Whither masterpieces?
Interesting article by Tom Shone at More Intelligent Life:
“What is a masterpiece and why are there so few of them?” asked Gertrude Stein in 1936. An answer has finally arrived from an economist, Tyler Cowen. In his new book “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World”, Cowen argues: “The current trend…is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits…When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet and the bitty. When access is difficult, we look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas and masterpieces.”
His point is not that great works are in decline, blotted out by clouds of grey mediocrity massing on the horizon. It’s that when communications are slow and information scarce, we favour works of art that aggregate and summarise and synthesise. A glance at the list of all-time top-selling records reveals that those albums that bestrode the 1970s and 1980s like colossi—from “Dark Side of the Moon” to “The Joshua Tree”—are now relics of the past. The last band to attempt one, Guns N’ Roses, almost killed themselves in the process, spending 17 years on an album, “Chinese Democracy”, that promptly went phut.
The list of Best Film Oscars tells a similar story, with epics like “The English Patient” and “Titanic”, which ruled the Nineties, giving way to small, left-field, indie hits—“Crash”, “No Country For Old Men”, “Slumdog Millionaire”. When Scorsese finally won his Oscar, it was not for his wayward epics but for his scrappy cop drama “The Departed”.
There’s a type of masterpiece that Henry James identified as “loose, baggy monsters”. One of the few recent novelists to try one was David Foster Wallace, whose death in 2008 prompted an online challenge to get through his grunge epic “Infinite Jest” over this summer. “A thousand pages ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week,” declared InfiniteSummer.org. “No sweat.”
It all depends what you mean by masterpiece, of course. An exhibition has just opened called “The Louvre and the Masterpiece”, which “explores how the definition of a ‘masterpiece’…[has] changed over time”. Once, a masterpiece was declared by the members of a guild: the apprentice locksmith tried to create the greatest lock he had ever made, using the best materials and the most ornate design, and thus gain acceptance from the guild. As there were hundreds of guilds, some with thousands of members, a masterpiece was a feat no rarer than a great set of exam results.
It was the Romantics who put the term on its lofty pedestal—a product not of perspiration but inspiration, touched by genius, possessed of greatness—and the modernists who duly yanked it down again. “Masterpieces of the past are good for the past,” declared the dramatist Antonin Artaud, in his book “The Theatre & Its Double” (1938). “They are not good for us.” …
