Art and Culture, Art and Technology

Commentary:

This is an extraordinary and most prescient document, written by noted French multi-cultural artist/musician/writer Bernard Xolotl back in 1982. He put in words many of my private thoughts at the time after touring California as a "New Age" musician. In my case it was the clash of New York culture vs. California, but Bernard comes from the grand European art tradition and brought a perspective far beyond anything I had imagined. The density of his prose calls for slow reading, repeated readings, and contemplation of the ideas presented. The ideas themselves may appear extreme or polarizing but that is only appearance and style. The assertions presented in the essay that follows can be backed up with a substantial body of evidence. This in itself would be a worthwhile project and lend credibility to these concepts.

In my opinion this essay would never have been written by an American. The intellectual style and level of abstraction would be a most unusal literary style for someone raised in America. With powerful, adroit and fluent use of the English language it is the work of an adept bilingual Frenchman. Bernard Xolotl's essay gives us a taste of a different map of reality with values and cultural assumptions far from the American norm. I consider this part of the worthiness of this essay. It has never before been published in hypertext. May a thousand links come this way as it enters places of serious discussion where thoughtful people consider the subjects of Art and Culture, Art and Technology in the context of our modern life..

Don Slepian, March 2009