Abstract

The Western world is in the habit of looking at the history of visual art ‘in closeup’ - single image by single image - and receiving its information about art history in that uniquely particulate form. But if instead we distance ourselves a little from the history of art, enough to see it ‘in long-shot’ as it were - i.e. as a more or less continuous, dense flow of images - patterns emerge in the flow which convey new information, which can sometimes be in direct conflict with long-cherished traditional assumptions. If we use the 25,000 plus year of art history in this way as a ‘barium tracer meal’ for cultural evolution itself, it is unexpectedly revealed as punctuated rather than gradual, driven by alternating phases of open and closed growth in the human ecology, each with its own characteristic pressures of cultural selection. As a result human culture itself has two equally valid but opposite ‘fitness landscapes’: in the past 500 years the more successful strand in Western civilization has been the Type-A low-cohesion/ high-agility culture associated with a phase of open evolution involving our species relatively rapid transition from a manual to a machine ecology. The West’s traditional object-based imagery of painting and sculpture has its origins in that period of accelerating pre-industrial and industrial growth with its characteristic ‘economics of plenty’ epitomized by a triumphant capitalism. But the newly-emergent event-based imagery of installations and contextual art of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century is now indicating the gradual emergence (or more properly re-emergence) of the Type-B high-cohesion/lowagility pattern, previously associated with so-called ‘primitive’ cultures, and here with the global consolidation of our new machine ecology in a world increasingly dominated by the economics of scarcity. If that is so, it is probable that the syncretic form of meaning associated with the ‘sticky memes’ of art will increasingly come to challenge the present cultural dominance of analytic meaning, epitomized by the ‘smooth memes’ of science. The resolution of that conflict in evolutionary semantics may have a direct bearing on our species capacity to survive into the future. Whether it will be more decisively resolved within the Western or the Eastern group of civilizations seems at present a very open question.