I’ll muse here about art and artists in the world to come, a world I assume is not too far removed from the world today (for example, no AGI-induced apocalypse or rapture). If Cohost were still operating I would post this there, since my thinking is too unsettled to consider this my final and definitive take on the topic. But Cohost is dead (RIP), so here we are.

I suppose I should first define what I mean by “art.” Dictionary definitions abound, but I like the anthropologist Richard Anderson’s definition as quoted and endorsed by Cynthia Freeland: “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.”¹ “Artists” are those who encode (and in many cases create) that meaning.

I take it as self-evident that art is good and that we should have more of it. We never know where great art may come from, or what futurity may deem great.

I also take it as self-evident that we want humans to make art. I leave to others the question of whether human-instructed and -directed LLMs can produce art in the sense above. If presently-hypothetical AGIs were to be created, we can certainly imagine them having a culture and creating art. However, such art would likely be alien to us: human-influenced but ultimately profoundly nonhuman, born of different concerns in a different existence. Let the AGIs enjoy it, we need our own art.

We also want people to be able to do art full-time. While a day job may be fruitful for some, others are best suited to making art their whole existence. They would be wasted making house or baking bread (like Emily Dickinson and many other women), delivering babies (like William Carlos Williams) or managing corporations (like Wallace Stevens).

This requires artists having the means to live and create without impoverishing themselves: Suffering may sometimes create great art, but we should not needlessly inflict it on artists. Life will likely bring it to them in any case and in many forms, unrelated to their economic circumstances.

But therein lies the present-day problem: if lots of people want to make art, and they do so within a globalized market that pits all against all, they will likely (really, almost inevitably) end up on the wrong end of the log-normal distribution, in which a few make millions and almost everyone else makes nothing—a difference of four, five, or even more orders of magnitude.

What to do? First, make it cheaper for artists to live by making it cheaper for everyone to live. Reduce the economic burdens of housing and health care in particular (ubiquitous in the GoFundMe and related appeals I see on Bluesky and elsewhere). Increasing supply can help here: The more houses built, the more doctors and nurse educated, the more generic drugs approved, the less expensive life will be for artists and everyone else.

What about government subsidization of artists? Again, I think it’s best to be universal, e.g., support people through general tax credits, wage subsidies, etc., as opposed to having artists be designated wards of the state, directly or indirectly. New art forms or artists don’t look like art to bureaucrats or grant committees, so government grants and other subsidies often end up benefiting a favored few insiders at the expense of outsiders.

How could artists make more money otherwise? One possibility is to have distribution platforms do their own redistribution, e.g., “taxing” top earners to give greater payouts to low earners (for example, by charging them lower fees). It’s an interesting idea, and you can see versions of this in other contexts (for example, Apple’s app store small business program). However, since payouts for most artists on the main “creator economy” platforms (e.g., YouTube, Patreon, Substack) are so low, I suspect that to be truly effective such a program would have to provide compensation to artists above and beyond what they actually earn in sales and subscriptions, analogous to the US Earned Income Tax Credit. I think the chances of such a program being put in place are slim to none.

What about unionization? I think it’s definitely worth pursuing for animators, commercial comic artists, and others, by analogy to SAG-AFTRA, Actors’ Equity, the American Federation of Musicians, and other organizations representing artists to the organizations that hire them. But those unions were formed during a rise in labor’s power, in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. The present-day political, economic, and cultural environment, along with the nature of some arts, make comparable organizing efforts harder today, possibly even fruitless in some cases.

What else can we envision to make the life of an artist less fraught? Some have proposed, and others are actively working to create, alternative venues for the economy of art: artist-owned cooperatives like Subvert or Comradery, tightly-curated services like Metalabel that emphasize the physical as much as the digital, and so on. In their various ways these all offer artists a potentially beneficial bargain: trade universal reach and a (very small) chance of outsized rewards for the opportunity to better engage their (possibly niche) audiences and exercise more control over their fate.

But what do I know? In the context of art I’m a consumer, patron, and (occasional) critic, not a practitioner. Feel free to tell me (e.g., on Bluesky) where and when I’m talking out of my hat, and let me know what specifically you’d propose instead.

(This started out as a comment on a post by @harphony, but it got to be so long I thought it was better to make it a standalone post.)

