1959
since [the advent of] printing it has been the poets and painters who have explored and predicted the various possibilities of print, press, telegraph, photograph, movie, radio, and television. In recent decades the arrival of several new media has led to prodigious experimentation in the arts. But, at present, the artists have yielded to the media themselves. Experimentation has passed from the control of the private artist to the groups in charge of the new technologies. Whereas in the past the individual artist, manipulating private and inexpensive materials, was able to shape models of new experience years ahead of the public, today the artist works with expensive public technology, and artist and public merge in a single experience. The new media need the best artist talent and can pay for it. But the artist can no longer provide years of advance  awareness of developments in the patterns of human experience which will inevitably emerge from new technological development. (Electronics and the Changing Role of Print)