Marcel Duchamp showed that "art" as commonly thought of was an obsolete notion. The insight behind Duchamp's "readymade" sculptures was as follows: with the rise of mass production, craftsmanship as part of the artist's identity was no longer necessary. Beforehand the artist had to be a person who could make a sculpture or a painting, who had the necessary technical skills to produce a particular object -- but afterwards, surrounded by thousands of objects of every shape and size and color and texture, all that was required was the necessary insight, to identify and arrange objects appropriately.
Examples of the readymades: A flatiron with tacks glued to its bottom in single file down the middle. A barstool with a bicycle's front fork set upside-down into the seat's center. A urinal, hung so that the narrow spout at the bottom was above, almost like the wimpled head of a madonna inclining forward above her robed shoulders -- rendered in sleek, white porcelain. As Duchamp said to Ferdinand Leger and Man Ray at the 1912 Paris aviation show: "Painting is dead. Look at that propeller! Could either of you do that?"
In the absence of the craft skills, insight thus becomes the measure of the artist -- as it had always been of the audience, the educated public. As a result there is no longer any distinction between artist and anyone else, so long as they possess insight. Anyone can be an artist, or to perhaps put it better, no one needs artists anymore, nor any of the social institutions which separated them and their work from the public and controlled access to their work. The middleman is no longer necessary.
John Cage showed that "music" as commonly thought of is an outdated notion. Sound takes place all around us at all times, in endless variety. An act of insight similar to the one necessary to become an artist (after Duchamp) is all that is necessary to create music. The decision to experience a particular sound as music - or, given the obsolescence of the term "music", the decision to attend mindfully to any particular sound or sounds -- is the essential act, and can be done at any time, or in any place.
"Fiction" is an outdated notion, as is "literature." All around you, wherever you turn, you will find endlessly fascinating characters, all developing interactively, having myriad adventures. Who needs books?
Mass culture creates the feeling that one is provincial, that "the party is eternally elsewhere." However, currently, the party is in fact everywhere, or could easily be -- as a direct result of the potential created by mass communications. But no one realizes this. Mass culture is unnecessarily demoralizing. Mass communications' potential is being wasted as a result.
If we do so we will see that there is as much history taking place right now as took place in all of the time between the invention of agriculture and the present era.
The fact that there are more people alive today than were alive in all the time before (some arbitrary recent date such as) 1945 is significant. It means that we have the manpower to replicate in quantity all of the science, art, and philosophy of recorded history -- in one generation.
For an example of what this enormous population means, we need only consider how small the world was from the beginnings of recorded history until the post-industrial era. During all this time, human society was run on the basis of personal contacts. Consider British society of the mid-late 18th century, as described by Boswell's journals or his Life of Johnson. When one reads Boswell one reads the illuminating work of a shameless social climber in a society ruled by conversation. There seems to have been no distinction of classes as there is today (as for example among clergy, bureaucrats, academics, the military, and the numerous professional classes): there was really only a distinction between Society and Everybody Else. Personal connections were everything: one sought to "gain an introduction" to persons of influence or prestige. One's personal appearance, comportment, and demeanor were of utmost importance. The art of conversation was assiduously cultivated. Why? Because there were only sixteen million people in Great Britain, and roughly 750,000 in London! That's twice the size of Pittsburgh and roughly the same size as Philadelphia today -- not very much when you consider that it contained all the society worth knowing in Great Britain. It was possible to know everybody. Human culture during the millenia leading up to the post-industrial age was built around conversation and personal contacts, as is only possible given a limited number of important people. In the mid-late 18th century there were 16 millions in Great Britain -- the equivalent of Pennsylvania. There were 28 millions in France -- the equivalent of New York State. It was possible to know personally everyone in your field and related fields. A very similar situation existed at all times until very recently. The majority of the knowledge of mankind was produced under such conditions.
As late as 1917, Velimir Khlebnikov, the Russian futurist poet (1887-1923) fantasized about a world in which there was a giant screen in every village, on which the news was projected by radio waves, and then later in the day perhaps concerts and dramatic readings would be provided, so that all would have access to the very best culture. To us today, such a proposal is hard to comprehend and smacks of totalitarianism. Provide the common people with only one channel of information, necessarily controlled by a central authority? However, Khlebnikov had no such intention. There simply wasn't enough culture at the time to fill up more than one channel. There were too few creators at work.
What might it mean to replicate in quantity -- to double -- all of the science, art, and philosophy of mankind, in our generation? There may be a limited number of cultural themes and endless variations, in which case our task would be to catalog them (identifying any obvious gaps and then seeking to fill them, in a manner reminiscent of Mendeleev's creation of the periodic table of the elements) and distinguish the essential form from the local facade. David Hume, for instance, a contemporary of Boswell and Johnson (and, despite the fact that he kept many of his views quiet during his lifetime, to escape the sort of response that the experimental chemist Joseph Boyle, for example, experienced -- word got out that he disbelieved in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and a mob burnt his house) replicated the Buddha's arguments for the doctrine of anatta (the illusory nature of the individual personality). It may be that human knowledge will be doubled when it is discovered how to put the existing, already redundant knowledge into practice.