YURI BOREV

AESTHETICS

AESTHETICS: THE FUTUROLOGY OF ART
The Science of Forecasting the Future of Art

SUBJECT. AIMS AND METHODS OF FORECASTING ARTISTIC CULTURE

Why Is the Futurology of Art Necessary?

Modern man is immersed in the stream of life and is often unable to get out of it and look into the future. So fast is the pace of modern life that he does not even have time to look around him in the present. That is worrisome, for mankind needs to take a long hard look at the trends of modern life and visualize the future in order not to be taken unawares.
If you do not think about your future there will be none. The future matures in the present. These ideas could well provide the motto for the new science of prognostication (futurology). Its roots go back to prophesies, to socio-political, cultural and economic Utopias. In an 18th-century Utopia L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (The Year Two Thousand-and-Forty) the French writer and Enlightener Louis Mercier wrote: "Oh the revered and sacred year of universal happiness which, alas, I have seen only in my dreams! Your turn will come, eternity will deliver you from its loins and those for whom the sun will then be shining, will casually trample underfoot my remains, and the remains of succeeding generations which will be engulfed by the abyss of death one after another.... Thought is more lasting than man. In this lies its great advantage! " One notes in these general propositions that spiritual culture is singled out as the enduring, intransient sphere. It is in a way a sound prognosis based on a fundamental truth: the surrogates of man's making will be consigned to oblivion, but genuine spiritual and artistic values are immortal and mankind needs them if it is to continue as a genus.
However, in addition to such global and sweeping ideas about the development of culture one needs to know its shorter-term future, its lines of evolution, the nature of artistic demands and their dynamics. It is the business of the prognosticator to grapple with these particular and concrete problems.
Recent decades have seen the isolation of a special scientific discipline which concerns itself with the trends in artistic culture and methods of controlling its development. Unlike former conceptions of future art arising from a logical analysis of the functioning of art, prognosticators today do not only aim to construct a conceptually coherent model of the future but are working towards the solution of the practical tasks of today and tomorrow. These tasks include meeting consumer demand, extending the network of cultural institutions, allocations to different branches of culture, determining the norms of consumption of art culture and other related matters. That range of problems involves planning and administrative tasks and the search for scientifically valid recommendations for cultural development.
Artistic culture comprises all the phenomena and problems that have to do with the practical functioning of art in society: first, there is art production, second, art consumption, third, the storing, disseminating and social distribution of art values, fourth, the control of artistic activity, storage and consumption of its products. The term "artistic culture" implies a broad study of art. And that brings up the question that is essential for the job of forecasting: what theoretical foundation could furnish a coherent idea of the actual development of art and its trends? Which factors should be taken into account and what tradition should be used as a point of departure?
The concept of artistic culture is an important methodological achievement of modern science. Formerly aesthetics usually concerned itself only with the creation of art, linking the essence of art only with the problem of the artist and his work and looking for answers in the study of artistic activity to the subjective world of the artist. The nature of art was explained in terms of the psyche, the innate soul, the capacity to intuit which an artistically gifted person possessed. Artistic values were conceived as something created within the space defined by the relationship between the artist and his product.
Many questions pertaining to the functioning of art fall outside the range of problems traditionally studied by aesthetics and demand urgent policy and administrative decisions. These are cardinal problems and they must be included in forecasting.
Present-day prognostic studies of artistic culture include social, demographic, economic and other aspects and take into account various forms of artistic activity. The prognostication of artistic culture also includes a scientific study of the prospects of its development (information on probabilities in the future).
Samuel Lilley, a noted English futurologist, stressed that on average 80 per cent of the forecasts made in the early 20th century have been proved right. That level of accuracy is high but not high enough. Lilley stresses that the only real way to improve forecasting is to plan. Forecasts in the field of artistic culture precede plans and assess the feasibility and consequences of the plans. Forecasts are wider than plans. Both forecasts and plans are made for any period, short or long. The difference between forecasts and plans lies in the mode of concretization of the prognosis. A forecast predicts: it describes a possible or desired future. A plan is prescriptive: it describes the measures that have to be taken to achieve a possible or desired result.
Every prognosis has two components: 1) studying the trends in the light of the needs to change it; and 2) concrete decisions that influence the cultural process.
The futurology of art must take into account different modes of interaction between tradition and new trends in art:
1) extending, improving and developing the tradition;
2) development by contrast (repudiation, development in "reverse" to established art tradition);
3) development on the basis of immediately preceding material;
4) development on the basis of material "across a period" (the traditions of "grandfathers" and not of "fathers");
5) the synthesis of different trends and traditions.
The futurology of artistic culture proceeds from three models: the target, the actually existing model, and the planned model. The latter is an intermediate stage on the way from the actually existing to the target model. That makes possible a scientifically valid control of the artistic and cultural process. Futurological prognosis helps to solve many economic, logistical and administrative problems in the development of artistic culture. Hence the goal of art prognostication lies not only in presenting a picture of the foreseeable future but also in steering its development in the desired and scientifically valid direction.