How to create something substantial—a work of art, a game, a novel, a nonfiction book—if you’re easily bored or find yourself struggling to complete even small projects? My personal experience is probably not that relevant to anyone else, but . . . I have written two books thus far, both completely self-formatted and self-published. I don’t have (diagnosed) ADHD, but I do get easily distracted at times and find it hard to make grand plans, much less carry them through to completion. I think the secret for me, especially for my second book, was that I (unconsciously) divided the work into multiple phases, with different tasks and motivations for each phase.

In the first phase I was just writing relatively small posts, heavy on personal opinion and light on research, with each post relatively complete in and of itself. For my second book this took the form of farting about on Tumblr, with no thought of doing anything more than that. Each post didn’t take that long to write and didn’t take much mental energy to complete, but I got a small feeling of satisfaction at having finished each one. That motivated me to keep writing more of them.

After doing that for a while, I could no longer muster the energy to keep writing more posts. But . . . I had accumulated enough material that I thought to myself, “it might be fun to make a book out of this.” So I started looking for common themes or arguments that I thought would provide an overall framework for the book, and tried to figure out what I needed to know to support those themes/arguments. The interest and enjoyment for me then became that of puzzle-solving: “why did thing X happen, and how did it influence thing Y?” I spent a lot of time doing reading and research, and much less time writing.

At the same time I started the third phase, turning the material into an actual formatted book suitable for either electronic or print distribution. I did this as a mental break from doing research and further writing: now my interest was in learning how the publishing system worked that I had decided to use, and my satisfaction came in the form of seeing my writing nicely formatted and typeset.

Eventually I was close enough to having something book-like that I was motivated to finish the job. In reading over draft chapters, I thought of additional things I wanted to write about. When I got bored of writing, I occupied myself in some tasks I didn’t need to think a lot about, most notably creating a comprehensive index of the appearances of the characters in the manga I was writing about. (After doing said index, I thought, “gee, I now have everything I need to do an analysis of the social graph of the characters,” so I extended my existing R knowledge to do that as well.) I also had fun learning new things about publishing: how to obtain an ISBN, how to register a copyrighted work, and how to license artwork and create a book cover.

I have a tendency to perfectionism, and that carried me through the remaining work of getting the book ready for publication: checking all the references and creating a complete bibliography, proofreading the text and tweaking the formatting, getting the book cover to a point where I wasn’t embarrassed to have people look at it, and validating the PDF and EPUB3 output. Again, I switched frequently between tasks as I got bored with doing one of them.

The final factor was that from the very beginning I worked hard to convince myself that I would never see any external rewards or validation from publishing the book: that no one would buy it, no one would even download it for free, and even if someone happened to read it I’d never get any feedback from them about it, good or bad. That freed me mentally to focus solely on the enjoyment that I myself would get from creating the book, and not persist in doing something I disliked in the (vain) hope of someone compensating me for it, monetarily or otherwise.

All in all, it worked out pretty well: I have something I can put on my bookshelf next to books by other people and think “that’s not too shabby, all things considered.” I sold a few copies, had a few more downloaded, and had one person tell me that they enjoyed reading it. I even had a pleasant surprise, when by a fortuitous circumstance a person came forward to create a Japanese translation—which in turn led to more fun experiences, like learning how to typeset Japanese. (It also improved the English version by having another person find typos.)

So, these are my personal conclusions—which, again, may not be applicable to anyone else—on how to create a substantial work:

• Start small, working in an opportunistic manner on things that interest you, can be done relatively quickly, and are self-contained enough to give you a sense of satisfaction that they exist once completed.
• If you get to a point where at least some of the small things look like they could go together to create something larger and more significant, think about how they might fit together, and what additional pieces might be needed to make the whole work.
• Stave off boredom by switching between different types of project work and trying things you haven’t done before but would like to learn.
• Set your expectations for the work’s reception to be extremely low. Don’t push yourself to work on it if you yourself are not getting any enjoyment from the process.

This is very much not advice for someone who wants to make a full-time living from their work—but in reality very few people will make anything at all from their personal writing, art, or related activities. My advice is rather for those like myself who will never see any significant external rewards from the things they create, but feel compelled to create them nonetheless.

This to me is the key sentence: “in other words, we don’t simply see a kusoge as a commodity but as an array of humans and their social relations that culminated into this product.” The folks at 65DaysofStatic have said similar things. This to me leads to at least two conclusions.

