I am of the internet generation.
The triggers can come from anywhere.
Our behaviour is not the same as it was with art, but it is also not less valid because it is different.
We are all increasingly sophisticated and fast consumers, bordering on frantic.
What if art is happening in a new way? Within a brain that seems to be becoming used to only half absorbing information (or selecting and reselecting its stimuli at a fast rate?) We are very quick to rubbish these ADHD kinds of consumption. Why? The obvious response is that the flitting brain doesn’t settle on anything important as it changes channel three times a minute. But may it be because ADHD consumption tells us that certain ways of 'arting' and platforms are perhaps no longer deemed worthy of such sanctity (or maybe even that they don’t relate in any immediate way to an economic model and thus a value?)
Occasionally I have felt riled by reviews of ‘Drums Between the Bells’ that haven’t seemed to give the music time to work, written by reviewers who have thrown it on and listened to two or three tracks and skimmed the rest. There is no doubt that ‘reviewing’ has very often become a process of slapping a label and a judgement very quickly on a passing product, in a deluge of similar looking products. But beyond the vain annoyance and more genuine upset that sometimes Joe Music of Ping Magazine hasn’t had the chance to sit down in an uninterrupted place to feel what I have felt listening to the album is a real and interesting question about how we are consuming our music and art in general.
What if the new brain is now getting so used to allowing mixed media moments to find it rather than setting itself up to listen by putting a CD on and listening only to that? When it visits an exhibition or listens to an album, what if it does so without a traditional sense that the 'exhibition' space and the brain space (and the iPod space and phone space) are separate and one must visit the other to listen. Instead it unthinkingly experiences that all of those spaces feed into and out of the same network instantaneously, all of the time.
In any instant of immersion in 'art' this brain may be instantaneously taking a distilled feeling from Barber’s Adagio for strings (via youtube or a film) or the memory of Robert Johnson and keeping its half life while recalling a community song in Malawi (experienced first hand on a break in 2008). Superimposed on this mix perhaps, having grown used to MTV and home made video mix and seen Rothko, Mondrian and Pollock in the same walk through the Tate Modern, might be an imagined coloured square that moves and pulses with the art, exactly then, in that moment. The merge in the sophisticated consumer. In an instant, the 'art moment' may pull together all of this mixture of half lives, triggered by anything; maybe by looking at an anonymous piece of street painting while listening to an excerpt of freestyled rhyming over beats, or just by looking out of the window on the bus with headphones on.
The problem with this suggested new consuming and re-editing brain with its complex network constantly firing and dying is that the consumer is now the artist more explicitly than ever before. This can have no ownership, it doesn't fit the model.
In a remarkable number of reviews of dbtb I was characterised as a 'twittering poet' (it could have been ‘online dating’ or ‘blogging’ or ‘myspacing' or ‘flytipping’ depending on when the album had come out). I just think I am looking at the world as it is now. The scrolling headline is very much of this world of mass reference as it is now, an immediate manifestation of the massive potential for sharpness or brainlessness contained in one very simple set of conditions.
In among the lines and lines of filler are headlines leading to interesting things, the kinds of things that are not featured in the press, that are not deemed feature worthy, or that may be made by someone you have never heard of. The sophisticated internet information junkie will select her own headline writers and log in to that stream, picking what she wants, rather than what the hardened categories of press or library or market suggests. The platform won't last much longer, but the behaviour will I think. Similarly, the days of listening to a whole album in order to reach the 'gems' have passed now too. More likely is that a track that may be dismissed initially as nondescript may re-emerge months later as you casually watch the trees fly past on a train to Swansea or run to work.
Art passes back over to us all more and more every day, we are more and more involved in selecting with what and how we engage. Image banks shift for all of us every day. Self contained songs with lyrics are relevant but so are open ended ones that do not fit our marketplace. I happen to think that ‘Drums Between The Bells’ is just about the perfect ‘doing something else’ album for our sophisticated and fast consuming internet generation, but I may just be biased.
Brian Eno reponded:
There used to be, among art historians at least, a pretty clear picture of what was important and what was not. The huge spectrum of human behaviour that we could call creative was neatly divided up into territories such as painting, sculpture, classical music and so on. They were seen as the central trunk of culture. The minor branches were things like ceramics, photography, cinema, craft and design. Right out on the edges, the most ephemeral leaf-lets, were the things which most 'ordinary' people enjoyed: folk music, pop music, crochet, cake decoration, wallpaper, and a knees-up down the pub.