MySpace

A couple months ago, before my last relapse and subsequent progress towards recovery, I wrote an essay published here entitled Art in the Cloud. While it contained the germs of several important ideas in whose merit I strongly believe, it also suffered several major shortcomings. Some people complained of the essay's vagueness, unsure of what tangible things I was advocating. Others outright dismissed the entire essay, suggesting that it was merely a collection of pompous declarations. A few people criticized the essay, suggesting that people do not want a more 'robust' connection to artists, they just want the music. Additionally, many asked of me, why should artists be sharing more information? Simply because they can?

Some of these points reflect a difference of opinion about what art is, can be, or should be and how it ought to be shared. Others more simply reflected my inability to write coherently at the time, my failure to clearly articulate my arguments. Hopefully now, after some time to reflect, and with greater brain capacity I will be better up to the task.

First, I would like to address my subject matter. I had intended to write solely on art, concentrating specifically on art music, as differentiated from entertainment. It was not, nor is it now within scope of the essay delve too deeply into the nature of this distinction, but it is important to establish, even if crudely, the subject matter at hand. I am fairly certain that there is no clear line that can be drawn, however it might be possible to articulate some of the qualities associated with art but not necessarily with entertainment.

My essay is concerned with art whose understanding goes deeper than simply the sensory experience of looking at it or listening to it. One can listen to a Britney Spears song, but there is not much to say about it beyond 'what it sounds like'. To the extent that there are deeper things to be said, they concern sociological phenomenon like the commodification of art as personal identity more than they concern engagement with an artistic tradition. Stravinsky's Firebird, on the other hand presents a creature whose understanding is greatly aided by knowledge of the harmonic structure, historical context, even simply by contemplating the elements of the work. I know that there is a continuum and do not cling to these distinctions dogmatically. However, it is works whose appreciation is skewed towards involving greater contemplation, knowledge, intelligence that I am addressing here.

What's the Point?

When I wrote Art in the Cloud, I had several nebulous points in mind, but failed to make any clear. Here I believe I can do better. Technology generally, but specifically the internet has reshaped our society. We are only first experiencing the consequential changes to the way information is shared, commerce is conducted, and intellectual property, if at all, is protected. I argue that these changes demand that artists change the nature of their interaction with the mass audience along several dimensions, and for several reasons. One is that the CD is nearly obsolete, and we no longer need to marry ourselves to its product cycle. Another cause for change, I believe, is that art ought to reflect the times in which it is created. As concerns these changes and the sharing of music, I believe most artists are embracing the crudest aspects of the new media, turning to Myspace to turn the sharing of music into an exercise in exhibitionist social networking, rather than taking cues from the open source movement and using the internet to share something more substantive than they ever could have without it.

First, concerning the compact disc. Just as the LP lifted constraints, allowing musicians to record longer songs, the internet too potentially changes the game, altering the dynamic between recording artist and audience. Still, few musicians have bothered to claim any degree of freedom from the product cycle of the CD. Many artists release individual tracks ahead of records on their Myspace pages. And many others post a track or two from live performances. But very few people have embraced the internet as the avenue of distribution, making it the primary focus, ahead of the album. To a large extent this is understandable; the product cycle of the CD provides a degree of structure that is useful and difficult to replace artificially. People regularly cling to vestiges of outmoded methods when they prove useful in the creative process. Writers regularly write distinct drafts even though computers allow for a continuous revision process. Still, I believe musicians collectively have yet to realize the potential to take ownership of the method of distribution. There are no longer any size, time, or logistical constraints in the distribution of music. More people can distribute more music on their own terms. Artists will have to turn their attention towards the creation of art to be distributed through the internet and not be so narrowly focused on the creating of albums and marketing them through the internet.

But in the scheme of things, this past point is minor when compared to the larger issue at hand. I was asked repeatedly, why must artists share more information, expose their process, just because the internet allows them to? I cannot honestly say that all artists must or will, but I feel confident in suggesting that many will, and that whether or not artists choose to participate in this new way of sharing information, it will necessarily be something that they will have to acknowledge. Art has always been reflective of its cultural surroundings. And when major technological shifts have altered cultures, they have always had multifaceted effects on artistic traditions, directly by altering the nature of the interaction of artist and audience, and indirectly by so radically altering the world that art must reflect these changes creatively. As concerns the internet, both these things are at play.

Above I briefly attempted to discuss one way in which the interaction between artist and audience has been altered. But there are others. By removing all logistical obstacles to the sharing of information, the internet not only makes it so that artists can share music in whatever quantities and at whatever times they want, but also allows them to share whatever text, video, and other supplementary information they want. As concerns an artist like John Coltrane, whose goal always seemed to be more to document a process than to produce a glowing nugget of perfection, the internet provides the ability to share all stages of the artistic process, all steps in thought and performance along a path. But still I haven't fully accounted for why it is that artists ought to expose the process to the audience, to their peers.