First, non-mass-appeal art is important to you to the extent that you know the people making it and feel part of a community with them, or at least a kinship with them. I don’t do games, but I do listen to music. I may purchase music by a person X I follow on cohost (or who’s rechosted by people I follow), knowing full well that there may be dozens if not hundred of pieces similar in style and quality available on Bandcamp or wherever. But I don’t know the people who made those, and I do know X and the other people who know X.

Second, we don’t need to de-commodify the entire economy to allow non-mass-appeal art to flourish (bread is still a commodity, as are iPhones), or even the economy of mass-appeal art. But we do need to provide people a way to survive and make a living, at least of sorts, when they’re not making art.

I think of my favorite go-to example here, the people who created American modernist poetry in the early 20th century. They weren’t MFAs or state-sponsored writers, they were bank clerks and insurance executives and physicians and librarians and people who had some money from family or inheritances. But they were also, and more importantly poets, and part of a community of poets, a community whose works ultimately became important to people other than themselves. But their poetry was first and foremost important to them, and if that had not been the case it would not have been important to anyone else.

What then is the role of the critic? I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I think kastelpls has provided a large part of the answer.

[This post originally appeared on Cohost.]

Recently I stumbled across a blog post by Julian Gough. His post is both long and heartfelt, but the bare facts are follows:

Upon being solicited by Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson, Gough agreed to write a text—the End Poem—to be displayed to players who beat the game in survival mode. After much back and forth, Persson’s company Mojang paid Gough GBP 20,000 for his work, but never got a formal copyright assignment, Gough having rejected the proposed contract as being too one-sided and not respecting his role as the writer.

Before the acquisition of Mojang by Microsoft was announced, Mojang executives again approached Gough to try to get him to sign a formal contract, but he again refused. Eventually after much agonizing—and some resentment of the financial rewards realized by Persson and others at Mojang—Gough decided to waive any rights he had with respect to the End Poem and dedicate it to the public domain.

There is much in this saga that touches on the topic of art vs. business; at its core it is a story of someone who thought he was an artist creating art trying—and failing—to communicate with people who thought they were businesspeople creating a product. But that topic is too big for me to discuss right now; instead I’ll focus on the reaction to Gough’s story, and then on the poem itself.

I’ll start with the commenters at Hacker News. I’ve been on the Internet a long time (back to the Usenet era), and am quite aware of the negativity that can be found there; however, I was taken aback at the intensity of the contempt directed at Gough. The various reactions can be paraphrased as follows:

“Gough is a nobody, he had nothing to do with the success of Minecraft.” “Gough got his money, then got greedy for more.” “I am not a lawyer, but here is my confidently-expressed argument that Gough didn’t have a legal leg to stand on.” “Gough probably didn’t spend more than a couple of hours writing that, it wasn’t worth 20,000 pounds.” “Gough wasn’t Notch’s friend, he was just a contractor.”

I find these last two classes of comments particularly interesting and ironic. The first is essentially an expression of the labor theory of value: that the economic value of an item should depend on the amount of work that went into producing it—hence the claim that Gough was grossly overpaid for (supposedly) a few hours work. But this claim applies with much greater force to Persson, who realized USD 1.5 billion in financial rewards for just a few years of work. Even if he worked 100 or more hours a week, that still equates to an hourly wage of about USD 50,000, an order of magnitude or two greater than what we’d expect to pay even a top-rank programmer.

Similarly, one of the commenters claimed that Gough had a “parasocial relationship” with Persson, thinking Persson was a friend when he was instead an entrepreneur looking for a hired hand. But it seems to me that many of the Hacker News commenters themselves have a parasocial relationship with the founders, VCs, and rockstar developers who form the elite of the technology industry.

They eagerly consume their idols’ blog posts and tweets, vociferously defend them from criticisms both large and small, and think themselves knowledgeable about the startup world and everything connected to it, so that if they were ever handed a term sheet they would be able to negotiate a Series A round as deftly as those whom they idolize. But I suspect that if the actual founders, VCs, and other power players were ever to come into contact with most Hacker News commenters, they would dismiss them as “Internet randos.”

