GM,11 September response: Duh!

GM, 11 September response: Duh!
According to Paul Valéry, “We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art” (18). Well, duh!
These days, anyone with a cell phone camera is a photo artist, me included. Is this a form of mechanical art? This puts a new spin on artist’s renderings. Somehow, I’m reminded of the artists Christo and Jeanne-Clause who do strange things like surround islands with pink fabric; which and I agree, is called art. But this is minor compared to Valéry’s implication.
With the advent of today’s technology, digital technology for example, the ability for the artist to not only reproduce, create a perfect replica, but to go beyond reproduction, to alter, breakdown a work of art or even words, language, sound, to fragmentize anything that has been digitally produced then digitally recreate it is, I believe, the new frontier and something that has just begun to be explored.
This past March, I had the opportunity to attend a half dozen plays while on spring break with Rollins in London. It was interesting to see the development of different types of plays from Renaissance, Shakespearean, Restoration, and Fringe. It seemed that each theatre company had its own interpretation from the other for plays that had been produced, in some cases, for several hundred years. In the extreme, the Fringe Theater, the actors on stage held hand-held cameras and filmed each other as they acted, and, in turn, we the viewer watched the live play on movie screens projected out into the audience. So, even with the basic’s, if you consider stagecraft to be sort of basic, one could argue that Valéry’s statement would apply if you compare.