."

Yet where the arts were concerned, these pioneers still didn't know the half of it. Even as they shaped their dense, experimental innovations--sometimes deliberately designing them to flummox the bourgeoisie--change of a different order was taking place a few steps down the cultural and social scale. All kinds of exuberant, colorful and popular new art forms and media were springing to life--more new forms and media than had arisen in any previous century.

Already, in 1900, Guglielmo Marconi had worked out the essentials of radio. The phonograph was fast evolving into the basis for a recording industry. By 1912, 5 million Americans a day were attending a new entertainment called movies. New Orleans echoed with the sounds that were jumbling together gloriously as jazz. Denizens of Tin Pan Alley were polishing the wit and jaunty lyricism of the pop song and revamping European operetta into an original American theater form: the musical.

No previous century had seen such a potent interaction between the arts and technology. You have to go back to the invention of the printing press in the 1450s to find anything comparable. Now, seemingly overnight, machines and electronics were transforming virtually everything. Photography, an important 19th century invention, became almost a different medium in the 1920s and '30s with the combination of high-quality, handheld cameras, film on an advanceable roll, and the flashbulb. Photographers were free to roam the fields and streets. They could cover crimes and wars. Soft, pretty pictures gave way to a more spontaneous, realistic style.

Recording technology changed popular music from sheet music, performed in Victorian theaters and parlors, to disks that spread thousands or millions of copies of a given performance across the landscape (and across radio's airwaves). The original 78-r.p.m. record was just that--a passive record of a three or four-minute song. In 1948 the l.p. accommodated longer pieces as well as the arrangement of various tracks according to a unifying theme. Soon, as with the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album became an electronic creation in its own right, impossible to duplicate in performance. These days, when voices and whole orchestras can be conjured out of a synthesizer, one wonders whether recording is even the word for it anymore.

But the most technological entertainment medium in history is movies, as anybody can surmise from seeing the small army of technicians on a sound stage or location. Technology gave the silents a voice in 1927 (though some of the great silent performers, such as Charlie Chaplin, took their time about speaking), but more important, it enabled film to refine its unique visual language.

What created the movies' vivid, fluent brand of illusionism--besides the talents of great filmmakers, of course--was the development of more mobile cameras, more expressive lighting, more sophisticated editing and, above all, more ingenious special effects that could bring to life prehistoric worlds of dinosaurs and future worlds of space travel. And let's not forget animated films, perhaps the purest cinema of all, in which technology allows the creation of an entire visual world unimpeded by such tiresome exigencies of the real world as sets, props and actors.

New technologies meant new audiences--and new relationships between artists and audiences. Movies were the century's first mass medium after print. But although millions of viewers could have the same experience at the movies, they experienced it a few hundred at a time, in individual theaters. Radio was the first entertainment medium to enable a mass audience to have the same experience instantaneously and simultaneously. Even more than movies, radio gave audiences an intensely communal feeling, a sense of being part of something national, as well as a special intimacy with its stars.

TV upped the ante by being as immediate as radio and as visual as the movies. Indeed, TV's mesmerizing hold is something unprecedented. A major TV event is overwhelmingly a shared national experience, and a TV star is a celebrity of a new order. When Lucy Ricardo has a baby, when Seinfeld goes off the air, it's not something that's happening out there--it's an event in our homes and in our lives.

And this is to say nothing of TV's power to bring us real-life events: a moon walk or the Olympics, an uprising in Tiananmen Square or Princess Diana's funeral. We conduct not only a lot of our fantasy lives on TV but also our political campaigns (and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which). From the Persian Gulf in 1991, we learned that global TV can even be a means of waging war.

The first two assumptions made about the advent of TV were dead wrong: that it would bury radio and that it would be a threat to movies. From the start, TV has provided a generous showcase for other arts--radio performances and movies included. Millions of people who, in earlier centuries or even earlier decades of this century, would never have seen world-class ballets, operas, concerts or museum works of art have seen them on TV. Not quite the same as live, perhaps, but considerably better than nothing.