Enough of Hacker News. If we turn to Gough’s blog post, we find an entirely different set of commenters, almost all expressing gratitude to Gough for both writing the End Poem and setting it free, with many telling him that the End Poem changed their lives. So it behooves us to look at the End Poem itself, a copy of which Gough appended to his post (and the beginning of which is shown above).

Strictly speaking, the End Poem is a prose poem: part story, part poem. It has enough poetic aspects that I will consider it—and judge it—as I would a poem. I’ve read much more poetry than the average person, have concentrated my reading among those considered “major poets” in the literary canon, and as a consequence have pretty high standards for what I consider a good poem (or prose poem).

So one might expect me to unfavorably compare the End Poem—an appendage to a “mere” video game—to “real” poems (such as one might find in the New Yorker or Poetry magazines). Or, if I were to acknowledge any excellence at all about it, to dismiss it with a variant of Noel Coward’s comment about the potency of “cheap music.”

But I’m not going to do that. As poetry the End Poem is as suited to its context, and to its audience, as are the poems that appear in the New Yorker or Poetry, and it seems to have meant far more to at least some of those who played Minecraft than the typical New Yorker or Poetry poem does to its readers. Why is that?

The End Poem does two things, and does them both very well. Recall its original context: it was shown only to players who had successfully completed the game. Those players would likely have spent dozens of hours attempting this, during which they would risk becoming estranged from the outside world, including their family and their friends. Some might have started playing Minecraft because they were already estranged from their family or others, and sought refuge from that estrangement in the game.

To those people, the End Poem first says: You have not wasted your time playing this game. This game—this “world that was flat, and infinite [where] the sun was a square of white”—is no less real—and no less worthy of your and our attention—than anything in the supposedly “real” world.

But it also says that likewise this other world—“on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock”—is no less real than the world of the game, and that the player who is about to leave the game can achieve their goals in this world just as they have in that world:

and the universe said I love you and the universe said you have played the game well and the universe said everything you need is within you and the universe said you are stronger than you know

The length of the End Poem, and the nine minutes or so it takes to display, serve as a decompression chamber for players, to prepare them before they leave the world of the game to reenter the other world. That process culminates in the most famous affirmation in the End Poem:

and the universe said I love you because you are love

William Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” That line in the End Poem teeters on the edge between enough and more than enough, and even goes a bit over the edge (as Gough himself acknowledges), but I understand why Gough left it in, and why it meant so much to so many people.

As I see it, it says to the player: you can love, and you can be loved. The love you put into playing this game is a mirror of the love you can put into living your life and being with others, and if you do that then that love can and will be returned to you.

And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. . . .

You are the player.

Wake up.

And now, thanks to Gough, the End Poem is now part of our common heritage from which future artists can create more works of art. And Gough himself has seen his act of generosity been repaid by people subscribing to his newsletter and potentially buying his next book.

But what about all the other artists, the ones whose work languishes in obscurity or was sold for a mess of pottage in work-for-hire arrangements? Gough touches on their plight in his post, and has things to say about it. And so will I.

A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it.

When I first started a blog I hosted it at hecker.org using custom blogging software. I later got tired of the management hassles involved, and moved my blog to WordPress.com, using the subdomain blog.hecker.org because I was still hosting other things at hecker.org and couldn’t afford to dedicate the entire domain just to my blog. Since then though the blog has assumed more importance as my public face to the world, and I regretted having a somewhat unusual domain name for it. I’ve therefore decided to adopt the conventional approach and use frankhecker.com as my primary blog name. (As noted above the old name of blog.hecker.org will continue to work, thanks to the magic of HTTP redirects.)

Note that my primary personal email address remains hecker@hecker.org; I have no plans to change that. However I can also receive email at frankhecker.com, so for example sending email to frank@frankhecker.com will get to the same inbox as hecker@hecker.org. I may switch over completely to frankhecker.com for all uses in future, but in the meantime there’s no need to update your address book.

In other news, I’m now on Google Plus so you can add me to one of your circles if you’d like. I’ve been meaning to try Google Plus out before now, but I use Google Apps for my email and related services, and Google Plus wasn’t added to Google Apps until this week. I’ll publish notices of new blog posts to Google Plus, and maybe some other stuff from time to time.

