The dampening effect

The Birkerts' quote has long been a favorite of mine, setting forth what is in my view the great artistic opportunity of the age. It's a challenge, though, which requires allowing the artist free access to the cultural artefacts of the past, as Hesse's Magister Ludi makes abundantly clear for me at least when he describes the Glass Bead Game thus:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

Putting it simply, I think Hesse's Glass Bead Game is the archetype of those art forms which Birkerts shrewdly surmises must await us.

The second quote comes from a particularly sympathetic article on the arts and copyright, a topic which I hope the conjunction of quotes here will show is of profound significance. I was particularly impressed to find the references to counter-melody, counter-image and dialogic practice in van Schijndel and Smiers' article -- they go right to the heart of the issue as Bohm, Bakhtin and Hesse each perceive it...

To coin a well-worn phrase, We stand on the shoulders of giants.