The traditional fine arts are elitist: their characteristic form is a single
work, produced by an individual; they imply a hierarchy of subject matter in
which some subjects are considered important, profound, noble, and others
unimportant, trivial, base. The media are democratic: they weaken the role of
the specialized producer or auteur (by using procedures based on chance, or
mechanical techniques which anyone can learn; and by being corporate or
collaborative efforts); they regard the whole world as material. The traditional
fine arts rely on the distinction between authentic and fake, between original
and copy, between good taste and bad taste; the media blur, if they do not
abolish outright, these distinctions. The fine arts assume that certain
experiences or subjects have a meaning. The media are essentially contentless
(this is the truth behind Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated remark about the message
being the medium itself); their characteristic tone is ironic, or dead-pan, or
parodistic. It is inevitable that more and more art will be designed to end as
photographs. A modernist would have to rewrite Pater’s dictum that all art
aspires to the condition of music. Now all art aspires to the condition of
photography.
