In the high thirties art, technology and design are so intertwined it is sometimes hard to pry them apart. …Since 1939 art and technology have broken apart, for many reasons. Architects still design skyscrapers, but they are rarely technological showpieces. we have stopped building bridges. Locomotives nowadays are not candidates for design competitions. Airplanes never were. Artists no longer paint heroic murals. Even if they did, one suspects that technology might not be a favorite subject. (Unless it were the villain?)
The art-and-technology divorce has been a disaster for both parties, and it has profoundly alienated us from the future. “The story of the relcamation of the site and the building of the [New York World’s] Fair on it,” says the 1939 Guide [to the Fair], “is a romantic saga of modern engineering.” Yes, once upon a time, engineering was romantic. …Today we respect technology, spend heavily on it and can’t live without it. But the spiritual glow is long gone. Art has lost its grip on technology, we have lost our grip on the future; and the American religion, in which skyscrapers and steam engines were beautiful and inspiring and numinous sacred objects, is dead.
–David Gelernter, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair
I’ve been saying for years that one of the most disheartening things about the modern-day world is that, aside from a handful of rare exceptions, nothing has any style anymore. Looks like this author agrees with me.
