Prestige Media and Popular Modernism

Color bars, uploaded by Wikipedia User Denelson83, and available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Towards the end of last year, Edgar and I both read Ways of Seeing by John Berger. It was an enlightening read, even if the physical object of the book was uncomfortably stiff due to the glossy pages and weak binding. Berger’s meditations on painting led me to consider the nature of prestige and the arts, and I have some thoughts after mulling them over and discussing them with my writing partner.

Every era seems, to me, to be at least partially defined by a singular “prestige medium” which dominates the discourse and shapes the thinking of the era. In some ways, this is connected to the issue of Protagonization that I mentioned on this website almost a year ago, which is (in turn) rooted in how we structure narratives around a singular viewpoint.

Berger mentioned that, during the Early Modern Period, the prestige medium was the painting. It served as an extension of the logic of commodification that had begun to dominate the era. It was possible, at that point in time, for someone to own the image of something. As such, it was possible to – by proxy – lay claim to something immaterial and impossible-to-grasp. While it was often real, material goods which were thus laid claim to, it was also quite possible for these paintings to depict, metaphorically, things like female sexuality, innocence, wisdom, and strength.

Captured by the spectacle — more than any movie theater managed.

But the painting was only the prestige medium for a certain period of time, and it has been superseded by other media, just as it, in turn, replaced other media. We can think of the pre-modern period as the age of sculpture or theater (I lean a bit more towards the key being theater, but I can see arguments in other directions.) We can think of the later modern period as being dominated by (successively) the novel and film. The postmodern period is dominated, largely by television (which has diverged radically from its position of radio-with-pictures, as described by Marshall McLuhan.)

I would be willing to venture that the novel attained prominence due to the appearance of serial fiction in newspapers and the effect of compulsory education laws. This line of reasoning leads me to one of the traits that I think defines all prestige media: it is impossible for any type of art to gain prominence without ease of access to the general public.

Now, I don’t mean to say that publicly-open art galleries existed back in the Early Modern period (I imagine that, once they read this, Edgar will have a history fact for me on that issue [and they just sent me a link to Wikipedia. The first one opened in 1661. I’m ashamed of my lack of thoroughness,]) but I think that anyone who lived in the wealthier parts of Europe during the Early Modern period could appreciate a painting put in front of them. An art form that isn’t transparent to the public can’t gain prestige.

What wikipedia thinks a “dank meme” is. Uploaded by wikipedia user Gaioa, available under a CC BY-SA 4.0

Of course, there is another half of an equation: an art form that is both easy to make and easy to enjoy becomes devalued: consider the status of the image macro in contemporary society (what most people call “memes”.) Anyone can make them, and the vast majority are ignored. This doesn’t mean that image macros aren’t necessarily art: simply that they are not a prestigious form of art due to the difficulty of competent works to gain traction.

But for novels in the 19th Century, there was a perfect storm of qualities that allowed them to gain prestige: they were difficult to create, and easy to enjoy. The same was true of paintings in the Early Modern Period and film in the early 20th century.

What we have seen in the past twenty years or so, is that the barrier of entry on enjoying television series has lowered. With the emergence of streaming services and on-demand playing, people have become conditioned to viewing television series as something akin to a vast, multi-volume film, carved into half- and one-hour chunks.

While there were definitely television shows that made use of overarching narrative structures before this period (see: V, Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, The Wire, Carnivale, many soap operas) the turn towards serial drama as a major medium in the last ten years has been a major driving force behind the emergence of “prestige” television. It’s no surprise that this has been roughly contemporaneous with the emergence of the smart phone and ubiquitous internet: you can plug into the invisible stream of everything-that-ever-was and watch Friends anywhere you have enough cell signal. But why would you want to?

She wasn’t acting, and Stanley Kubrick was a monster.

The asymmetric barrier-of-entry criterion is, I feel, the best explanation for a number of other phenomena: notably, why video games haven’t taken over the role of the prestige medium. By definition, they aren’t for everybody: no one lost The Shining but Shelley Duvall, and that has more to do with Stanley Kubrick being a serial killer who discovered that he could make films instead of committing murders than anything to do with the medium. The fact that there is a win-loss structure to it means that it’s harder to get into and thus harder for it to accrue prestige. Likewise, the material requirements for it, while certainly lower than they were in, say, 1995 or 2005, mean that some people are just barred from entry into it.

look, all I’m saying is that there aren’t 0 results.

There is also an open question of whether the prestige medium can even be an active, participatory one: it’s possible to pick up Fiasco and enough six-sided dice to play it for under $20 if you know what you’re doing, and that’s technically the last cent you need to spend to enjoy the game forever. I still don’t know if it’s possible for such a game to seem as “artistic” as Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (which won best picture last night, as of the time of me writing this.) Of course, even if it could, it’s an open question of whether it could repeatedly.