One of the internet's most notable effects across society has been the demystification of nearly everything. Our times are characterized by an unprecedented degree of transparency. Sure, an artist today can decide to ignore this, but even then, the decision in this climate to withhold transparency is a conscious rejection of what has become the norm, just as a college student must consciously decide not to join the Facebook. I do not suggest that artists should strive less for perfection, concentrating instead on the documentation of a process with no regard for where it leads. Rather, I contend that in a society characterized by open source software development and grand experiments in groupthink like Wikipedia, where embarrassing video exists of every politician in office and every teenager has immortalized some statement on a Livejournal that in years past might have ended a career, art no longer needs to maintain the illusion of perfection, of seemingly emerging from nowhere fully formed. I argue that the proper way to share art in times characterized by borderline exhibitionist transparency is to do it transparently. I have written a number of truly terrible essays on this web site, and will soon begin posting some truly terrible music as I attempt to swiftly rise towards a lofty goal while originating from a humble beginning. In the past, musicians were very careful about how they debuted, what information they shared, what the public was allowed to see. Today this runs contrary to the nature of our society.

Bart:

"You make some interesting observations and points, some I agree with, some I don't. I don't want to know what Trane studied 10 hours a day. I don't think the creative process must be laid bare for all to see. I think he who wants to know should work for the information, like students centuries ago going to monasteries to seek wisdom. Another thing is that I don't want to know everything about how things are made. It's a bit like the extras on a dvd. Knowing to much about how a movie is made can distract you (me) from what that movie is about. The problem is you don't know what information is helpful, and what info isn't."

Doug Wamble:

"Hard to get past the first paragraph, really. Your entire premise is kind of false. I think artists have been at the forefront of utilizing the internet. Where is the evidence for this "stiff resistance?""

"Besides all that, you're making these grand proclamations that aren't really based in anything specific. What is art music? What is boldness of concept? What is confrontational honesty? Do you just know it when you see it?"

Response:

First of all. Thanks for taking the time to attack my half-formed ideas. As I'm still not quite all together, I hope you'll forgive my approach of being somewhat deliberately provocative even when my arguments are not well-formed enough to support the conclusions.

Bart, concerning your idea that the extra information detracts from the whole, that's a very good argument and I have no great answer for it. In fact, I don't think that I want all art to become open in the way I'm suggesting. I think what I'm putting forth is more of a crude first stab at one particular view that I think will become more prominent as a consequence of the way technology is affecting the experience both of art and of life in general.

Secondly, Doug. I don't think that artists have been at the forefront of using the internet. I think if anyone, software developers, computer scientists are way ahead, granted they have an unfair advantage. The things happening in the open source movement are pretty remarkable. That said, I think you guys here (www.mydamnforum.net) are probably among the best examples of artists really taking advantage of technology. Perhaps not as portals for the public to access your individual art, but in the sense of information sharing.

Concerning confrontational honesty, boldness of concept, you are right, I have been horribly vague. These ideas need to be fleshed out. I should point out that they do not come from music. Rather, they come from what I perceive as general characteristics of communication through the internet.

People seem to be captivated by the quality of being exposed. Look at some of the blogs that have commanded millions of hits solely on the basis of the bareness with which people lay out their lives. I think this is one of the defining characteristics of our times and that it will necessarily in some ways become manifest in art. The way in which I envision the manifestation is the loss of the pretension that art springs forth fully formed, the separation of artifact from process. I see people accepting humanness even in higher art in a way that is, in my opinion, new.

Thanks to Bart and Doug Wamble for their thoughts and challenges.

The internet is the new media. This may seem obvious, but for most it has yet to sink in. Surely, for encyclopedic content, the internet's primacy is unchallenged by even the most philistine. But for art, particularly music, the internet and its culture of information sharing have been met with stiff resistance. Among more serious artists, at best the internet has been used to moderate effect as a marketing tool. Only among kitschier musicians is the internet seriously contemplated, engaged.

I should clarify that I am referring in this essay to the mechanisms of distributing and communicating about art, not the intrinsic properties of the art itself. I do not suggest that the future consists of technologically driven concept art produced through artists' dynamic interactions with an audience in cyberspace. I do, however, assert that the internet is the new media. It is not simply a marketing tool; it is the product.

The Business Model is Dead

I will not attempt to hazard a guess at the exact ratio of mp3s that are obtained illegally as compared to those uploaded from CDs or purchased legally on the internet. But I do not feel squeamish about assuming that it is a lot to a little. Still, despite the overwhelming proportion of distribution occurring on the internet, the majority of revenue is still captured in the conventional ways. Record sales. The music industry finds itself in the same position as AOL found itself at the end of the twentieth century. Rather than capture the traffic by distributing the music themselves, artists cede influence over their audience to peer-to-peer file sharing services. It is holding on to dying product, preferring to die slowly rather than quickly. In this essay, I will not address the future business model for music; I believe that the business model and the direction of art, while related, are determined by different sets of factors. Here I will focus on what the growing convergence of technology and art means for art, specifically music, irrespective of the business model.

