(4 of 4)
Here's another first for the 20th century: it's the first in which performing artists at the end of the century have been able to see and hear their predecessors from the century's beginning. It used to be that only the plastic arts could be preserved--in print, paint or objects. The performing arts were evanescent. A dancer's line, a comedian's schtick, a singer's coloratura vanished as soon as the performer walked into the wings, and could only be remembered, described, perhaps glimpsed in a third- or fourth-hand imitation. Now recordings, film and videotape form a permanent database of old-time show biz. A young actor can summon up Marlon Brando's performance in A Streetcar Named Desire instead of having to read about it as a part of the irretrievable past, remote as David Garrick's 18th century Hamlet.
This sets up a new dialogue between younger performers and their artistic forebears, perhaps producing not only a deeper relish of tradition but also a shrewder sense of how to build on it--or trash it. For the rest of us, it renders a part of the past perpetually present, and it forces us to view the present differently: behind the young actor, we can't help seeing the shadow of Brando. What's more, right in front of our noses, our era, our present, is becoming part of the retrievable past for the 21st century.
Ah, yes, the 21st century. As we hurtle toward it, digital technology's dizzying capacity to shuffle, combine, alter and duplicate images and words raises ever more daunting questions for the arts. "We can scarcely calculate," critic George Steiner has remarked, "the mutations in our experience of texts, music and art in the new worlds of the CD-ROM, of virtual reality, of cyberspace and the Internet."
Will the computer make everybody a creator? Will it undermine the very idea of the individual creator whose work has form, permanence and its own essence? Or will some unforeseen nerd genius figure out how to organize all those electrons in a dazzling new way? For now, things are shifting and blurring too fast to say. True to its theme, our century, which began by changing the old constancies, ends by making change the only constant.
Executive editor Christopher Porterfield has covered the arts for TIME for more than 30 years