If art has reversed from pursuing beauty to seeking self-expression…
...can artists be the antennae of the human race? Revising McLuhan.
“The fish is not aware of the water it swims in,” was one of Marshall McLuhan’s favorite proverbs. People normally are not aware of their environments, and since these environments are increasingly made by media, people often are not aware of what media do to them.
The habitual is not visible. To become aware of the water, the fish must be pulled out of it. A counter-environment makes us pay attention to what surrounds us and how it affects us. When you mind your perception, you gain awareness of the environment.
According to McLuhan, art may serve as such a counter-environment. With their peculiar perception, artists sense the environment for us and make environmental sense-making available to others. As McLuhan often quoted Ezra Pound, artists are the “antennae of the human race.”
McLuhan also liked to compare this detecting capacity of artists to the DEW Line—the Distant Early Warning Line was a network of radar stations in the Canadian Arctic designed to warn the Americans about approaching Soviet bombers.
However, just at the time McLuhan credited art with the capacity for counter-environmental sense-making, the arts were changing under pressure from electronic media, and this transformation may have deprived them of that epistemic function.
Electronic media enhanced our capacity for reflecting and capturing the world, thus relieving the arts of the burdens of reality and materiality. As the media’s capacity for representing reality advanced, the arts were no longer needed for imitatur naturam. Media increasingly took care of it, developing as what Paul Levinson called Human Replay.
This shift is best seen in painting: after photography emerged, painting no longer served as the primary medium of visual reality representation. Painters moved away from strict realism and explored what photography could not do: perception, emotion, color, subjectivity, abstraction, and inner vision. The technical skills of a painter were no longer required to pass a reality check. Expressing feelings became more important than faithful depiction. Realism was swept away by impressionism, expressionism, symbolism, cubism, abstractionism, surrealism—you name it.
Additionally, electronic media pushed toward the dematerialization of art, shifting the focus from product to performance and from beauty-centered creation to artist-centered creativity. More broadly, media evolution shifted the arts from product to process and from pursuing beauty to seeking self-expression.
Jaqueline McLeod Rogers’s Crises Then as Now. Marshall McLuhan, with Urbanist Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Artist Gyorgy Kepes explores the intellectual atmosphere of the 1950s–70s, when the first techno-environmentalists—media theorists, urban planners, and visual artists—recognized a crisis of perception and authenticity triggered by technological progress. The aftermath of WWII, the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, space exploration, and the impact of television led them to recognize far-reaching changes driven by technology, including the transformation of art.
Curiously, unlike many other effects of technology, the technology-driven transformation of art was rather welcome at the time. In “The Emperor’s Old Clothes” (1966), McLuhan wrote that “mechanical culture and environment produced the spectator and the consumer”; but “electric circuitry and responsive environments” replaced the spectator and the consumer with the participant and co-creator. The art object was “replaced by participation in the art process.”
According to Charissa N. Terranova, a co-author with McLeod Rogers in Crises Then as Now, “McLuhan predicted the transformation of the artist from maker to programmer, from crafter to information organizer.” She also notes that the artists and thinkers of that time “described the dematerialization of art, in which objects were secondary to concept and performative intentions.”
At the time, most observers saw this transformation as positive, because it opened new horizons for creativity. But what has this emancipation from reality and materiality really done to art itself? Most importantly, how did this transformation of art from seeking beauty to seeking self-expression affect artists as the “antennae of the human race”? If an artist seeks self-expression rather than beauty, what exactly does this antenna capture?
In Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan wrote that humans are mesmerized by their extensions/reflections in their technologies—just as Narcissus, whose “narcosis” did not let him recognize either himself or his surroundings. If art is now less about the product and more about the process, if it is focused on self-expression, what is the point for me in shifting from my narcosis to the narcosis of another Narcissus, whose sensitivity to surroundings cannot be attested by anything beyond his “performative intentions”? What will it reveal to me?
When art collapses into self-expression, it risks becoming a relay of narcosis rather than a counter-environment—substituting one reflective enclosure for another.
It’s not that surrealistic self-expression cannot be antienvironmental and therefore revealing how perception works. Kandinsky or Dali disrupted the automatism of perception. They reconfigured how vision works and thus they were highly “antienvironmental,” while also inducing awe, an emotion of beauty. The point is that, unlike the beauty of imitatur naturam (taken away from art by media), the value of self-expression, multiplied by the virtue of “participation” (the switch from product to process), eventually leads to the condition in which “art” is whatever an “artist” does.
I cannot tell whether McLuhan connected these dots and recognized that, when art shifts from product to process and from seeking beauty to seeking self-expression, it can no longer serve as an antienvironmental DEW Line. But he was clearly moving in that direction when he wrote in “The Emperor’s Old Clothes” that “pre-electric art and education were antienvironments,” while under electric media “the members of the mass audience are immediately involved in art and education as participants and co-creators rather than as consumers.” He concluded: “Art and education become new forms of experience, new environments, rather than new antienvironments.”