For a long time, technology facilitated the dominance of music as commodity. Specialization of labor, mass media in the form of television and radio supported the model. Find a niche product for a niche market. Put it in a clearly labeled box. Sell it through the appropriate channels. The pressure on artists has been to define themselves as narrowly as possible. What television and radio did to make us stupider, however, the internet is beginning to reverse, allowing us at least the option of choosing a more intelligent course. With access to billions of sources of content, rather than a few tailored to the lowest common dominator, the discriminating audience, however small, can find the deeper good. Additionally, from the artists' perspective, the internet provides an unprecedented opportunity for growth through more robust communication.

Sure, one can point to the videos of pandas making hand-farts while playing the flute that dominate Youtube as an indicator of the 'internet culture.' But these are distractions. The existence of inanity on the web has no bearing on its potential as a medium for art. Plenty of people wrote stupid things down on paper in the past. This would never be taken seriously as a condemnation of books. The internet has brought the world information sharing, both in and out of academia, in a way that has never been seen before. It spawned the open source movement: collectives of software developers collaborating with no profit motive to accomplish some of the greatest feats in software engineering. Think of the Linux operating system, which is dominant in the cloud, powering the majority of most people's computing experience, whether they realize it or not.

Myspace is not the Answer

Musicians suffer from a variation on Stockholm Syndrome. They've been liberated. The record companies are dead. And while the internet has yet to produce a great business model to replace them, the channels of distribution, the capacity to share knowledge, method, process, and product are all there. What is our response?

“Well, it's comfortable in the box.”
“We've learned how to market ourselves, this is how it's done.”

In the presence of a technology that allows us to share everything, the entire creative process, where do we go? MySpace. We express who we are as artists through a short, self-congratulatory bio, a list of influences, and who our “Top Friends” are. Some are so enthralled with MySpace that they forego the luxury of an independent website.

Other musicians flock to the Dynamod web portal. Here the information from a MySpace page is thrown into a Flash application. In a world driven by text and search, musicians post unsearchable content. This is not only a failure to realize the internet's power in exposing the artistic process, it is also bad marketing.

Open Source Art

What is the alternative? Now I stumble onto more nuanced ground. Some people are instrumentalists and that is all they want to be. They make records, polish them, sell them. They do not like to talk about what they do, share the process by which they do it, or explore where it is that they are heading. From the internet they seek only a means to advertise where they play, what they are selling and a way to let prospective employers know how to contact them. In these cases, MySpace is fine, forget everything I said.

Select others have sufficient fame that they share more than records and dates even if not through their own channels. Interviews are published on journalistic web sites. For them the need to embrace the new order is not as urgent, but still beneficial.

For the rest of us, the internet presents the opportunity to be artists in the way that we, as musicians, have always understood it, not the way record labels and the business model have shaped us. Coltrane's music, Bird's music, Miles's music, were always about the process. The artifact was secondary. It was a glimpse, a snapshot. To Columbia records, Kind of Blue was Miles' crowning achievement, Bitches Brew another milestone. To Impulse, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme was his defining achievement, Crescent another burst of creativity. To those of us who know better, these were gems along a bigger path. We love the records, but we care about the path. Who, in possession of a bootlegged Bird record prizes it less than its official counterpart? We cherish the raw. The development of the idea. The snapshots along the way are great, but the path captivates us.

Our moment has arrived. The internet is the new media. Radio was great for selling records. Television was great for selling records. The internet is great for sharing everything. The process can now be exposed. Imagine having access to John Coltrane's mind when he was practicing ten hours per day. Imagine knowing exactly what he was practicing, what he was reaching for.

For some, this proposition might seem scary. Not having to explain what it is that we do makes it easy not to have anything to explain. How can one pass off mindless harmonic super-impositions in the absence of a deeper concept as intellectual art if expected to explain what it is that they are doing.

Still, any resistance to the new media is futile. The old media is disappearing. The live concert is not going anywhere, but the mass audience is in the cloud. The CD is done. It will probably not be sufficient in this world to share nothing besides a business card with several attached mp3s. An artist must also be a thinker, a writer.

Great art is always of its time. Bach, Dostoevsky, Picasso, Miles. I believe that in this time, the creative process must be laid bare. How else can we reflect the times in which we live? Jazz, without the trite attempts to commercialize, has been perfectly suited to benefit from this paradigm shift for at least sixty years. Instead, the territory is ceded to Indie rock musicians who have managed to be more savvy and demonstrate themselves more literate in spite of the intellectualism associated with jazz. Art music will become the dominion of ideas again. The highest art in this age will be characterized not by the illusion of perfection or the air of intellectualism but by boldness of concept and an almost confrontational honesty.