Gadamer - About Modernism’s Art and Culture (too instantly available)

“We should clearly recognize one thing. The generation gap, which we experience in the home in friendly argument over which program to tum on or which record to play, can also be found within our society as a whole, although we should rather speak of the continuity between the generations - since the older generation also learns something in the process. It is a profound mistake to think that our art is simply that of the ruling class. We can only believe that if we forget all our sports centers, motorways, public libraries, and technical schools, which are frequently more lavishly furnished than the fine old grammar schools, which I myself miss, where chalk dust was almost part of our education. Finally, this is also to forget the mass media and the widespread influence that they have on the whole society. We should recognize that all these things can be used in a rational way. Certainly human culture is greatly endangered by the passivity that is produced when the channels of cultural information are all too instantly available. This is especially true of the mass media. Whether we are talking of the older generation that raises and educates or the younger generation that is raised and educated, we are all as human beings faced with the challenge of teaching and learning for ourselves. What is demanded is precisely the active application of our own thirst for knowledge, and of our powers of discrimination, when we are confronted by art or indeed anything that the mass media make generally available. It is only then that we experience art. The inseparability of form and content is fully realized as the non-differentiation in which we encounter art as something that both expresses us and speaks to us”.

GADAMER, H-G. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Trans. by Nicholas Walter, ed. Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986