David Peat

98 From Certainty to Uncertaintyuncertainty. This lack of fixed strategies means that there are moreways to explore the world and that we must therefore exercise a deepersense of the responsibility that goes along with this freedom.This lack of certainty may be one of the reasons why ours is not anage of great art and literature. There are no all-encompassing statementsto make or great contemporary myths to relate. Our world lacksthe sense of confidence and certainty necessary for a Bach or aMichelangelo. In a period of transition, when everything is open toquestion, our greatest creativity may lie not so much in producingworks of art as in building new social structures and more stable andsustainable relationships to the natural world. It is only after this periodhas passed, a period that may last well into the twenty-first century,that a new context will be created, one in which new myths andnew artistic endeavors are possible.PaintingChanges in the way we see the world are also evidence of changes inhuman consciousness. This is most easily seen by looking at paintings,particularly those of different cultures or those made centuries ago.They are an important way of discovering how different people structuretheir world. Today we have the additional benefits of photography,film, and television. After all, who under the age of 50 can imaginewhat it was like to live in a world of black and white pictures and movienewsreels? Looking at films made in the 1930s, with their home interiors,clothing, big cars, soda fountains, and small-town life, we see aprofoundly different world. It is a world that seems grainier, morestarkly etched, more direct and simple. By contrast, in contemporarycinema it is increasingly difficult to detect what is real and what hasbeen constructed by computers and postproduction processing. Whereonce “seeing was believing” today we can no longer be sure of the actualityof a TV news clip or newspaper photograph. 11In fact, in some of the great classical photographs of the past all is not what itseems. Robert Doisneau’s famous image of two lovers kissing was posed, as was thatof a young woman walking past wolf-whistling Italians. St. Mark’s Campanile, appar-