Something about Art

Paulina Borsook

loris@well.sf.ca.us

I write fiction as well as non-fiction, and was alarmed when I found out one of my published short-stories, the novella "Love Over The Wires," that had appeared in "Wired," had been made available post- publication on the "Wired" site on the Net. I couldn't figure out my reaction --- after all, the journalism I've cranked out has been available for years on zillions of electronic databases that I probably couldn't even afford to access myself; my reporting has been reprinted and sold to other publications than the ones I originally wrote it for, without my permission; stuff with my byline has been made part of reading-material packets by those who make money by teaching in the what-should-I-do-with-the-rest-of-my-life adult-ed market. I shrug all this off.

But news of the net-version of my fiction provoked deep feelings of proprietaryness and violation --- and I couldn't figure out why. Its digital reincarnation disturbed me mightily. Other friends in the art world shared my upset, but they couldn't articulate what the Big Deal was, either.

Rationally, I knew folks could Xerox the print-pages where the story, or any of my other stories, had first appeared. And I still held the copyright: if Robert Altman wanted the screen rights, he'd clearly still have to bicker with me.

And I know pioneer network-thinkers like Ted Nelson envisage an ideal universe where anyone can be a publisher/information provider that anyone can contract to buy from off the net, once proper net-billing mechanisms get in place. There are massive intellectual property-copyright battles going on, both in the courts and in the minds of cyberthinkers. I even sympathize with the National Writer's Union, which has a test-case class-action suit going against several publishers who sold off secondary electronic rights of authors' works without giving those authors additional royalties.

But legal precedent is not the issue here; the concern is with how people think and feel about art, and not with the reworking of the machinery of commerce. There is a difference, between fiction and reporting, art and information. At least in the Western World (and after the age of the cathedrals), art is very much tied up with the cult of the individual. Context, provenance, authentication: these all matter not just to insure the tidiness of the art market, but to help see and understand the work itself. And if someone makes art --- bothers to go through with the foolish, unrenumerative, self-referential, and beautifully useless act of creation --- composing the song, painting the painting, writing the novel, then she is asserting her own blow against entropy and chaos. The imagined universe of a work of art is precisely an artist's SimCity --- and to have control loosened over that universe strikes deeply against what art has come to mean.

Painters care how their paintings are framed and hung; writers choose what magazines they want to submit their work to. Once, through the wonders of digitization, art becomes unmoored, released from the artist's environmental controls --- something gets lost from the aesthetic calculii. A group of artists in New York in the 1970s began to assert permanent copyrights over their art, even after the works had been sold --- as much because they wanted a say in how their works were reproduced as for any monetary benefit. Think of how covers of songs performed by bar-bands can make you laugh, while the original, straight from the exactitudes of the arranger and the sound-engineer, made you want to dance; think of the vogue of movies rereleased with director's cuts. There's something fundamentally appealing about preserving the artist's original vision, unrevised.

And in my case, when I'd heard from a woman teaching my story in her freshman comp class, I was dismayed to see, from the student comments she forwarded to me, that my readers had gotten lost in who was addressing who, in the piece's email dialogues.

One character was poetic, and her email read as such. I had labored over her line breaks, and she wrote, a la e.e. cummings, with no capital letters. The art director at "Wired" honored the idiosyncratic way I'd laid her words out on the page, taking care that the story's layout preserved her proto-poetry- making. The story's other main character wrote straight-ahead business prose; his paragraphing would have done a wire-service reporter proud.

Photocopying, an older and analog technology, retains at least what computer folks refer to as look and feel; there can be no such guarantees for online reproductions, particularly of texts --- at least until imaging technology gets a whole lot better and a whole lot more common.

And while all fiction doesn't rely on the conventions of concrete poetry, nonetheless there was a message here: what I realized is that these layers of cues, the visual as well as the verbal, were in danger of being lost through the translation into bits. Communication works precisely because redundancy is built into it, a truism most commonly understood when a tone of voice and a facial expression expand and clarify the sense of the written word. And no one in the world, no artist, no lover, ever does anything for just one reason (how the words arrayed on the page mattered, even as their sense mattered). But this richness of semantic redundancy is in danger of being lost when art turns into bits.

The German literary critic Walter Benjamin in his essay "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" posited that art, which started out in the realm of sacred, still filled people with awe --- until the mechanical reproduction of works of art, pictures of the Mona Lisa available to anyone for the price of a postcard, killed that awe. His view was too simple, as anyone who has ever had a numinous encounter with a painting in person after seeing it first in reproduction, will concur. But he was onto something with the idea that art inspires a special kind of reaction, can move us deeply in ways we don't really understand. The furor over Bill Gates' Continuum multimedia company snarfing up exclusive electronic rights from museum collections tapped right into human art-atavism: museums were uncomfortable not knowing how their holdings would be used. No one really knows the values of these rights, so it was nervous-making to sign them away. But maybe it's that no one really knows how to conflate the primordial respect for whatever art is, with the reality of the digital metaverse.

Art is not information; information easily can become outdated. Part of what appeals to us about art is that it can last and last: unless we are historians or specialists, we care far more about Etruscan sculpture than Sumerian cuneiform. Yet once art goes digital, it can be transposed, replicated, messed with in any old way --- its permanence comes into question. Keats' sappy "Endymion" has the treacley lines in it --- 'a thing of beauty is a joy forever' --- meaning, I think, that life is short and art is long.

And until some means gets developed to protect this peculiar singularity of art, that distinguishes it from all the other content that's getting turned into ones and zeroes, the queasiness will abide. Imagine a world where the metaphor of colorization could be applied to any work of art. All those lawsuits over musicians who sample without authorization is not just about money --- they are in part about recognizing that a work of art has a distinctive signature that custom honors.

It's true that artists like Warhol and Kostabi with merriment or cynicism knock the whole concept of the artist's signature on its head --- their workshops are freely acknowledged as mass-production factories --- but even here, the artists themselves set up the factory. It's the way they chose to create their art, as anti-art-establishment and as mercenary as it may be. While spoofing the piety of the artist's individual imprint, they are also paying homage to it: only true believers blaspheme.

Post-Modernism has it that everything is appropriation, palimpsest, redux; that art is only what the ruling hegemony says is art. But I think not. There remains something of Kant's notion of art being that has universal subjective validity --- a form, somehow, that triggers Art-Alert pattern- recognizing neurotransmitters. Edvard Munch demonstrated this in his attraction to Japanese woodcuts. It's evident in a Seattle technical writer's romance with the music of Mali. We know Art when we see it --- and we don't necessarily want it to be morphable. If it can become anything, be changed by anyone, be presented in any format, then what's its point? Remember that's it's not been demonstrated that anyone -wants- to interact with movies.

Art created for the Net, designed up front to be mostly a meme, to be passed around and duplicated, may turn out to be a different kind of beast. Yet for now, Art is not information, in that I am not sure it wants to be free --- freely duplicable, free to be transformed in any of the ways computers can change any image, text, or sound. And I remain uneasy, knowing that "Love Over The Wires," created for print, is available online.

San Francisco writer Paulina Borsook (loris@well.sf.ca.us) has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She is "Wired" magazine's only regular feminist/humanist/luddite/skeptic contributor.

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