Nowadays, we’re experiencing (probably like never before) an incredible exchange of influences between creative disciplines. This fast, continuous movement of elements across neighboring fields, should give arts new interesting perspectives to push ideas into unfamiliar lands.
Nonetheless, the risk is that everything is going to collapse into a repetitive pattern, a system that cannot reinvent itself anymore, but only feed a liquid network where probably if no boundaries exist, no differences will survive either.
We lost the capacity to play. Something that the primitives did, and that is what Lévi-Strauss refers to as “bricoleurs”.
Thus, where the primitives found multiple uses for the same tool, from creating a pipe to building a canoe, we lost that capacity, and therefore we need multiple tools, each for specific employment. Our language is following the same fate. What once a limit of resources was also an opportunity to stretch out our imagination, is now being replaced by an abundance of resources that are limiting our creativity, for how derisive it may sound.
We got rid of the differences on behalf of a new idea of exchange, acceptance, and tangled relations. It’s actually faster and easier to copy and paste a sign, rather than conceptualize an idea, bringing it into a different contest. In fact, even concepts are going through the same process of replication. This is “[…] the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning”, as Baudrillard wrote.
One could argue that the attempt to create connections between disciplines is not new, as Neoplasticists already tried something similar. That would be true, except that Neoplasticists adopted a different approach. That is the will to bring graphics, music, painting, and sculpture into what they used to call “The Total Masterpiece”.
The idea was to integrate different languages into what the Neoplasticists considered to be the only main discipline (architecture), where different arts could actually fulfill the very system that was being invented. It wasn’t a tweet of a sign. It was instead the creation of a new language.
Global Marketing is surprisingly close to what creative disciplines are becoming today. The Global Masterpiece is born. Not only cultural differences (the very richness of each culture) are at risk of disappearing, blending into each other by abandoning their respective identities. Also, art, design, fashion, architecture, and sculpture are now sharing the same signs, which are not improving any of them anymore, but rather making them alarmingly too similar. What is theoretically meant to add meaning, turns out to take the meaning out.