Something about Art

Somethingabout Art Iwrite fiction as well as nonfiction, and was alarmed when I found out that one of my published short stories, the novella “LoveOver The Wires”that had appeared in Wiredmagazine [13, had been made availablepost-publication on the Wired site on the Internet. I was unable to figure out my reaction-after all, the journalism I have produced has been available for years on countless electronic databases that I probably could not even afford to access myself;my reporting has been reprinted and sold to publications other than the ones I originally wrote it for without my permission; and work 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-education market. I shrug all this off. But news of the Internet version of my fiction provoked deep feelings of proprietaryness and violation-and I did not know why Its digital reincarnation disturbed me mightily. Other friends in the art world shared my upset, but they were no more capable than I was of articulating what was wrong. Rationally,I knew people could photocopy the print pages where the story, or any of my other stories, had first appeared. And I still held the copyright; if film director Robert Altman wanted the screenrights, he would clearly still have to bicker with me. I know pioneer network thinkers such as Ted Nelson envisage an ideal universe where anyone can be a publisher/information provider and that anyone else can contract to buy material from any provider through the Internet once proper net-billing mechanisms are in place. I am aware of the 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 machineries of commerce. There is a difference between fiction and reporting, between art and information. At least in the Western world (since the cathedral age),art is very much tied up with the cult of the individual. Context, provenance, authentication: all of these matter notjust to insure the tidyness of the art market, but to help one see and understand the work itself. If someone makes art-bothers to go through with the foolish, unremunerative, self-referential and beautifully useless act of creation by composing a song, painting a painting or writing a 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 simulated world-and to loosen control over that universe strikes deeply against what art has come to mean. Painters care about 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 calculi. 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 versions of familiar songs as performed by amateurish bands can make one laugh, while the originals-straight from the exactitudes of the arranger and the sound engineer-made one want to dance; think of the vogue of releasing the director’s cuts of previously released movies. There is something fundamentally appealing about preserving the artist’s original vision, unrevised. 164 LEONARDO,Vol. 30,No. 2, pp. 164-166, 1997 0 1997 BAST In my case, after hearing from a woman teaching my story in her freshman English composition class, I was dismayed to see, from the student comments she forwarded to me, that my readers had gotten lost in trying to...