Lots of conversations recently have been leading me back to a series of nagging definitional questions about cultural endeavor:
- What defines art from entertainment?
- What determines whether a work is ‘independent’ or not?
- When does an artist or artwork move from being an increasingly popular individual voice to an audience-pandering sell-out?
These are not questions of absolute fact, but of social decision-making. Individuals and groups make these decisions every day as they assess their world and the creative individuals within it. And yet we rarely stop to assess the measures by which we’re deciding.
It’s not just an issue in the arts. Any communications movement seems to undergo the same struggle between purity and popularity. A current case in point is weblogging (the massive network of independently written on-line journals, like this one). Here’s how Clay Shirky describes the trend in his own wonderful work:
A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we’ve seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.
But Shirky goes on to suggest that our reflexes for explaining the causes for that movement are way off:
Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.
The seemingly bizarre distribution of attention, power, and resources we see (in popular music, among film stars, in web traffic patterns, and even among cultural nonprofits) may not be bizarre at all, but just a natural function of diversity and freedom of choice — two attributes we usually run up the flagpole as systemic goals.
In another interesting twist, Shirky’s assessment implies that our usual remedies for the inequity (fostering more diversity of expression and more access for arts audiences) are actually the engines that make the inequity worse.
Of course, this realization doesn’t answer any of the questions above, but it does set them in an interesting context. We clearly have an embedded assumption that once something is popular, it can’t be artistic or independent. Yet, popularity is an outcome out of the creator’s control, and the seemingly unfair distribution of that popularity is really just a natural function of a complex social system.
It might be more useful not to base our ‘art or commerce’ decisions on the size of the audience an artist or work attracts. Instead, the creator or creative team’s intent (although still slippery and unmeasurable) might be a better way to start. As Stephen Sondheim explains in this recent interview in the U.K.’s Telegraph:
”When you write a show, you don’t really think about attracting audiences. You can’t either write down to them or up to them, you just have to tell the story and hope that they’re interested in the story the way you are and in the way you tell it. And if they’re not, there’s nothing you can do anyway.”
