Can there ever be an online masterpiece?
One of the SXSW sessions I attended today was the Ze Frank session on the ‘creative lifestyle’. I found it a bit pointless, really. It appeared to be a love-in between Frank and a room full of his fans. But it did get me thinking about art and the internet.
The examples of Frank’s work left me unimpressed. I find them whimsical, disposable and inconsequential. I can see how they would provide some moments of entertainment, but this isn’t what I’m interested in. As I get older, I find myself more and more interested in identifying things that I can safely ignore and getting rid of them for good. My goal is to spend an extremely high percentage of my time on what I would like to call masterpieces.
I realise that this puts me in a minority, but it’s something I’d like to explore here for a little while. Please understand that I’m not opposed to entertainment; it’s just something I’m not interested in. No pejorative judgement is implied if you like entertainment.Simon challenged me to define what I mean by a ‘masterpiece’. I came up with three identifiers:
- A work that will survive for generations to come, and that stands outside the time it was created in
- A work that, without which, one cannot understand the time in which it was created
- A work that we cannot imagine not existing, and without which our world is inconceivable (Hamlet or The Odyssey would be good examples here).
An extremely non-exhaustive list examples of works that I would class as a masterpiece:
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner
- Symphony No 9 by Gustav Mahler
- Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso
- The Wire by David Simon, et al (somewhat early days on this one)
As I was thinking of these works, a thought occurred to me: is it possible to conceive of a work of this stature being created on and distributed on the the web?
What I mean by this is: not an e-book, or a video, or an existing form; rather, I mean a new form, that could only exist on the web, in the way that, say, Ulysses is only conceivable given the existence of the printing press. A new, durable form that can only exist on the web or a successor technology.
I think durability is the big problem here. I think it’s possible to imagine the great majority of the content of the web simply disappearing in only a few years. I don’t see a technology that would help solve this problem at the moment.
But is there a bigger problem? Is the web itself hostile to the idea of art, to the idea of the masterpiece? We coo with satisfaction at the latest piece of whimsy on the web (one of Frank’s projects, Young Me / Now Me would qualify here), and move on to the next thing. Is it possible to imagine a work that took years to make, that makes a genuine attempt to understand what Kundera has called a ‘human possibility’, rather than something that is designed to entertain us for a few minutes?
I’m not optimistic that it is possible, but I’d love to be wrong.
About the author
James is a Creative Technologist at Made by Many. He is a reformed .NET developer.
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Comments (14)
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Responses (0)
Nice thoughts. The internet itself is obviously just the distribution mechanism but focusing on the web (via a browser?) I think I’m in agreement with you. Aside from the debatable example of 3d cinema, all the masterpieces I can think of come from a static medium. The constant evolution of the web means that norms and standards probably won’t emerge and any innovative/skilled work will be judged in that evolution rather than on its own terms
Simon
March 14, 2010
at 12:40 am
Interesting thoughts on something I think (i.e. worry) about a lot too. My feeling is that there must be enough of us yearning this way that someone will eventually pull it off.
Brian Frank
March 14, 2010
at 5:36 am
A series of connected responses, though not a complete argument:
The processes of social interaction and artistic creation which are emerging in the internet age — characterised by fluidity, ephemerality, deconstruction, participation, uncertainty, subjectivity — are themselves antithetical to the antiquated concept of a “masterpiece”.
In order to have “masterpieces” it is necessary to have audience who wish to create them. The nearest thing web culture offers is a proliferation of diverse “top ten” lists. The polyvocality of the web also opposes the creation of “masterpieces”, which, more often than not, rely on established critical authority in order to gain cultural momentum.
The “masterpiece” belongs to a past age. We don’t need them any more.
It is no coincidence that all the auteurs of your chosen “masterpieces” are male. If I were being facetious, and maybe I am, I’d point out that it’s in the very name.
What singles the web out as a medium is its ability to facilitate and make transparent the processes of collective authorship. The idea of what a “masterpiece” can be — currently still hampered by the concept of the single (male) auteur — would have to be substantially revised if you want to create one online.