Maybe that’s the wrong question. 20th century thinking. Could it be as “artistic” as Mad Men or Breaking Bad or similar? I think so. Could it attract as large an audience? Probably not. Maybe by virtue of its medium, but who knows? And that means that it’s not really a candidate for “prestige” status.

Still, I think that tabletop games are closer to being a prestige medium than video games, though I would categorize both as art. I would peg that to the material conditions: you need a computer for one, and dice and pens for the other.

This is getting off into the weeds, what can we say about what’s happening in the culture, instead of what’s already happened?

Well, I think that the reason that television eclipsed film is fairly easy to understand: the barrier for entry on the audience side dropped on television, especially for serialized dramas. For the price of two movie tickets a month, you can access a streaming service on a device you already have in your home. You can watch a significant slice of all the television that is available.

We still tend to act like movies and books are the prestige medium, though. Sorry, I mean film and novels. Sorry, again, I mean cinema and literature. The fact of the matter is that some parts of these media are well-respected, but they have become so rarefied and inaccessible that there’s effectively multiple media in each of them. I mentioned Parasite earlier. I think that it’s a great example of film, but it isn’t a movie in my head: for that, you need whatever the latest Avengers movie is (I think I once referred to it as Avengers: Who Gives a Shit) or similar. Likewise, Foucault’s Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code are both conspiracy stories, but the former is definitely literature and the last is definitely a book.

I…guess?…this counts as a crowd pleaser. I don’t really know what people like.

The rarefied, genteel iteration of the medium retains its cachet, but there’s not enough prestige for it to cover a significant portion of what’s produced. Indeed, I think you can see it happening with movies in real-time: the American Film Industry knows that its prestige is slipping, and is retreating into the safe territory of crowd-pleasers, but now the field is so crowded that even those can’t make money. Each one is so demanding to produce that they begin to look the same. Now, it seems, the only movies that are in line for Academy Awards are custom-made Oscar-bait movies, which are often the MFA-fiction of film.

Which brings me back to literature. A cottage industry has sprung up to produce high-prestige fiction. It is only for this reason that it makes sense to talk about MFA fiction. They all fundamentally work the same way: a plotless, character-centered maundering that terminates with a revelation about a character, custom-ordered and meant to be served up in the New Yorker or similar. Even genre fiction isn’t immune: apart from the MFA types who try to play with genre tropes, the Clarion workshops serve much the same purpose in the speculative fiction community, which leads to a convergence of styles (“The X of its Y-ing” as Edgar points out, after a common stylistic device, and now I can’t unsee it.)

But this is a squeeze: I think that, among younger readers and readers that don’t fit the middle-class-white-professional stereotype, MFA fiction is looked down upon as an attempt to siphon more of an increasingly small pool of prestige. As the convergence continues, the siphoning grows more and more insistent, and the pool smaller and smaller.

Instead, I feel that many of these readers are turning to other sources. There are many competently-written works online that are available for free or cheap, and it is here that we find the condition of the abased medium – anyone can enjoy it but, also, anyone can make it.

Now, a caveat: I’m using “abased” here in contrast to “prestige” – I don’t mean to imply that I think that these artists are unworthy or that they’re doing bad work that isn’t worth reading. But, as someone who wants to be a working artist at some point, it does mean that it’s a lot harder for me to make the transition from amateur to professional, and I’m sure that there are many other people in the same boat.

The ideal situation would be that anyone who can’t bring themselves to not create would be able to support themselves this way (barring, of course, some sort of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, or whatever the meme is.) The fact of the matter is that there’s far too many producers in the Attention Economy, and not enough consumers (Or, I suppose, the audience is the Attention Producer and the Artist is the Attention Consumer? This metaphor is a mess.)

I can’t browse itch and not buy a dozen odd tabletop games and weird monographs, honestly. It’s a problem.

This is the problem with trying to enter the arts at the moment with the goal of becoming a working artist: because barriers of entry don’t vanish, they move. While it’s possible to self-publish a book or put it on the internet, and anyone with a modicum of artistic talent can start a webcomic, or any aspiring actor can film a YouTube series on their iPhone, or any musician can start a soundcloud or bandcamp, or anyone can write a tabletop game and put it on itch.io or DrivethruRPG, or anyone can learn Twine and start building a game, gaining traction and building an audience aren’t easy.

In a few prior pieces I mentioned the concept of a Popular Modernism. This is exactly what’s missing: there’s no real way to incubate new talent and release it into the wild. No one is looking to give new creators a platform, and platforms are just what we need.

There has to be a middle ground between “no one can release anything without a corporate co-sign” and “everyone can release, but no one can gain an audience.” There must be a pathway for different media to gain prestige and different artists to participate.

So, I suppose what I’m saying is that artists need to start building platforms for their work, and they need to use them for people other than themselves. They need to employ their sense of taste to curate a collection of artwork for the benefit of a potential audience, and they need to build that audience. Instead of an Eternal September, what we need the internet to make is an Eternal Années folles: though such a thing cannot be eternal.

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