Just as painting gives an example of the arts breaking away from representing reality, music gives an example of the arts switching from antienvironment to environment. Before electricity, music was collective and special; it provided an unusual experience, requiring withdrawal from everyday life—a typical antienvironment. With electricity, music began to accompany individuals everywhere. It became part of the individual environmental routine. We can have music on our personal devices and in our earbuds whenever and wherever we want. Sometimes, someone’s personal music is so environmental to us that we want it to stop.
McLuhan, as always, noticed this 50 years ago: “Music in the concert hall had been an antienvironment. The same music, when recorded, is music without halls, as it were. … music becomes environmental by electric means.”
Curiously, the music of the early electric age also had its ways of diverting from reality, just as painting did. Theodor Adorno wrote that a jazz musician, if given a score of serious music, like “one of Beethoven’s simplest minuets,” would likely be unable or unwilling to play it strictly as written. He would rather treat the score as a canvas for individual self-expression (though within standardized formulas of improvisation, as Adorno argued).
The Latin proverb ars longa, vita brevis slightly recasts Hippocrates, who used the word techne—technical skill and competence. For Hippocrates, this line meant that true learning of skills (of medicine) takes longer than a lifetime. The Latin version, more poetic, is now rather understood as “life is short, but art is eternal.” The electronic and digital transformation of art invalidates both meanings. If art is a process, not a product, and self-expression, not seeking beauty, then:
1) it cannot last longer than a lifetime; it is reduced to the act of creativity, or even to “performative intention.”
2) one does not need a lifetime to learn artistic skills; without a reality check—without imitatur naturam—any self-expression counts as valid. “Performative intention” may well substitute for skills.
So, media evolution has pushed art from product to process, from seeking beauty to seeking self-expression, from concept to “performative intentions,” from antienvironment to environment. In this new capacity, can art actually serve to expose our otherwise imperceptible environments shaped by technologies? Perhaps this idea of McLuhan’s needs revision. Art as self-expression, immersed in the environment of total self-expression—the digital environment—can no longer be antienvironmental.
Curiously, a somewhat similar digital transformation happened to journalism. Just as electronic media emancipated art from the burdens of reality and materiality, in journalism digital media 1) dematerialized the news product and 2) flipped news supply from the product to the process of participation (everyone informs everyone). This brought no good to journalism; eventually, this killed it.
Now a new digital challenge is emerging: not only can AI imitate nature in artistic forms, but it can also mimic human artistic self-expression. Can art be an anti-environment to the AI-infested environment if art is increasingly affected—or even made—by AI?
Once digital media become an environment of total immersion, it seems the only reliable way to perceive and resist their effects is not another digital medium, but embodied physical reality (and old media that accompanied it). As McLuhan observed, obsolete media can sometimes return as art forms. For example, handwriting in a notebook is a clear aesthetic and antienvironmental statement. A paper notebook decreases the efficiency of note-taking but restores embodied experience and the “efficiency” of anti-environmental perception.
Possessing technical skills (Hippocrates’s techne) becomes an art of physical living that stands in clear opposition to digital immersion. Embodied experience, along with media that require bodily contribution, are becoming antienvironments. People of the skilled trades are now counter-digital—antienvironmental—artists.
Embodied experience allows us to walk the uncanny valley backward, away from near-human simulations and back toward unmistakably human life. No wonder mindfulness, digital abstinence, and other practices of deliberate embodiment are so popular among people in the tech industry. It is a form of informed self-defense by those who know exactly what digital media do to us.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
Excellent subject! Yes, anti-environments are lost when art becomes a form of self-expression in lieu of language—when language, as taught and used, becomes inadequate for expression.
It needs to be more than a retrieval, however. There must be proportion. Without appreciation of analogies between wholes, i.e. the whole "right brain", ecological ratios of everything and everything, you aren't doing art.
"The job of the artist is not to sign but to read signatures. Existence must speak for itself. It is already richly and radiantly signed. The artist has merely to reveal, not to forge the signatures of existence. But he can only put these in order by discovering the orchestral analogies in things themselves."—Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press
"Baudelaire knew that the 'significance of an experience', and this is the whole of the matter, does not reside in the poet, the thing, or the larger reality but the ratio between these three... [The artist] should be aware of a much greater range of analogical implications in any set of particulars than the ordinary man. But he cannot create either the particulars or the ratios between them. The one he receives, the others he must find."—The Case of the Missing Anecdote
The "self-abnegation" of the artist, for the sake of readying their perceptual capacities and senses in order to "tune in" to reality is what McLuhan emphasized over and over. It's serious business—it's the sort of things that drive people crazy. It's what happens in cults, in the guise of religious experience. It's schizo. They begin picking up on things—the universe starts communicating to them.
All of this is far too unseemly for discussion (let alone to be advised!) in most respectable circles. It's also very, very easily faked with occult or shocking ornament and pageantry.