It took at least 200 years before Hamlet was considered a masterpiece, after decades in which Shakespeare was considered largely to be a skilled but insubstantial populist. The [d/r]eification of Shakespeare began in C18th, gained more and more momentum over the next century, until by the Romantic era we have Thomas Carlyle reaching the heights of criticual absurdity: “does not he shine, in crowned sovereignty, over us all, as the noblest, gentlest, yet strongest of rallying signs; indestructible”.
Nothing is indestructible. Not even Wikipedia (surely the best candidate for a masterpiece of the web age?)
200 years for Shakespeare. Less than 10 for The Wire?
This is not to say that the web age cannot produce great art, or that great art isn’t important. But we are here, online, alive, to celebrate the transitory, the processual — the changeability and multiplicity of life — the moving forward — the excitement of the new — optimism. We are not here to calcify works and kill them through critical consensus. We are here to move.
Harry Giles
March 14, 2010
at 10:13 am
Thanks Harry. I certainly made no pretence that these were completed thoughts!
We obviously completely disagree (or maybe not; I’ll come onto that). I do not believe that the masterpiece is an antiquated notion, rather that it is a modern one (you make this point for me with your remarks about Shakespeare). J.S. Bach is another great example of masters who were forgotten for a period of time before excessively zealous rediscovery. There can be obscure masterpieces; I don’t see how that weakens my argument.
I love wikipedia but it fails my tests for two reasons. First, it is not a work of art, but rather an attempt to be as objective as possible about the world. (Or, let’s put it this way, if it is art then we need a new word to describe the kind of thing I’m taking about. If the word Art is to be useful at all, there must be some things that are not art. By my definition, wikipedia isn’t.) Second it is not a new genre, but rather an online version of an offline one. It seems obvious that an online encyclopaedia is better than an offline one for many reasons, but it isn’t a fundamentally different thing.
Of course I know that ‘auteur theory’ (I never understood why we say ‘theory’ – is there some doubt about the existence of authors?) is not fashionable. It’s not fashionable because it makes it difficult to repudiate the past and shows how we have failed to live up to it in the present. Rather than trying to find ways to learn from, emulate and surpass our masters, we find ways to deny them entirely. Mistresses too – your point there is well made, but these are just my own masters – a great many British literary people would include Jane Austen and George Eliot and probably Virginia Woolf too (of these, I’d probably say Woolf came the closest to writing a masterpiece in Mrs Dalloway, but for me, despite its pleasures, it’s still a pale imitation of Ulysses).
I think that the single controlling intelligence is still a vital component in making works of art of any kind, and certainly in making masterpieces ( I guess that’s by definition). A masterpiece is a highly controlled piece of work, and atomic. I would be astonished to see the crowd produce anything other than a mid-brown after relentlessly squeezing out every tube of paint.
Ultimately, I think you make my argument for me:
In other words, we are here in ignorance and denial of the masterpiece, and the medium itself is hostile to the idea of the masterpiece. Perhaps Kundera had it right when he said that we are at ‘midnight on the dial of European culture’. It’s certainly what I fear. That we would replace works like Ulysses with trivia, whimsy and self-publicism fills me with horror.
James Higgs
March 14, 2010
at 12:31 pm
Thanks for the response!
I think we are tending towards agreeing on the analysis (the mechanisms of the web are not conducive to the production of masterpieces), but disagreeing on how that should be valued. Crudely, you’re sorry to lose them, while I’m happy to move past them.
You’re quite right to pick up on “antiquated”. The masterpiece belongs to the modern age and not to antiquity (Homer only became a master much later, though the Athenian theatre competitions are an interesting case of the rise of the auteur ion a culture of community production). The thing is, as far as I’m concerned, we’ve moved well past the modern age and into the postmodern, if not beyond. Which of the many objectionable neologisms to describe this age (altermodern, transmodern, hypermoden . . . ) I am working in I’m not sure, but that seems to be where my analysis is placing itself. Your analysis reminds me very much of Alan Kirby’s in The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond — he refers to this age as the pseudomodern or digimodern, and he certainly thinks that we are replacing “works like Ulysses with trivia, whimsy and self-publicism”. Bravo, sez I.
