The war against the secular

Roger Ebert in his consistently interesting blog has a post about how Twitter and internet browsing are destroying his concentration, reducing his ability to enjoy Victorian novels. It's a sensation many people may have felt, although whether the internet is anything more than a scapegoat is uncertain.

The epic films of the 1960s and 70s, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky's Solaris, and Apocalypse Now, began with an often glacial slowness, and didn't get much faster. It seems like they aspire to the condition of dreams, enveloping the viewer in a strange world. But it is not exactly the dream they want to create, but the concrete, the secular - which means variously the non-spiritual, the long-lasting, and the non-eternal - a space where they can exist and be free. All art needs this room, a space and time where the audience can move and stretch their legs and experience something at length, escaping the momentariness and fragmentation of ordinary life.

There is a book to be written about how changes in artwork density from gallery to gallery and era to era have affected the visual arts - pictures crammed on walls in the 19th century, now sitting in solitude in white galleries - and how today we may be giving contemporary art too much space. Because after all, despite our dense urban lives, it is time we really have a shortage of - we can flit from work to shallow sensationalist work in a gallery but not commit the time to enjoy temporal arts like the novel, the slow-moving epic, or the opera.

People still have time for long TV series, box sets, but they are paced and punctuated for stop-start viewing with their ad-space-friendly ten-minute acts and credit sequences. What they do not offer is the long slow sensation of drifting off. Everything is Brechtian now, shocking you out of its reality, showing you its frame.