Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema

Pg. 66

The information explosion is not a window on the future so much as a mirror of the past catching up with the present. The intermedia network, or global communications grid, taps knowledge resources that always have existed in discrete social enclaves around the planet and saturates them into the collective consciousness. Suddenly the mass public "discovers" African culture, East Indian and American Indian cultures, folk music, politics. Knowledge previously the domain of scholars becomes common knowledge, and precisely at that point when the old order is about to fade it sees itself clearly for the first time. William Burroughs has called it the Age of Total Confront, noting that all the heretofore invisible aspects of our condition have quite suddenly become visible. 

 

John Dewey: "When art attains classic status it becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life experience... when, because of their remoteness, the objects acknowledged by the cultivated to be works of fine art seem anemic to the mass of people, aesthetic hunger is likely to seek the cheap and the vulgar.