Kyle Gann (“composer, musicologist, writer, educator”) recently wrote a blog post, “The Epistemology of Elitism,” that posited a way to get beyond sterile debates on whether some types of music are objectively better than other types (e.g., the “classical vs. pop music” argument). To quote Gann at length:

John [Luther Adams] and I put together a registry of musical virtues that was isomorphically analogous to a classification of audiences.

For instance: there are people for whom the best music must involve innovation. These people are likely to value Varese, Partch, Cage. There are others who value craftsmanship above all else. These people tend to like Hindemith, Sessions, perhaps Ligeti. Other people feel that music should be, above all else, emotionally true; perhaps they gravitate toward Barber, Vaughan Williams, maybe Messiaen. There are people who love music for its sonic lushness and sensuousness, who may relish Takemitsu and Feldman. There are people who value clarity, who value simplicity, who value intellectualism, who value memorability, who value physicality, who value theoretical rigor. Most people value several of these virtues, and we could create Venn diagrams of audiences who love different new musics because of the specific virtues they possess. The innovation + emotive sincerity intersectors love Ives. The intellectualism + sensuousness people love Takemitsu. That’s what John and I were coming up with.

I think these virtues could be categorized, and I think it would be a worthwhile and revealing musicological exploit. I think it could become the prolegomena to a sociology of new-music (and other) audiences.

I happen to have a weakness for aesthetic theories, and commented on what I thought were some interesting implications of this one, including what I thought was an possible point of intersection with Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Gann replied positively to my comments and added “It’d be great if we could use findings from other fields to lay out the groundwork for all this.” That was all the encouragement I needed to write at length about this topic (though needless to say Gann bears no responsibilities for any excesses or errors I’ve committed).

A framework for a possible theory of aesthetic innovation

Let me first say that I am definitely not the person to construct an aesthetic “theory of everything.” The best I can do is try to explain Christensen’s theory and point out possible analogies and connections with how aesthetic and related changes occur in music and other arts. Consider this the barest sketch of a possible theory of innovation in the arts. Others can either take this further (if they think it’s a potentially fruitful approach) or demonstrate that it’s total poppycock (if they don’t)

What I like about Christensen’s theory as applied to this context is that it offers a theoretical framework that is rich enough to include all the actors within an aesthetic movement—not just artists but also the audience, critics, patrons, etc.—and to also account for historical and technological factors. I think this is an advance over theories that posit that art evolves in some autonomous manner (e.g., in inevitably repeating cycles of innovation, elaboration, and decadence) or that focus solely on artists and their reactions to each other (e.g., as discussed in Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence).

What should we look for in such a theory? In the context of business Christensen’s theory purports to explain (among other things) why established companies fail to capitalize on particular types of innovation, how new entrants to markets can successfully compete with and (in many cases) displace incumbent vendors, what characteristics truly innovative vendors, products, and business models tend to have, and how such innovative vendors, products, and business models tend to evolve over their lifetime in the market. In the aesthetic realm a variant of Christensen’s theory may function similarly, providing insight into how aesthetic innovations and artistic movements are born, received initially, evolve over time, and (in some cases) successfully compete with and displace existing artistic works and movements.

In the discussion that follows I focus on music, but to the extent it works at all the framework is general enough to be applied to other artistic endeavors. My explanations of Christensen’s theory are drawn from the book Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change (SWN), Christensen’s most comprehensive treatment of his ideas, including both a useful summary of his various theories (as an appendix) and several informative case studies. Those interested in Christensen’s ideas should also consult his earlier books, The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution in order to see the evolution of his thinking.

Artists and their markets

Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation was originally formulated in the context of technology-based businesses (e.g., computer companies), and thus our basic strategy is to equate the world of art with the world of business at a fairly deep level. (If this offends you please stop reading now.)

We start with vendors selling products to customers; a set of similar vendors providing similar products to a set of similar customers constitutes a particular market. In the simplest model applied to music we can identify composers with vendors, compositions with products, and listeners with customers. The “price” paid to composers for their products may be in the form of patronage (direct or indirect) or simply in the form of sustained attention to and engagement with their works.

Note that Christensen’s theories can be applied to individual companies or to groups of companies providing similar (though not necessarily identical) products as part of an overall market. Similarly in our analogies we’ll sometimes deal with individual composers and sometimes with groups of composers who are associated with particular aesthetic movements.

