UP THERE from The Ritual Project on Vimeo.
Some art forms simply grow impractical as systems of efficiency and economy dominate old artistic principles of dedication, discipline & quality. Artistic technique and intuition used to take a lifetime to develop under a mentor that spent a lifetime learning from a previous generation. Skills like woodworking, painting, architecture; the kinds of things that you can’t price by the production hour. It seems that fewer people invest that depth of training with every generation.
We enter an accelerating time when the previous era’s wisdom is often lost and replaced with new techniques and technologies. This trend is an accelerating phenomenon and for the first time, virtually none of our generation’s new tools will be handed down to the next generation because the next generation won’t need them. They will evolve so far and so fast within our generation that they will cease to be recognizable as their origin.
There will cease to be a continuity of “literacy.” Our successors will have new tools and new “languages” by which they learn to use them.
Will we be able to impart some wisdom, understanding, know-how that they will value or will they look at us as irrelevant relics from a time gone by? I think I’m starting to understand the Amish.