Arrival: Gizmos and Love
Please consider the cover of the April 30, 2007, New Yorker, by Harry Bliss.
The drawing shows a young couple standing before a large abstract expressionist painting, apparently in a gallery; they are pleasantly dressed. Hipsters, we might call them, but they're not hipper-than-thou: the boy wears a necklace and jeans, while the girl has a black tank-top and a red skirt.
The boy has just taken a digital photo of the painting, or part of it, and is showing her the results on its little screen. She stands slightly apart, her head inclined toward the camera, her hands clasped behind her holding the gallery map. While he is planted solidly on the ground, possessing his gadget with both hands, she is ever-so-slightly distanced from it. It is clearly his gadget, his photography habit, and his capture (of the painting that stands before them).
This drawing means several things to me.
On the one hand, it might represent an arrival. The boy and the girl are about my own age; they have my style; they have an interest in art—all fine things which I approve of. And the camera: it's an instance of the digital technology, whose arrival I spent my youth waiting for (never could I understand why anyone used those baroque, circular timepieces, when digital watches told the time directly!). This couple is not of the frock-and-shawl generation that decorated New Yorker covers past: no, these are the youngsters, probably with a bit of hip-hop as well as indie rock on their iPods, and no Gershwin at all. They might be product designers, or marketers. The boy might be a coder. Possibly, this picture is a picture of our arrival on the scene: an announcement that we, the jeans-wearing creative class, we who know innately the superiority of the digital approach, we are the cultural vanguard, we are at center stage for the hopes and dreams of bourgeois America.
I want to read the picture that way, and partly I do—partly I find some hope in it. But it seems more profoundly a criticism, rather than a triumphant arrival.
Looking at the two characters' postures, I see a rift. Rather than a couple in love with each other, with art, and with technological possibility, I see a boy with a toy, and a girl with patience. He is much more engaged with the devise; she curves demurely away. Digital cameras are the most dubious of "tools," as you'll see in a moment. Whereas a film camera is (of course!) a vessel for capturing light, for making pictures, digital cameras are rather more like handheld video games. They are full of settings and switches, a field for endless play—and not only this, they can also be upgraded. The memory card and the lens can be forever interchanged, providing opportunities to experiment, to buy, and to peruse catalogs and hobbyist magazines—all with the veneer of a respectable, even artistic, hobby (unlike riding a motorcycle, which raises eyebrows). It is a boy's dream, a Game Boy, dressed in grownup's clothes.
Women, of course, are wiser than this. Women know there's no satisfaction in relationship with a device. Nothing handheld holds much interest for them. Women are whole-body people. All that play amounts to nothing: not skill, not insight, not love. Just diversion. Yet women (so sad! so tragic!) have this need for a man, this need to be protected and supported. In the pursuit of that domesticity, one needs to put up with the obsessions of the other. The woman looks on, a little bored, a little disappointed that the man is so obsessed, but unable to say anything, unable to spark a passion in him, not a passion for art, nor for experience, nor for herself. She knows that the device is distracting, that its little screen or the prints that will be made later are no substitute for the present moment. But then, she wants to be loved, to be cared for, she wants stability. In that connection, having a little patience with the boy's habitual diversion is a small price to pay. Later that night, they will watch a little TV; she will make him dinner; he will watch a ball game while she gossips with her friends. They will share nothing of their souls, they will not connect. But peace will be kept.
This picture is a picture of my whole life, in 8 1/2 x 11.









Am I missing something here with People's cover story touting