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.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.