Note also that in the full Christensen theory vendors are part of “value networks,” defined as “[a firm’s] upstream suppliers; its downstream customers, retailers, and distributors; and its partners and ancillary industry players” (SWN, 63). In our musical example components in the value network could include performers, critics, promoters, instrument makers, and others. For now we’ll ignore these others for purposes of our analysis, but we’ll come back to them later. In particular, we assume for the moment that performers simply transmit composers’ intentions faithfully, and we lump critics and patrons (including institutional patrons) in with listeners in general.

Finally, note that (as with other art forms such as painting, poetry, etc.) “products” may outlive their “vendors,” so that composers today are competing for listeners not only with their contemporaries but with past composers as well. I’ll come back to this topic later as well.

Jobs to be done

The next key component of Christensen’s theory is the concept of “jobs to be done.” In Christensen’s formulation, customers “hire” products in order to accomplish a particular “job” (SWN, 281). Jobs to be done can be very straightforward: for example, most customers hire cell phones to do the job of enabling them to make and receive phone calls while out and about. Jobs to be done can also be more complicated, and not necessarily apparent based on the surface nature of the product. For example, I make more use of my iPhone to access the Internet, including reading blog posts, than I do to make voice calls. A large part of the job I am hiring the iPhone to do is to provide a source of information and entertainment in contexts where I have nothing better to do (e.g., waiting in line at a store).

People also hire music for certain jobs to be done. For example, religious music helps intensify the ritual of worship, chamber music can be used as an aural background for social occasions, opera provides an entertaining spectacle, and so on. Jobs can exist within a specific cultural context; for example, the original job of rock music was to provide teenagers a compelling vision of rebellion and excess. Christensen notes that in general the job that customers may hire a product to do may differ greatly from what the vendor intended them to use it for. This is true for music as well; for example, many people listen to religious music for purely aesthetic pleasure, outside the context of a worship service.

In the context of music the jobs to be done concept allows us to address both sociological and psychological aspects of music—i.e., that music has particular social uses and also fulfills certain human pyschological needs. I haven’t read a lot in the relevant literature, so I won’t be concerned too much about what exactly these uses and needs are. (See Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and similar works that attempt to address these questions.) For the purposes of this analysis I simply assume that such uses and needs exist, that there are a multiplicity of them, and that a particular composition may satisfy each of them to greater or lesser degrees. This leads us to our next topic.

Dimensions of performance

When customers seek to hire a product to do a certain job for them, they evaluate the product based on certain “dimensions of performance” (SWN, 277). (“Performance” here is used not in the musical sense but in the sense of how well products do their jobs.) For example, a mobile phone may be judged on its weight and voice quality, among other characteristics.

In the case of music the dimensions of performance can be identified with the various aesthetic virtues discussed by Gann, perhaps augmented by certain aspects of music that relate to its social uses and are not captured by the purely aesthetic virtues. Thus, for example, people may judge a composition by how “emotional” it is, how “deep” it is (i.e., requiring repeated listening for maximum appreciation), the degree to which it exhibits novelty in its form (what Gann refers to as being “innovative”), and so on.

Note that some of these virtues refer to points along a single spectrum; for example, we can contrast a deep musical piece with one that elicits immediate appreciation. Others are wholly or partially orthogonal to each other; for example, Gann describes Toru Takemitsu’s music as being simultaneously intellectual and sensuous.

Sustaining vs. disruptive innovations

Now we come to the most important and well-known component of Christensen’s framework, his disruptive innovation theory (SWN, 277–79). Christensen divides innovations into two general types:

• “sustaining” innovations directed to demanding customers in an existing market, or
• “disruptive” innovations directed to less demanding and more price-sensitive customers in an existing market (“low-end disruption”) or to new customers or new uses by existing customers (“new market disruption”).

Thus, for example, when mobile phones were first introduced they were a disruptive innovation relative to traditional phones, as they enabled people to make calls in new contexts. Since then mobile phone vendors have been producing sustaining innovations for demanding customers who want lighter phones, phones with longer battery life, etc.

Note also that disruptive innovations can be in the form of new technologies or new business models. Pre-paid mobile phones leveraged existing technology in the context of a new business model that represented a low-end disruptive innovation, enabling people to afford basic cellular service without the need to sign up for an expensive plan.

