The Mechanization of Art
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 1960
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's lecturer is the first and current Professor of Art History at Oxford University, Edgar Wind. The German-born British professor specialises in iconology in the Renaissance era. In his Reith Series entitled 'Art and Anarchy', Edgar Wind explores the concepts of creative energies produced through turmoil.
In this lecture entitled 'The Mechanization of Art', Edgar Wind considers how machines have influenced art. He untangles conflicting opinions of how mechanics have influenced the production and evaluation of art now that works can be reproduced and multiplied. Professor Wind discusses how our experience of art is affected by the techniques of multiplication, and acknowledges that the creation, preservation and display of art can show signs of a mechanised style.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.8 | This lecture in the series Art and Anarchy, given by Edgar Vint, was originally broadcast in 1960. |
| 0:12.8 | Art and Anarchy. The BBC presents Edgar Vint, professor of the history of art in the University of Oxford and Fellow of Trinity College, |
| 0:23.3 | with the fifth of this year's Reith Lectures. |
| 0:27.4 | In this lecture, Professor Vint discusses the mechanization of art. |
| 0:34.1 | It might be thought that an artistic performance and a mechanical event cannot possibly have anything in common. |
| 0:42.5 | An artistic performance is a creative act, unique and unrepeatable, where it is of the very essence of a mechanical event that it can be repeated and often is. |
| 0:55.0 | To say that a creative artist would not incline to repeat himself exactly is an understatement. |
| 1:02.0 | He is incapable of doing so. |
| 1:05.0 | If two paintings ascribed to a great master look identical, it is more than likely that at least one of them is a copy by another hand. |
| 1:14.8 | The rule is as valid in the study of art as it is in the study of handwriting. |
| 1:20.9 | A man's signature varies because he writes spontaneously. |
| 1:25.7 | If two signatures are exactly the same, one of them is suspected |
| 1:30.3 | of being forged. If mechanical repetition is thus regarded as the direct opposite of the creative |
| 1:39.3 | act, there would seem to be some excuse for holding fast to the old belief that art is degraded by mechanization. |
| 1:50.1 | I call it an old belief because it underdates our age by at least 500 years. |
| 1:57.2 | The invention of printing, for example, and the use of woodcuts for the illustration of books |
| 2:02.5 | filled the Duke of Urbino, the famous Federigo da Montefeltre, with such dismay that he would |
| 2:09.7 | not permit a printed book to enter his library. |
| 2:13.4 | For him, the act of reading a classical text, and he was an enthusiastic student of ancient literature, |
| 2:20.3 | was desecrated by the contemplation of a printed page. |
| 2:25.3 | Words that were beautifully written by a scribe seemed to address his eye and mind in a personal way, |
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