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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

is there some doubt about the existence of authors?

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.