The Cult of the Machine

 The de Young Museum has an exhibit through August 12, 2018 celebrating the machine age as reflected in American Art of the 1920s and 1930s. These steel gates, for instance, once marked the entrance to corporate offices in a skyscraper in New York City. Elsewhere the exhibit features paintings of things such as the internal workings of a mechanical watch done in a style called precisionism. 

The machines are still around, but the cult of the machine has been replaced by the cult of electronics. We used to speak of "electronic music," but today it's rare to hear music that is not somehow made electronic, if only by being run through a PA system. Video games gave us visual tools that are now being incorporated into fine art, as I experienced yesterday at The Museum of the African Diaspora. Their exhibit, "Digitalia," allows the visitor equipped with a smartphone or iPad to look through the device's camera and see additional images invisible to the naked eye.

It's hard to imagine the cult of electronics will pass as the cult of the machine did, but perhaps that's beginning to happen. David Sax's book, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter, was published two years ago.