the american artist, “like the memory registers of certain computer systems.”
Ralph Ellison, 1982.
Thus, the ideal level of sensibility to which the American artist would address himself tends to transcend the lines of class, religion, race—floating, as it were, free in the crowd. There, like the memory registers of certain computer systems, it is simultaneously accessible at any point in American society.
— Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience,” 1978