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I must say I’m rather astonished to hear someone writing on a blog called “Made By Many” that “a single controlling intelligence is still a vital component in making works of art of any kind”. If collaboration can produce great works of craft, then why not great works of art? That needs a weight of justification, I feel. Your choice of Homer is again a little problematic here: contemporary scholarship tends more and more to viewing the Odyssey as being authored largely collectively or by tradition.
Certainly, ever since Roland Barthes proclaimed their Death in 1977!
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I suspect you may find the art/craft distinction useful, considering your analysis of Wikipedia. I’m not a fan of the distinction myself (when was the idea of art invented and separated from craft? I’m not sure, but it’s relatively recent), but there it is. I notice you’re referencing a definition of art without having made one; good luck with that! I don’t know of any 20th century philosopher who’s had much success making one. I think that a useful approach to understanding our concepts of art may be through Wittgensteinian “family resemblances”: you say Wikipedia isn’t art because its form doesn’t much feel very similar to the forms of other things you call art. But to my mind, it’s one of the greatest works of literature ever created.
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Finally: “midnight on the dial of European culture”? Certainly. But there’s that recognition of the cultural specificity of the idea of “masterpiece” — it’s an idea that’s been used by a small minority of the world’s population for a tiny proportion of its life. I’m not sure it’s particularly useful to the glocalised [stet.] world we’re now living in. I certainly wouldn’t like to see that rapacious culture dominating any more than it already does.
Harry Giles
March 14, 2010
at 5:41 pm
Thanks again for your detailed response.
There’s much food for thought there, but I think your analysis is correct: we agree that online masterpieces are not possible, but disagree about whether this is a problem. I may compose my thoughts into a second post on this.
Meanwhile, Bathes. Oh shit. Not even the most foaming at the mouth literary theorist could possibly deny the actual physical existence of the human who creates the work. I know you know that, and I know that you know that’s not what Bathes was saying. He wanted to deny the author their authority to control the work once it had been published. Surely the post-modern novel is a reaction to this, in that the author is even more visible in post-modern works (Rushdie, Calvino, etc).
James Higgs
March 14, 2010
at 7:51 pm
Yes, there can be online masterpieces. I don’t quite understand your argument that there couldn’t be.
Before I get to why, though, I want to quibble with one of your assertions about wikipedia. I agree with you, it is not art (Harry has a fairly wide and hard-to-interpret opinion about what consitutes ‘Art’); it is more like ‘infomatics’. But it is a necessarily-online medium. It is utterly different from a traditional encyclopedia, which is generally made up of a set of articles authored by individual ‘experts’, or small groups of the same, edited by a similarly limited group of people and then published at a particular date, and remains unchanged from there. Wikipedia is dynamic; its aim is to reach Truth through collaboration — and according to the Experts, it does an astonishingly good job at it.
This brings me to my main counter-argument: that interactivity is the key component for new media that are necessarily web-based, and have the potential to be masterpieces. The web is exploding with interactive fictions, games, etc. (though, admittedly, many of these games could exist offline, and only be much harder to distribute — but I assert that the same could be said of Ulysses and the printing press). Nor do interactive media need to be considered multiply-authored; they are merely multiply-experiencable.
This is not to say, of course, that any of the currently-existing online games or interactive fictions actually are masterpieces (though I know some who would put forward a few candidates for the title), but that they could be. After all, the genre is only a few years old. How long did television exist, before it started to produce what you would call ‘masterpieces’?
…For that matter, how much can single-authorship be held up as a qualifying criterion if such inherently collaborative artforms as television shows are included, anyway?
Molly
March 14, 2010
at 7:09 pm
Thanks, Molly.
