Image & Consciousness: The Collective
Artists have always been seen as visionaries within a culture. This is usually described as artists having a thumb on the pulse of the current collective condition. Artists are said to be able to create tangible expressions of the underlying awareness of the society.
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Somewhat like the argument of the chicken and the egg, it is hard to say whether the imagery was "predicting" the future scientific discovery, readying the culture for the coming shift, or if in fact the imagery, as a focal point first of the artist and second by the culture who viewed it, was actually the cause of the shift and scientific "discovery".
By the theory of "the hundredth monkey", it is not even necessary for others to view the art for the shift in the collective culture to be manifest. A shift in the awareness of one individual creates a shift in the whole web of life.
In my own experience I have found that "and" is usually a more accurate parameter than "or" for these kinds of questions.
If an individual is the microcosm of the collective macrocosm, then it stands to reason that what is true of the one is true of the group as well, and vice versa. I believe that artists throughout time have served both of the above functions for themselves and for society as a whole.
It is interesting to live in a time when images and artists are not valued as a necessary part of daily life, but rather, as "luxuries" or "non-necessities". This must be because the role of artists and images in everyone's experience is largely misunderstood. Although many have valued images throughout history enough to pay great sums of money and collect and preserve them, perhaps they have not understood the deeper value that images hold. Or perhaps, at a deeper level than their individual awareness, the value of images has been understood by the culture/species at large, and that is precisely why these images have been kept for future generations, no matter what the individual collectors' intentions were. As more and more individuals become aware of the impact of images in their lives, then the culture can more consciously benefit as a whole from artists and the service they provide as image-makers, as society-shapers, and as researchers, in their own unique way.
1997