The Subject and Methods of the Futurology of Art

What kind of society will the future generations live in? What "beautiful and furious world" will surround them? And what will be the place of art in that society? What will art be like? How will it function in the world to come? What will be the structure and features of the artistic culture of the future? These futurological questions are interconnected. Those of them which have to do with the destinies of artistic culture in the future constitute the subject of the futurology of art.
To understand that subject theoretically it is important to identify the body of theoretical premises from which prognostic studies can and must proceed. The concept of the nature of art determines its futurology. Understanding the social forms and mechanisms of art consumption is also a major, factor. This range of problems, traditionally the province of aesthetics, needs rethinking in concrete historical terms with a view to making prognostic decisions. According to established tradition in aesthetics, art, in its diversity of types, genres and styles can only be understood within the framework of a general philosophical theory of art, as part of an overall conception of the nature of art as a complex social phenomenon. As other disciplines (economics, sociology, etc.) took up the study, that aspect was not delineated and emphasized enough. The futurologists of art need to restore the historical continuity of problems and their solution.
The main trends in the prognostic study of artistic culture are a comprehensive approach to the study of the functioning of art based on an understanding of its nature, and a broad coverage of a multitude of diverse factors and parameters involved in the functioning of artistic values in society and the processes of their consumption and assimilation. Prognostic studies of artistic culture are expanding to include new areas.
The multiplicity of prognostic methods reflects the multiplicity of approaches and diversity of forms of artistic culture that have come under study (the cinema, theatre, library, museum, etc.). The structure of investigations reflects the historically established structure of artistic culture itself.
Every methodological concept and model of prognostication has its own methods, goals and applications (in the shape of administrative decisions, recommendations for planning, etc.), and its own methods of processing the initial material. The determining factor in prognostication is its goal of enhancing the social effectiveness of artistic culture. This overall goal is present in every concrete prognostic study in keeping with the problem in hand and the concrete tasks of the study. The global goal concretized for specific tasks determines all the other factors of prognostic studies (the methods of information processing, applications).
To be successful in forecasting artistic culture one must possess conceptual instruments: special methods (approaches, principles). There are about a hundred and fifty such methods in the futurology of artistic culture. But at present only a little more than a dozen have been tested in practical prognostication work.
One of the oldest "classical" methods of futurology is extrapolation which consists in revealing the trends in contemporary art and extending them into the future.
Extrapolation methods include probability assessments, assessments by analogy, the method of rounding curves, etc. Projecting observed trends into the future should be done with care since it is hard to determine how a given trend would develop.
If trends are studied statistically only in quantitative terms, extrapolation may not yield a full and true picture of development. Statistics is unable to establish the existence and development of causal relations.
To carry out an extrapolation it is not enough to observe superficial trends in artistic culture. Extrapolation must proceed from a logically valid hypothesis, from a scientific knowledge of the essence of phenomena in artistic culture.
Prognostications lose in scientific validity if they are narrowly oriented to a particular factor or aspect of artistic culture. This must be borne in mind in interpreting data. A forecast based on what is "observable", "tangible" and "lies on the surface" may end up by producing pseudo-concrete results. Any one-sidedness in prognosticating artistic culture risks distorting the causal relationship between phenomena. For example, one cannot forecast the future of film art from cinema attendance trends, it is not enough to extrapolate these figures into the future.
There is little prognostic value in the studies of artistic culture prompted primarily by "departmental" or business interests which base their forecasts on money and other quantitative factors. A forecast of cinema attendance must be backed up by a study of all the positive and negative aspects of attendance. One must compare general statistical data on the evolution of artistic tastes and take into account the process of the forming of a rounded and harmonious individual. "Flattening" a forecast and projecting it onto one plane only creates a temporary impression of authenticity but later it is found to be at odds with reality. One should not make too much of the methods of mathematical data processing; substantive, logically valid criteria for prognostic judgements must be created.
The authenticity of a forecast depends to a large degree on awareness of historical experience and on the previous ways of studying of the object. The history of the object is a necessary and probably sufficient prerequisite for prognosticating its development. The history of the study of artistic culture is the basis for forecasting its development. The significance of history for prognostication is highlighted by the appearance of particular types of "retrospective" models of prognostication that are based on the study of the past development of an object. Historical-retrospective analysis of the phenomena and laws in the development of artistic culture may yield fruitful and accurate prognostic results.
A leap across the information gap may make it possible to anticipate the future. This is one of the remarkable qualities of the human mind. Given a body of data and proceeding from our knowledge, previous experience and intuition, we can make a picture of the future.
One principle that is applicable only in art prognostication but not in the forecasting of other fields is "I want it to be that way". Art must take into account the wishes and demands of the reader, listener and viewer who has a specialized background. That principle is used in forecasting artistic culture through expert evaluations. A group of specialists are asked to answer a set of questions specially developed for the purpose of the study. These surveys can be individual and collective, viva voce or by correspondence, and may involve one person at a time or panels of experts.
The method of expert evaluation as used by the general theory of prognostication is not yet effective enough: expert judgements are often contradictory and offer mutually exclusive information. It remains to be determined how best to process and use these replies to obtain a valid forecast. The method of expert evaluation sometimes misfires because the phenomena of art are exceedingly complex and their perception by different individuals is not identical.
The prognostic method involving the study of "advanced" groups is methodologically promising. In every society demands for artistic culture, the capacity to absorb it, and the taste and ability to appreciate art are distributed unevenly among the different social groups. There are groups of highly cultured readers, listeners and viewers who are able to appreciate the highest artistic values and come nearest to true art in their demands. Such an "advanced" group furnishes a model in the study of the functioning of artistic culture in the society of the future.
The modelling of artistic-cultural processes (matrices, graphs, "tree of problems" and "tree of goals", the creation of mathematical models and the like) is important in art prognostication. The practice, theory and methodology of the prognostication of artistic culture are in their infancy. Its methods are being perfected. Prognostic studies of artistic culture have yet to yield a whole picture of its future development. So far they have offered fragments of the picture and preliminary data.

 

THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE OF ART

Eschatological Concepts of Art and Its Real Destiny in the Future World

The history of aesthetics has seen various concepts advanced about the fate of art which varied depending on the expressive means available to the various period and the changing cultural function of art. The authors of these conceptions tried to understand the underlying pattern in the development of art, the deep-going trends, the changes in its social role and cultural functions. They built then view of the future on theoretical-logical and conceptual models, on the distinction between the necessary and the accidental factors, and on their ideas of the nature of art.
The future of artistic culture has continued to engage the minds of many scholars. At the International Congress on Aesthetics in Athens the Italian scholar Guido Calogero said: "The world is full of poems we have not yet read. The treasure chest of art is inexhaustible, for it is the only good that is not destroyed through consumption." These reasonable statements however lead Calogero to the unjustified conclusion that future generations will not produce art; they will content themselves with the body of art created before them.
Aesthetic eschatology, predictions of the death of art have recently become fairly widespread. The claim to authorship of that concept was "staked" many centuries ago by Plato. He believed that in an ideal state art would be unnecessary and only philosophy and religion would remain. Even great Homer should be expelled from the ideal state, though not until after crowning him with a wreath of laurels.
Many aesthetic concepts deny that future society will need art. Hegel maintained that art, having passed three stages, has completed its development. These stages were first the so-called symbolic art (ancient Egypt), in which form prevails over content, then classical art (ancient Greece) which effects a harmony between content and form and then the Romantic art in which content prevails over form. After the Romantic period, according to Hegel, there will be no art, content liberates itself from the aegis of form and the era of pure reason begins.
Many "eschatological" concepts have been advanced. But none of them are true. Long after Hegel had said that art was ended it continued to give the world such names as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Faulkner, Shaw, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Bulgakov, Gorky and others.
Few people would opt for a world without art. And future generations would not be content with the art of the past. Every period needs to understand itself and its aesthetic ideals. Great and favourite works of the past may of course be a help in that. But only a fresh and contemporary look can explain the man of the new historical period. The experience of new human relations cannot be understood without a modern artist. Future people will need artistic interpretation of their complex and varied life. They would need their own artistic conception of the individual and the world. The art of the future will also face a novel challenge, for it will become a key stimulus to work.
Art awakens the creative impulse in man, who is capable of creating things of beauty in various fields of endeavour. In making a lamp, a table, a chair – strictly utilitarian objects, man wants them to be not only useful but also beautiful. Whatever trade he pursues, whatever material and intellectual values he creates, he is an artist. To awaken the artist in man means to awaken his creative instincts. Such a person feels a need to create. This is the law by which true artists, actors, poets have lived over the centuries. They could be left without means of livelihood but they could not be made to stop creating. They were driven by the "fire of the soul", the creative impulse.
And if every person in a future society lives and works according to the laws of beauty how greatly increased will be the function of art! It will foster a person's appreciation of beauty and his creative leanings. There will be a vastly increased demand for art and not a dying off of art as Guido Calogero and like-minded people assert. But to accomplish that task, the art of the future will have to overcome difficulties more formidable than it has ever encountered in the past. Odd though it may seem these difficulties stem from the rapid progress of science and technology in every area of life, including art itself. In the old days an artisan produced the whole object single-handed and fulfilled himself in it. So an artisan was an artist, like Colas Breugnon described by Remain Rolland. A cupboard or a table decorated with a grapevine etched in wood was a work of art embodying the spiritual world of a person. But it could be enjoyed only by two people, Colas Breugnon who spent half a lifetime making it and the fortunate nobleman who bought the masterpiece.
Machine-made cupboards have no artistic value. Standardization kills art. As a result people are deprived of aesthetic influence and aesthetic pleasure both as consumers and as producers of objects. You can put your soul into making a cupboard with your own hands, but it is hard to be inspired by a job that consists in screwing legs to tables. How to bridge that gap? Today almost all kinds of manufacture involve the artist. A new plane, a new cupboard, or a new machine are made not only by engineers but also by designers. In future that alliance will be exceedingly important and the two trades may become one. All the objects surrounding us will acquire aesthetic value. But that is only one part of the problem. For even in the highest degree of automated production there remains the problem of organizing it in such a way as to make every worker feel like Colas Breugnon. Future people will live in a world of object-images. Thomas More in his Utopia asked, "will the people of the future be happy? " For the sense of happiness derived from the achievement of even the most coveted goal is short-lived. According to the Weber-Fechner Law sensations increase as logarithms of stimuli. In other words, a person's feeling of happiness passes if the situation that has caused it remains unchanged and is not enriched and expanded. Man is only happy if the situation that makes him happy grows and is enriched. Moreover, to make him truly happy the situation that causes happiness must develop at an ever faster pace and the factors causing it must reproduce themselves on an expanded scale. That human quality, that psychological mechanism of happiness will never let man rest and will propel him and the material and spiritual products he makes towards more progressive forms. In terms of happiness, any pause in the ascending line of human evolution, even a slow-down in the rate of cultural development, means regress and unhappiness.
Man in the future will need a maximum level and pace of growth of demands and means of satisfying them. It is this psychological mechanism of happiness that provided the spring which enabled man to advance from stone weapons to space vehicles, from magical drawings scratched on a cave wall to Raphael's paintings, Shakespeare's theatre and Fellini's cinema. The same psychological mechanism of happiness holds out the promise of further scientific, technological and artistic progress, the growth of productive capacity, of energy, of technological prowess and knowhow, of a richer, broader and more accurate scientific picture of the world and of aesthetic values, artistic and cultural achievements. This exponential growth of modern culture and civilization is caused by and aimed at human happiness even though along the way to happiness mankind is capable of inflicting irreparable damage on itself and exposing itself to untold calamities. These calamities are a consequence of the inability to ensure extended reproduction of cultural values on a scale sufficient to maintain the feeling of happiness and attempts to compensate for it by seizing values from other people. All this creates breaks in the exponential development of human culture and civilization and at times poses the danger of mankind's self-destruction. However, historically this development always retained an upward trend.
This has many consequences and manifestations in the sphere of artistic culture. Let us dwell on some of them.
One of the laws of artistic culture is the growing number of its languages. This happens because the creative character of culture, its enrichment and expansion can only take place if there is at least a double "translation" of the original idea (for example, from one language into another and back). The growing number of languages in artistic culture accelerates the growth of the conceptual body of art. The growth of the number of artistic languages occurs above all through the birth of new types of art, the appearance of new interactions and syntheses of arts, the accumulation of expressive means within each of the arts. The trend towards expanding the semiotic parameter of culture is likely to continue into the future.
Another trend is the expansion of the communicative channels for dissemination of artistic culture which is also important for the future of art. It manifests itself not only in the emergence of new types of art but also in the emergence of technical arts (photography, cinema, television) capable of being mass communications media. One can discern a future trend in the expanding communications media at the disposal of artistic culture. The same trend manifests itself in the transition from oral culture to written culture, to book printing, the growing capacity of the printing industry to produce books quickly and in large editions, etc.
The trend towards enrichment and expansion of communicative channels can be observed in individual arts. For example, the cinema has only recently (in historical terms) acquired sound and with it a new channel of oral verbal communication with the audience. Music has obtained a channel of mass communication with the audience through the sound cinema, tape and disc recordings. Theatre as the audio-visual art has always relied on several channels of communication with its audience and these channels reveal a historical trend to multiply, and expand.

