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A very brief history of art: In the beginning…
A very brief history of art: growing up
About six centuries ago an irresponsible Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing, thus depriving thousands of guileless monks of the job they had devoted their entire life to. The catastrophe spread like wildfire: holy and less holy pieces of literature escaped the watchful hands of the Church and started spreading around information, concepts and ideas that bishops and kings would rather have kept confidential, thus pulling the cork off the Renaissance…
Just imagine all those monks and abbots groaning and moaning about the death of the art of calligraphy and as such of the literature as they knew it…
yet surprisingly enough Gutenberg’s felony didn’t kill the literature at all; it just stripped off its aura of holy and arcane and focused it more on the contents than on the form.
In the following centuries the worries raised by scientific and technological progress intensified exponentially: chemistry stole the work from alchemists, medicine from witch doctors and healers, the steam engine from horse breeders, physics and astronomy from theologians, the mechanical loom from weavers (remember the Luddites?), the internal combustion engine from the steam engine… the list could go on for quite a while.
Then after WWII the embers of a science that for a couple of centuries had been discreetly growing in the background without affecting much people’s life, ignited the fuse and the situation exploded: new technologies started popping up like mushrooms, newer technologies replaced them in a matter of a few years (or even months), the world began changing at an impressive speed.
Believe it or not, still in 1962 a computer was a human being, most often a woman, who performed a set of boring repetitive calculation manually or sometimes with the help of a few rattling mechanical gadgets. Less than four years later a bloom of electronic computers – bulky, clumsy, primitive but then regarded as lightning-fast – was already spreading on the world markets and stealing the job from innumerable grudging accountants and bookkeepers.
And today’s world was born.
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A very brief history of art (3 of 5): today
