On artistic innovations that don’t make art better

For years now I’ve wanted to write a blog post about the Coke machines on my college’s campus. They’re sleek, modern, and high tech, with WiFi-integrated chip card readers and LED lights and a system of robotic conveyor belts that whisk your drink out of the rack to dispense it in a rotating receptacle with its own recessed lighting.

They also don’t work very well. All that innovation has resulted in more points of failure than the rudimentary, purely mechanical Coke machines I grew up with. One of those might occasionally have eaten your change. These can break in at least twenty ways. I’ve counted. Technological sophistication has actually made the machines worse for their original purpose.

Here’s a quotation I’ve been meaning to share for a while, a passage from poet Dana Gioia’s essay “Notes on the New Formalism,” which was published in 1999 but that I first ran across last year:

These young poets have grown up in a literary culture so removed from the predominantly oral traditions of metrical verse that they can no longer hear it accurately. Their training in reading and writing has been overwhelmingly visual not aural, and they have never learned to hear the musical design a poem executes. For them poems exist as words on a page rather than sounds in the mouth and ear. While they have often analyzed poems, they have rarely memorized and recited them. Nor have they studied and learned poems by heart in foreign languages where sound patterns are more obvious to nonnative speakers. Their often extensive critical training in textual analysis never included scansion, and their knowledge of even the fundamentals of prosody is haphazard (though theory is less important in practice than mastering the craft of versification). Consequently, they have neither much practical nor theoretical training in the way sounds are organized as poetry. Ironically this very lack of training makes them deaf to their own ineptitude. Full of confidence, they rely on instincts they have never developed. Magisterially they take liberties with forms whose rudimentary principles they misconstrue. Every poem reveals some basic confusion about its own medium. Some misconceptions ultimately prove profitable for art. Not this one.

The failures of both modern poetry and modern Coke machines stem from a fundamental misapprehension of their purpose—what they’re for, how they’re supposed to work. The basics are neglected. Not for nothing does the phrase mechanical failure apply in both instances. What you end up with is pointless sophistication (cf. Jacques Barzun’s definition of “decadence”) that often doesn’t even work.

A silly comparison, probably, but one that is broadly applicable.