That's actually a pretty good articulation of what I've seen within the musician community as well. It's a view that's slowly dying down with newer generations I feel like, but there does seem to be this sort of fear around technology devoiding them of 'humanity', and thus their creativity, which is the most treasured thing you can possibly have as an artist. I've seen similar resistance towards learning music theory and writing things down[1] within some musician circles as well, which tangentially stems from this. Makes artists seem paradoxically conservative in a way, but I think the logic makes sense even if I don't agree with it.

[1] Jazz is a good example of this; usually they only have bare-bones lead sheets (musical skeletons/outlines of sorts) to go off of, due to the genre's unique improvisational nature. And in a different realm of music, Lil' Wayne never wrote down any of his lyrics during the prolific stages of his career either. So there something to be said about such things possibly helping creativity; and if something as simple as writing stuff down could be interpreted as 'hindering' creativity, then complex technology usage can surely be interpreted that way too. Sometimes the best way to squeeze out creativity is to impose some restraints on yourself, so it's not all that surprising.

Music really varies in my experience. Even in jazz, while there are many folks with no interest in technology, you've also got those like Sun Ra, who was keenly interested in incorporating new electronic stuff, to the extent of working directly with Robert Moog to get his hands on early synthesizers. And some musicians' careers are entirely based around technological experimentation and developing their own tech, whether it's bands like Einstürzende Neubauten or composers like Iannis Xenakis.

Totally. It all really seems to be about what value proposition the technology holds with regards to an artist's creativity. Some people see a synthesizer and view it as a tool to finally express some of the sounds they've been kicking around in their heads, while others might see it as diluting the craftsmanship of the instrumentation they already have. And like I said, some people see restraints as a bigger boost to creativity than others.

It's interesting though, because adoption of technology doesn't seem to be much of a big deal at all on the recording side of things. Very few are the musicians that wouldn't be interested in learning how to use a complex DAW with tons of fancy plugins nowadays...

Or are painter-coders simply designer/developers?

I know plenty of people who are comfortable with hand drawing, perhaps even painting, computer assisted drawing and design, and code. I also know people who are squarely one (painter or the other (coder).

In the past would these people have been engineer-painters? There were certainly a few of those, with Leonardo da Vinci top of the list.

I'd love to pick up a book that deals with this issue: why and when painters - and more generally artists - have come to adopt this anti-technological outlook.

Was it a fear that the pervasiveness of technology would make their craft(s) obsolete?

This sort of thinking is rife even within artistic circles.

Artists whose medium is photography are like the ugly lepers of the visual art world.

I find this anti-technological bent in modern Western cultural life particularly unsettling.

Don't take what I'm saying to an extreme; I have nothing against consumable art in its many forms.

However I think the cultural life of cities in the West - in its various forms (art, theatre, cinema, classical music, architecture) are ruled by cohorts who wholly constitute the anti-technological fringe.

They live for abstraction and something about that makes them virulently anti-technological.

Suggest a book or essay that addresses this issue in great depth.

I don't think artists as a whole have a particular aversion to technology, unless you specifically define art to exclude all the technologically influenced art, in which case it becomes true by construction.

There are huge areas of art based on strong engagement with technology, and art/tech crossover types who write code and build stuff as part of making their artworks are the norm in those. Areas like new-media art, electroacoustic music, cybernetic sculpture, etc. basically require crossover, and they are definitely more vibrant scenes these days than oil-paint-on-canvas is. This journal's been around since 1968: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_%28journal%29. Some miscellaneous people whose work is interesting in that vein: Julian Oliver, Roy Ascott, Toshio Iwai, Edward Ihnatowicz, Nam June Paik, Cory Arcangel. More examples (tilted towards recent stuff) can be found in this online database: http://rhizome.org/artbase/

Computer-music is particularly well established, with 5-6 journals and numerous conferences and exhibitions, as well as centers like IRCAM and CCRMA. I think actually if you take well-known post-WW2 composers, a substantial proportion come out of the tech-crossover angle, folks like Steve Reich (tape loops) and Iannis Xenakis (digital synthesis, granular synthesis).

Of course, there are areas of art that don't care about technology either. And they're somewhat overrepresented in the establishment "cultural life of cities in the West", because that tends to take a very conservative, backwards-looking view. It's all about upper-middle-class people taking in high culture as it existed in the 1920s and earlier: classical music, paintings from the great masters, Renaissance sculpture, the standard repertoire of operas, etc.

The areas of composite art you mention hardly have a fraction of the sweeping brushstroke of influence and the ability to impress upon society, certain mores and affectations that the more established forms of art (that you refer to in the last line) have.

It is by no means an exaggeration to say that most people who patronize art in cities and wealthy donors who lavish large sums on money on museums, opera venues, orchestras and various other ventures that promote art, probably have never heard of the crossover types you mention.

Hence it is fair to say that these newer art forms barely register in terms of their influence on the popular mood of the culture of a city much less a nation.

It is no secret that berating the ills of technology is Hollywood's favorite past time.

From Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Terminator to the recent Prometheus and a million flicks between them portray in no ambiguous terms the banes of unchecked technological advancements.

Ignore that for a moment.

The scuttling of technology, even when it could greatly aid and enable a better experience, can be seen in sports as well.

FIFA is a notorious luddite. They act as if the soccer gods will strike with lightning if they so much use an instant-replay.

The overlords at the French Open won't even touch Hawkeye with a ten foot pole. Players have to resort to pointing to where the ball left an impression on the clay to argue for a point that could decide their fate.

I only know of the NHL that embraces an uncommonly high amount of technology to make better ruling decisions. Every goal of every game is reviewed remotely in Toronto just to be sure. Offside calls and a host of other decisions are still handled by a couple of on-ice referees.

All said this technology-hating nonsense and the morons who advocate such superstitious dogma are everywhere.

I pray for the day when this bullshit will be called for what it really is - a form of a hate crime, an intolerance of reason and utility.

Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is about exactly this. Some random quotes:

"The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."

“We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.”

“This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.”

“The way to solve the conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barrier of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is – not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both. When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first airplane flight across the ocean or the first footsteps on the moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in one's own life, in a less dramatic way.”