Comments on: Can Meaningful Art be Created through Mass Collaboration?

By: Shannon Houston

Shannon Houston — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 05:52:16 +0000

I’m so glad I came across this discussion! I am a graduate student in Arts Administration at Columbia University, and I’m working on my thesis on how arts organizations are utilizing user-generated content. This occurs in several manners – informing the artistic process and/or product, like Aaron Koblin or the recent YouTube orchestra at Carnegie Hall, crowdsourcing the planning process like the Smithsonian, utilizing user-generated content in marketing like the Met’s ‘It’s Time We Met’ campaign, and using the audience as curators in a virtual environment like the Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibit.

In terms of crowdsourcing art like one might crowdsourcing software, I think it’s absolutely possible. Only because I would never say it isn’t possible. After a career as a professional dancer, and two degrees in art, I still wouldn’t make that determination. Art is whatever you think it is. Good or bad is another question altogether, but form does not dictate that determination. Could crowdsourcing create good art? Sure, why not? Once upon a time, most of the world thought a piece of new technology called a camera could never produce art, and we all know that to not be true now.

As you mentioned, “it is difficult to produce meaningful art through true collaboration”, but that depends on your definition of art. Many examples of art are collaborative, regardless of any application of ‘high’ or ‘low’ labels – Jeff Koons has many assistants (some place the number around 80!), the ceiling of the Sistine chapel was not painted by Michelangelo alone, and films and other theatrical pieces are usually not created by one singular person, etc.

Look into the topic a little more, I wouldn’t base opinion on Koplin alone. But it is definitely a very interesting topic, and I’m glad to see Wikinomics addressing it! Thanks!

By: michael crockford

michael crockford — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:54:46 +0000

Interesting discussion. Though a considerable art project, having 10,000 artists each contribute to the recreation of an american hundred dollar bill (!) does not strike me as collaborative. It seems far more like a script into which 10,000 actors have been given bit parts, to do with as they please within the parameters already constructed and dictated. Collaborative projects that I have been part of are sometimes quite messy affairs; they don’t even always work out so well, they are open to revolutions of vision, they are almost like secret lessons in civility, debate, shared visionmaking, skillsharing, and development.

I’ve also been involved in artist groups, particularly theater, where there was a tension between directorial expertise and administration, and the welcomed but potentially dismissed collective creation process. What is the stop-gap of collective artmaking vis a vis ‘final’ decision making? Is it in the above case the ‘program’ that decides the limits of participatory decisionmaking? Or is the program a mask? I dont mean to sound draconian.

The more I think about it, the less I think of the dollar bill project as collaborative. It matters little whether there are 10 or 10,000 artists involved, though I do wonder how big a group can become before participatory democracy breaks down.

…

there seems to be a bit of hagiographic idealization of the auteur/artist at play here in the veneration of singular vision, whether an individual artist or a computer programmer. Clever, perhaps, but I think collaboration in art is not the absence of leadership, it’s the absence of dictation.

By: Seb

Seb — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:22:56 +0000

Drawball is the closest I’ve seen to mass-collaborative art. I’ve written about it recently here: http://tinyurl.com/lp2db4

By: Tel

Tel — Sat, 30 May 2009 15:39:25 +0000

I don’t know much about art, but I know that software is what I like.

I’ve seen great software written by tight teams who came up with something elegant and clean, I’ve seen great software written by the brute force of a very large number of people plugging away, and I’ve also seen vast amounts of crappy software written by every imaginable setup. As a general trend, when a leap of consciousness is required to jump into new territory, that leap will come from only a small number of people (usually just one). Once the new territory opens up, others will elaborate (and collaborate, and compete). Competition can be a type of collaboration if it stimulates energy and activity.

When dealing with massive complexity, or dauntingly large tasks, only a big team can do it: collaboration is a total requirement. Never the less, high-level coordination and vision are usually part of successful teams, but the details of exactly how that manifests might vary.

