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Listening to this Modern Art Notes Podcast on Italian Futurism, and this section on The Machine with Vivien Greene discussing her Gugenheim Exhibit and Italian Futurism. Theres a brief discussion on the contradiction of the machine, which I think is insightful to the techno-
utopian trend today, where the answer is always this idea that it is "for thee not for me" from the wealthy. It's in the way we educate, where the rich will encourage mediated cyber ed for the poor and then increasingly hire private tutors for their own children. Then we see it
in art with the sale of exhibits and priceless works of art to the rich even as we are told that seeing pictures of those works are "basically the same". The contradiction of the machine that the futurists were trapped with in film and photography is in many ways still mirrored
by the kind of neo-futurism we find in mass cinema. Theres a preoccupation with death, and a desperate desire to transgress but a need to be referential at all times. The push to a future that the writers and technocrats deceive themselves into believing can exist even as they
are too blinded to see their vision will be betrayed. The glorification of war death and violence of 1917, or Tarantino, or comic book movies (really all one movement ill argue) and their desire to be abrasive and aggressive and NEW is always tempered by this collector's sense
which in Tarantino's self aggrandizing case has come to include himself. Of course the Contradiction of the Machine/Cult of the Machine existed in contrast to the Cult of the Past without ever seeing that they were in the Cult of the Past. Putting constantly the future in fear of
and disgust with the past. The obsession with rebuilding reinventing leaving behind was really all a desperate plea, not realizing they had chosen to put the future in the service of the past. They had to destroy the past because it loomed so largely, of course this is impossible
and their work instead is unable to move forward.
