Art in the Age of the Machine

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Art in the Age of the Machine

Claims are often made that everything will be different in the twenty-first century: the end of oil will send us back to a pre-industrial existence; the internet will end tyranny everywhere; electronic devices will unleash unprecedented creativity. Similar claims have been made in the past – and for many of them, the data is in.
Art in the Age of the Machine examines the historical effect of technological advance on the arts, culture, and human thought. What was the impact of the clock? the printing press, the phonograph, the camera, the cinema, or the elevator, on the arts?
Previous speculation on the relation between the machine and the arts by Karl Marx, Water Benjamin, Lewis Mumford, Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Jacques Ellul and the neuro-scientist, Donald Merlin provide a theoretical matrix for the ways in which machine culture impacts our ways of thinking and doing.
The subject is vast, so the study confines itself to the ways in which the arts responded to the machine and to machine culture. But all the arts are considered: from archaic epics, through cave paintings, photography and the cinema, to electronic music.
The artists discussed range from H. G. Wells to Aldous Huxley; from Renoir to Calder; from Stravinsky to Glass; from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Ghery

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

• Leon Surette is a retired English professor, author of five books, among them: A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound`s Cantos , and The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and the Occult, and most recently, Drams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics.