There’s something so ugly about crushing an acoustic guitar. Making it buckle, blowing the middle to smithereens. This might be personal for me, as someone who grew up with a father who was what you might call a campfire guitarist – not a performer, just a father who entertained us with songs like “Dark as a Dungeon”, a bit folky. listen to the deadly dangers of coal mining. Maybe for you, it’s not the guitar. Maybe it’s the cameras or the vinyl records.
A little more than halfway through the new ad for “the thinnest Apple product ever,” a huge hydraulic press leans on an acoustic guitar – and cameras, discs and other things that hold reservoirs of d emotion for people who make art. Paint, pencils, a seamstress’s mannequin, books, a wooden character model, a not-yet-dry clay bust, a video game cabinet. Everything is flattened under his power. But the most spectacular crushes involve musical instruments – this guitar, this piano, this drums, this trumpet standing until it gives way.
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The ad – for which Apple has since apologized – is intended to communicate, I suppose, that this small, thin iPad can hold what’s important among all those things. He can replace them all. You can make your music with it. You can paint with it. You can play games on it. You can take your photos with it. And that suggests it means you can finally destroy all those things that were so heavy, like massive pianos and messy paint.
But these are not practical elements to begin with. Person owns a piano because it’s practical; it’s the least practical thing you can own. This can destroy your floor. It goes out of tune. And if you’re getting a new home, you don’t just need movers; You might need special movers. You don’t own a piano to get from point A to point B in the most direct way possible. You own a piano because we had one at my house: someone played it. Someone sits down, like my mother did, and plays “Maple Leaf Rag,” and you can hear the pedals squeaking slightly, and you can watch the hands slide across the keys, and of course you’re listening to music – but also, these are your mother’s hands.
Of course, to be fair, the ad is also meant to cause controversy, because you don’t crush beautiful things and accidentally offend. The ad says almost nothing about the iPad itself, except that it’s very thin; THE indicate it’s all the crushing, the indicate It is ugliness, certainly, to recognize that ugliness is to serve the purpose of advertising.
But its ugliness is also what proves the madness of its concept. The reason people will react so emotionally to the vulgarity of the ad is precisely why the thinnest iPad yet can’t do what they claim to do. It cannot replace the things that people have learned, over hundreds of years, to wear and live with, and to incorporate into their creation what they hope is beauty. Art is closely linked to humanity, with all its imperfect dimensions, and the two cannot be separated. In artistic creation, there is family, there are friends and collaborators, there is both fragility and permanence, and there is the passage of time. And there is the physical.
In our current environment, advertising plays the role of an extension, or perhaps a companion, to the idea that artificial intelligence – or whatever travels under that name – can support the production of art: books, illustrations, music, films. We are experiencing an all-out attack on the need to involve everyone’s idiosyncratic individuality in artistic creation. It is an attempt to reduce creative acts to devices with appropriate capabilities, to the point where machines can achieve everything entirely without us. In this vision, we will commission a book or film like we would manufacture a mass-produced piece of fast fashion, and as such it will be cheap and disposable and dependent on labor exploitation.
But the very fact that Apple knew this ad would make people angry is why you know this reductive approach to art is doomed to failure. The people who made this ad specifically chose to crush things that are valuable, not only because of their capabilities, but also because these are things that creative people imbue with meaning, save money for, and pass on to their children. These things will not be replaced by iPads.
You can make beautiful music with an iPad; you can create beautiful digital art. But this art will be done next to other music, other art, not piled on the corpses of old violins. If you view the new frontiers of art as an opportunity to destroy sculptures or explode paint bottles, you have never understood art and you never will.
In some types of stories, “I’m not worried” is the last thing you say before the monster eats you. But while I worry about the economics of art and its creation, I’m not at all worried that man-made art will one day disappear or be replaced by the thinnest iPad ever created . The gasp of so many people when they saw that guitar explode, that sound came from the part of a human being that makes art. And this part instinctively understands that beauty is not obsessed with dominating the technological world. There is no need to crush what is loved in order to pursue the fantasy that you can fit everything that matters into the pocket of a briefcase.
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