The medium's own most distinctive format bears out a theory of its first prophet, Marshall McLuhan. TV discovered that on the whole, amid all its sitcoms and music and dramas, the most entertaining, the most amusing and sometimes the most gripping thing it can show us is people sitting and talking to one another, and to us. McLuhan argued that speech is the richest form of human communication because it involves several of the senses--sight, sound, touch, etc.--and that speech on TV is the nearest equivalent yet to the face-to-face variety. Hence the ubiquitous talk show. Hence hosts with an uncanny ability to gaze into the camera and connect emotionally with viewers. And hence our feeling that we know Johnny Carson or Oprah Winfrey as we know a friend or a family member.

It's no accident that we tend to locate the defining artistic moments of recent decades in TV and other popular media, whereas in earlier decades we found them in, say, literature or painting. This stems from the other convulsion the century had in store for the arts in addition to World War I. (Oddly, it wasn't World War II. That conflict's primary impact came from the waves of European artists who fled Nazism for the U.S., enriching the country's homegrown arts and shifting the center of gravity in such fields as painting and classical music.)

The second great upheaval was the 1960s. Again, a rupture opened with the past; received standards and values were under siege, this time in the ferment of civil rights, the sexual revolution and Vietnam. In the arts the rumbling had started in the '50s, when Elvis Presley got everybody all shook up, when Jack Kerouac took to the road and Allen Ginsberg began to howl. In 1969, in a muddy field in New York's Catskill Mountains, more than 400,000 of their spiritual heirs gathered at the Woodstock Festival to stake their claim as a new generation and a new social and political force, complete with a language of their own--rock music.

From then on, youth and pop culture were in the ascendant. The rock sensibility permeated the other arts--painting, film, even TV. Blacks, women and others who had been jostling on the cultural fringe increasingly moved toward center stage.

And what about the heirs of Joyce and Stravinsky? Still doing brilliant work from time to time, to be sure. But broadly speaking, the energies of high modernism had played themselves out, and the ironic, self-conscious borrowings of postmodernism did not advance the cause much. Literature, the theater, classical music lost the authority to set the cultural agenda. Today the influence, the action, the buzz is all pop.

Here's another first for the 20th century: it's the first in which performing artists at the end of the century have been able to see and hear their predecessors from the century's beginning. It used to be that only the plastic arts could be preserved--in print, paint or objects. The performing arts were evanescent. A dancer's line, a comedian's schtick, a singer's coloratura vanished as soon as the performer walked into the wings, and could only be remembered, described, perhaps glimpsed in a third- or fourth-hand imitation. Now recordings, film and videotape form a permanent database of old-time show biz. A young actor can summon up Marlon Brando's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire instead of having to read about it as a part of the irretrievable past, remote as David Garrick's 18th century Hamlet.

This sets up a new dialogue between younger performers and their artistic forebears, perhaps producing not only a deeper relish of tradition but also a shrewder sense of how to build on it--or trash it. For the rest of us, it renders a part of the past perpetually present, and it forces us to view the present differently: behind the young actor, we can't help seeing the shadow of Brando. What's more, right in front of our noses, our era, our present, is becoming part of the retrievable past for the 21st century.

Ah, yes, the 21st century. As we hurtle toward it, digital technology's dizzying capacity to shuffle, combine, alter and duplicate images and words raises ever more daunting questions for the arts. "We can scarcely calculate," critic George Steiner has remarked, "the mutations in our experience of texts, music and art in the new worlds of the CD-ROM, of virtual reality, of cyberspace and the Internet."

Will the computer make everybody a creator? Will it undermine the very idea of the individual creator whose work has form, permanence and its own essence? Or will some unforeseen nerd genius figure out how to organize all those electrons in a dazzling new way? For now, things are shifting and blurring too fast to say. True to its theme, our century, which began by changing the old constancies, ends by making change the only constant.

Executive editor Christopher Porterfield has covered the arts for TIME for more than 30 years