Types of Art and Their Future

The future will see architecture, an art whose influence no man can escape, assume a tremendous role. Many features of a future architecture have probably been anticipated by Le Corbusier, the famous French architect, and Oscar Niemeyer, who planned and designed Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil.
The development of architecture depends to a large extent on technological progress. The availability of stronger and more flexible materials creates new possibilities for mastering space. The architect no longer has to be constrained to erect his bearing structures vertically and can direct load along any line his fantasy prompts him. Architects may turn to the beautiful and efficient forms that have been produced by nature and wildlife over millions of years. But it is not merely the question of technological progress.
Apparently in considering the future of architecture one must bear in mind a circumstance that will be extremely important for other arts as well. Already we can discern two opposite processes taking place in art. The first process is the birth of new types of art and the isolation of each type in a pure form. For example, the cinema has incorporated the previous experience of art and has gradually freed itself from dependence on stage methods, and from the forms of literature, painting and photography, and has developed its own laws. The same is happening with television. That process will continue.
At the same time there is the opposite process of the synthesis of arts and the birth of new ones as a result. One can cite the Czechoslovak group Laterna Magica whose performances blend ballet and colour photography, pantomime and cinema. Synthesis of this kind will be one avenue for the future development of art. Synthesis can assume startling and incredible forms. This holds for architecture too. It will be even more closely allied to painting (as witnessed by the remarkable architecture of Mexico which freely draws on painting and mosaic). Future architects will, in their "buildings-images", use television, cinema, photography, and music.
Yes, music! After all, an old pagoda in Burma is girdled with silver bells. When the wind blows the little bells produce a wonderful tinkling sound that seems to envelop the pagoda in a musical shroud. That remarkable structure was built in accordance with a yet to be formulated law of synthesis between architecture and music. Music will be used in architecture. Imagine houses and streets each with their own distinctive sound. In such a city houses will differ not only in numbers but also in their look and sound. Mayakovsky spoke about "the music of streets" and Alexander Green dreamed of such cities.
And what will cinema, television and photography be like in the future? That group of arts, like architecture, is certain to be heavily influenced by technological progress. Cinema, television and photography will master space, depth and perspective (think of the promising experiments in holography and laser technology). It is technically quite feasible for these arts to include even smell in their expressive arsenal. A cinema-goer watching a tiger hunt will be able to smell the jungle, and gun powder. Such experiments have already been staged. It is still unclear however whether art needs such an addition and whether smell could be made an artistic vehicle. Many technical innovations are already feasible today. There exist, on an experimental basis, stereo films, 3D colour films, and 3D colour photographs. But volume and colour have not yet quite become artistic means, they remain technological experiments.
And yet one may recall the history of the sound cinema. Chaplin continued to make silent pictures even after the talking films came along. He did not begin to use sound in his films until he was satisfied that it had stopped being a technical possibility and became a means of art. Colour came into its own in the cinema when it became a means of conveying meanings that could not be conveyed in any other way. The potential of colour cinema has yet to be fully tapped. Stereo television, stereo film and stereo photographs too will at first be technical novelties, amusing gadgets, before volume will become a vehicle for conveying artistic messages.
Photography, colour cinema and television have influenced and will continue to influence painting. The individual vision of the artist and his original attitude to the surrounding world will become very important. The evolution of related "technical" types of art will indirectly cause painting to change its course. And not only indirectly. New paints, and the methods of multiplication have affected the visual arts and will affect them even more in the future.
Does this mean that technological influences on art will increase infinitely? That is unlikely because it is hard to imagine that the people who come after us would be happy to have an art that creates a perfect illusion of life and is even able to replace it. Ray Bradbury's story The Veldt describes a society in which children by pressing a button in their playroom could find themselves in the jungle with roaring lions. The jungle was so real that parents could not find their children in the thicket. Such degree of verisimilitude is not the aim of art. And it is not going to develop along these lines. Its aim is to understand life and shape a full and socialized individual, not to replace reality with pseudo-reality. Who would want to have a cinema illusion instead of a date with his beloved? But technological devices capable of materializing our fantasies, dreams and intentions into images would greatly benefit art and could even give rise to a new kind of art.