I was careful to say ‘a single controlling intelligence’ rather than literally a single author. As I understand it, David Simon is unquestionably the author of The Wire even though it was, of course, also a massive collaboration.
I disagree entirely that Ulysses could exist without the printing press. I think it’s literally inconceivable that it could have been written without it. It couldn’t exist without Tristram Shandy or Gargantua and Pantagruel or Don Quixote each of which were only possible themselves because of the printing press. The printing press made the modern novel possible every bit as much as Cervantes did.
You are right to call me on Wikipedia. It is indeed inconceivable without the web. But it certainly is not a work or art by any meaningful definition of that word.
James Higgs
March 14, 2010
at 7:39 pm
The internet is, no doubt, already full of masterpieces awaiting approval by a later generation. If we step back, we could simply call the Internet itself, a masterpiece. Truly original and unlike anything before it. If the internet was music, we are learning to listen. If the internet was art we are learning to paint. A masterpiece is inevitable.
Peter
March 14, 2010
at 7:45 pm
Totally disagree. The internet is not a masterpiece of the same order as any of the works I cite. To apply Wittgenstein’s family resemblance terms as Harry suggests, there are no resemblances. The web is brilliant, I love it and it has brought about enormous change. But it is not a work of art. Unless, as I’ve said before, we define the word art so broadly that it ceases to have any practical meaning at all. In which case we just need a new word.
James Higgs
March 14, 2010
at 7:56 pm
Your view is simply dated. Although your inclusion of the wire is encouraging especially the et Al part. This suggests that a masterpiece can be created by more than one. The internet is a true masterpiece but in a wholly new way. It is not defined by an individual. We may be able to pluck an single piece and say this is good. But the Monster that is the whole is far more beguiling than any of the examples you suggest.
Peter
March 14, 2010
at 8:21 pm
The internet more beguiling than Tristan or Ulysses? There’s no way for us to agree on anything if our views are that far apart.
James Higgs
March 14, 2010
at 8:28 pm
agreement apart, I feel my argument meets the three identifiers you suggest. It is still only an infant. It’s best work is still to come.
Peter
March 14, 2010
at 8:45 pm
Your MBM colleague Elin Sjursen tweeted this url to me over the weekend, but I’ve been onstage nonstop and so join the conversation a little late.
On the one hand, your criteria for “masterpiece” might be a little bit too stringent for the time. You could argue, for example, that no visual artist since Picasso has created a masterpiece; Pollock’s important — so is Cindy Sherman — but we can surely imagine the late 20th century without them. Is there a novelist since Hemingway who is, in this sense, indispensable? A classical composer since Shostakovich? One shouldn’t ask online art to do what no one can achieve.
Conversely, I think it’s now safe to say that we have several hypertext fictions that essentially meet your standard. Michael Joyce’s _afternoon, a story_ and Shelley Jackson’s _Patchwork Girl_ are obvious candidates here. They’ve been the subject of many, many books and even more scholarship. They’re studied in colleges and universities throughout the world. If you were a candidate for a PhD in, say, new media, and it came out in your orals that you didn’t know _afternoon_ and its criticism, your committee might well send you back for more seasoning before granting your degree. And I don’t think you can really imagine a history of art in the late 20th century without the battle between late modernism and postmodernism, and no account of that conflict could properly omit literary hypertext, its champions and detractors.
I’d also single out for consideration an unusual candidate: George P. Landow’s _Context 32_, now know as The Victorian Web. http://victorianWeb.org/ Looking at it right now, one sees a very large and important scholarly compendium of what seems a familiar type; what one forgets is that this was originally done in *1986* and that it’s migrated through generations of hypertext systems from Intermedia to Storyspace to various Web formalism. This migration is also the answer to the apparent fragility of digital work: digital literature is easy to preserve, provided that people remain interested in reading it. In today’s world, that’s all we can say for print.
Mark Bernstein
March 15, 2010
at 4:52 pm