Is it possible for each person to do arbitrarily small tasks and then it all just fits together without an explicit coordinator and without any design vision at all? I don’t think so, not for any useful software project I’ve ever heard of. Maybe in the case of art you can have beauty in really abstract things like the shapes that big crowds make as they flow around a town square, or snowflakes caught in a wind eddy, but I’m going to agree that a work of art (ignoring the highly abstract stuff) depends on some central vision, and won’t just form itself out of disconnected bits.

Then again, there’s always a first time, especially for art.

By: Catherine Thorn

Catherine Thorn — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:58:27 +0000

Thank you for your comment, Maura. I must admit that I am not an art connoisseur, and your comments have caused me to rethink my definition of art. Despite not being an expert on the subject, I wanted to post a blog about art being created through mass collaboration because I think the idea has great potential, though I, personally, have not yet seen it accomplished meaningfully. The mural you helped create does sound like an excellent example of the collaborative creation of meaningful art. Whether it would be considered mass collaboration would depend on the scale of collaboration, but regardless, it does indicate that people would likely be open to the idea. It would be an interesting project indeed to see if a meaningful digital art mural could be created by thousands of artists from across the globe collaborating through web 2.0 technology.

On a side note, a very interesting artist to check out is Jonathan Harris. Though he does not create art through mass collaboration, he has created art using the online expressions of individuals around the world. He has created such projects as “We Feel Fine”, a continuous expression of human emotion around the world, captured from online conversation. His work can be seen at http://www.number27.org/

By: maura

maura — Tue, 26 May 2009 18:54:47 +0000

I disagree with your characterization of art ["Since art is a sensory (usually visual) expression of a feeling or an idea and is usually very personal... a single expression of a thought or feeling"], and find it quite narrow. There have been and continue to be many domains of artmaking (visual and performance-based) that transcend the confines you lay out here, both in terms of the nature of the work (highly conceptual/abstract, political, and/or multi-layered in medium/meaning rather than deeply personal and singular), and in terms of their manner of realization. The mail art movements of the 60′s and 70′s, for example, can I suppose be viewed narrowly as the exchange of singular expressions of art among makers, but for a great many of the participants, the “meaningful art” within and emergent from that endeavor lay in the creative organism that unfolded via the generated network of exchange – the construction of an alternative sort of creative-conceptual currency, completely dependent upon the existence of a multitude of participant drivers – and not the individual atomic artifacts produced.
I spent eight years in a smallish city in New Jersey co-directing a community mural program that operated through the participation of a permeable body of neighborhood residents – children, workers, students, trained artists, etc, through _every_ stage of the process (inception, research and conceptual development, design, wall-prep, design transfer, painting, & celebration). The resultant meaningful art (created many times over) was indeed truly collaborative (not at all a single artist’s vision), using your definition ["True collaboration should take advantage of the unique talents and perspectives of all contributors to create an end product that is greater than the sum of its parts"]. It was both a mural (or series of murals) on a neighborhood wall(s) and the very collaborative process itself. In those projects as in much collaborative artmaking, the material objects produced, though typically aesthetically pleasing and of value to observers and appreciators in their own right, are typically regarded by the participants as mere ‘residue’ of the wonderful creative process in which they engaged with one another. [see also, Toward a People's Art, by Eva Cockcroft].

If by “meaningful art”, you mean “high art” of the type that is bought and sold and hung in galleries, then perhaps that is another matter. Or if you mean “meaningful art produced via web 2.0 techno-cultural practice”, then maybe that is also another matter. In either case I’m sure there are many folks [see the community at boingboing.net, for instance] who’d challenge you even on those more deliniated grounds.
What I’m attempting to highlight, I suppose, is that there is a whole history and ongoing practice that well predates web 2.0 that has proved beyond a doubt that “meaningful art” and true collaboration need not be mutually exclusive. For some of us, in fact, the best and most meaningful art to be made is that which emerges from true collaboration… that which is, in its medium and message, born of a multitude of minds and hands, working in concert, to bring something new to life together. Hell, if you attend a conceptual enough art school, culture itself is the pinnacle of meaningful art arrived at through mass collaboration…
My apologies for the long-windedness. I hope my intent has come across through the thought-muddle.