Serious changes are also in store for theatre as an art. The boxlike stage of the theatre will not remain as we are used to seeing it today. Theatre history has already seen attempts – some highly successful – to take the action into the hall and outdoors. One can recall the experiments of many stage directors. For instance, Okhlopkov in the Soviet Union, who gave serious thought to the future of the stage, teamed up with architects to design a theatre of his dream. The stage was to be easily transformed. In the course of one play and even one act it can change from traditional, to circular form placed in the middle of the hall surrounded by an amphitheatre of seats. In such a theatre the ceiling may open up on a starry sky, or the rear wall can be drawn back and actors would perform against the background of the trees surrounding the theatre.
New architectural solutions of the interior, the stage and the auditorium will undoubtedly extend the possibilities of stage art. Theatre will welcome them. Even the Greek god Texmachen was not above using technical gadgets when he came down from heaven to sort out people's problems.
The theatre will not die fifty or a hindred or two hundred years from now simply because it enables viewers to observe art happening before their eyes. Nothing can replace this magic act. The audience sees the actor on the stage and the actor is aware of the breath of the audience. An invisible link springs up between him and the audience and mutual enrichment becomes a two-way process. The actor infects us with his creative elan and is inspired by our attention and emotional response. This feature, which distinguishes theatre from other arts, is a guarantee that it will never be absorbed by powerful technical rivals and will never die.
The theatre's potential lies in man, in the actor, in expanding his psychic, physical and creative potential. Art's role is not only cognitive, educational and aesthetic but also suggestive. Ancient art was particularly suggestive and was dominated by oaths, incantations, charms which were based on the now convincingly confirmed powers of the word to influence man's psyche.
The suggestive power of art reawakens in modern art at critical moments in the life of nations. For example, Russian poetry written during the Second World War sounds like incantations, charms and other ancient forms of suggestive art.
The suggestive potential can be used to a great effect by literature, drama and stage art in the future. For that, the actor will need to study the technique of hypnosis and telepathy.
The human individual will become increasingly complex. Art will seek to understand the individual, fathom him, to reflect him convincingly in its images and influence the individual, help his socialization and uphold his intrinsic value. One can create an image of a person and stage a play using the physical influence method (the technique used by Stanislavsky in his "system") and the representation theatre technique going back to the theoretical premises of Diderot. Diderot said that an actor is a person who squeezes tears from the viewers' eyes by his brain. The former system is important for the psychological plays of Chekhov and Ibsen. The latter system, which harks back to Diderot's paradox of the actor, is relevant to the intellectual drama of Frisch, Durrenmatt, Brecht and Camus. In such a theatre the actors "act out" not the psychology of a person but a conception of life. The same is true of literature.
Some writers tend to concentrate on the psychological world of the individual while others lay out intellectual conceptions of the world. It may be that the literature and theatre of the future will see a merger of the intellectual and psychological trends. In the theatre that would demand a new technique, new personal qualities, a higher professional competence and cultural background.
Such a theatre would require a new kind of director who is intimately acquainted with the complex "apparatus" of the acting technique and is competent in handling the modern technology of the stage. Most important of all, such a theatre would call for a director-philosopher capable of linking the situation on the stage with the state of the world at large. The director will need a global kind of thinking. Without it he would not be able to understand and reflect the fact that the life of an individual is increasingly linked with the destiny of the whole mankind. The artist would not be able to say anything about the individual, let alone about humanity as a whole because man lives in the magnetic field of humanity.
To be sure, in the future many conflicts that bedevil the present world will be resolved and many situations will recede into the past. But there will remain the conflict between Mozart and Salieri, there will remain Romeo and Juliet and Othello and Desdemona. People will live in a real "beautiful and furious" world in which there will always be "divinity, inspiration, life, tears and love".

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