A HISTORY/PROPHECY OF THE COLLABORATION BETWEEN SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND ART.

Historical fact, contemporary opinion, and prophecy, these are the three elements in this timely and invaluable study by the art critic of Newsweek magazine. He begins by providing a history of the long and stormy affair between visual art and the technology of modern life, from Duchamp’s cocoa grinder to Oldenburg’s giant pneumatic icebag, taking in whole generations of formidably complicated hardware on the way. His second section consists of a series of interviews with a number of contemporary artists. Kepes, Schoffer, Tringualy, Takis, the Zero and Grav artists, (collective statements) Kluver, the Ruschenberg, Paik, Seqwright, Stern, and others. Mr Davis ends with a section of prophecy: the future of art, he argues is not distinct from the future of human life. Neither the death of art (widely predicted) nor the death of science (widely wished) is half as important as what those deaths might signify. This book, like the subject it treats, is a metaphor. Only technology makes art accessible, and the crude attempts that have so far been made to use advanced technology in art are metaphors of a great liberation of creative potential, the humanization of science. With 306 illustrations.