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.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by malbonster: Just blogged about agencies, sharing, Shirky & disruption >> “The Kingdom of Awesome” http://bit.ly/c7eqlP…

great blog post and totally to the point.

I like to compare advertising agencies with the principal/agent theory. In the past you needed structures and teams to fully leverage your potential as a geek but nowadays thanks to sharing, openness and networks big agencies are just slow, expensive & inflexible.

It’s time for a revolution and the whole executive board of the networks has no clue that they are today not just competing with other networks but also with small start ups and groups of individuals that for project teams.

As also Jeff Jarvis mentions in his book, there was never a more interesting time to be in advertising then now, because it won’t be the same anymore and you can be part of the change.

Keep on doing awesomeness

Steff