Returning to music, we can imagine composers creating (for example) “deep” works to which certain audiences respond appreciatively, and in response inventing new compositional techniques to make their works even deeper. Such new techniques would count as innovations, though in this case they are sustaining innovations only. (Note that I am here using the word “innovation” in a slightly different sense than Gann.)

At some point in time other composers may begin writing music of a different type, one that appeals to other listeners; for example, such composers may eschew depth and pioneer different compositional techniques that create music with a clear audible structure that audiences can immediately apprehend and appreciate. From the perspective of the prior composers and their works this would count as a disruptive innovation, and in particular a new-market disruptive innovation, since it is directed at new “customers” not being well-served by the “incumbent” composers.

As noted above, in the context of music and other arts the “price” may not be (only) in money, but may also be paid in terms of attention, engagement, and the level of effort required to experience the work. If a given work can provide a reasonably satisfying aesthetic experience at least comparable to (though perhaps still inferior to) that of a more “expensive” work (i.e., one demanding more attention, engagement, and effort to experience properly) then it can be considered a low-end disruptive innovation. For example, the 3-minute pop song may have functioned in this way vis-a-vis longer works.

Investing in sustaining innovations directed at demanding customers

Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation originated in his desire to explain why so many successful and innovative companies missed out on the creation of important new markets and were eventually displaced by new market entrants. For example, DEC was blindsided by the success of the PC and the rise of Intel and Microsoft, while Microsoft did not foresee the strategic importance of search engines like Google’s.

Christensen’s explanation for this “innovator’s dilemma” is that companies invest in innovations that are consistent with their capabilities, business models and processes, and overall priorities in serving their existing market. Christensen refers to this as the resources, processes, and values (RPV) theory (SWN, 279). For example, if a cellular company owns its own network and is expert at managing it, and has customers that put a high premium on (and are willing to pay for) market-leading reliability and ubiquity of cellular services, then that company will tend to invest disproportionately in innovations that improve the quality of the network, at the expense of innovations that might reduce the cost of cellular service, enable new applications, etc.

In musical terms the RPV theory implies that “incumbent” composers (i.e., those who have already achieved some measure of success) will innovate based on the stock of compositional techniques that they have already learned and mastered, in the social and institutional context in which they are already situated, and for the same types of rewards (tangible or non-tangible) as those to which they have become accustomed.

In many cases a company’s priorities in pursuing new innovations are driven by its most demanding customers, those for whom the company’s products are not yet “good enough”—i.e., they fall short of customers’ needs and preferences along whatever dimensions of performance are most important in the market served by the company. The most demanding customers are typically the most vocal in their complaints and product feature requests, and also typically those most willing to pay a premium for products most nearly meeting their needs.

If our analogies hold we would expect a similar phenomenon in music: Composers would strive to innovate in furtherance of the particular aesthetic virtues valued by their most demanding listeners, i.e., those who have the most sustained engagement with the composer’s work.

Note that this does not mean that composers do not or cannot create autonomously. Composers can themselves be their own most demanding listeners, just as (for example) developers of open source software are known for “scratching their own itch,” i.e., developing software for themselves to use, and enhancing it to improve its fitness for their own particular needs. As with open source developers, this can lead to accusations that composers are not offering anything of interest to ordinary users (audiences), as I discuss in the next section.

Overshooting customer needs

People often speak of aesthetic movements in music or other arts as being “played out” or as having “exhausted the possibilities,” which seems to put the blame on the composers or the materials with which they’re working. On the other hand we have the cliché of the composer who complains that “audiences don’t understand what I’m doing.” Can we reconcile these two views?

In the context of Christensen’s theory one major problem in satisfying the most demanding customers is the danger of overshooting customer’s needs, i.e., investing in sustaining innovations that improve products along dimensions of performance that most customers no longer see as most important. In the technology-based industries originally discussed by Christensen, this occurs when the pace of technological progress is faster than the rate at which customers can absorb it. (This is illustrated in the diagram in this discussion by the contrast between the line marked “sustaining innovation” and the line marked “performance that customers can utilize or absorb.”) For example, steady improvements in integrated circuit technology have translated into regular increases in the processor speeds of the CPUs in personal computers. However except for the most demanding users (e.g., PC gamers) customers have not needed such speed improvements for their typical tasks (e.g., email and web browsing).

Is it possible to overshoot customer needs in a similar way in the artistic realm? Certainly in the case of music human physiology sets certain limits on the range of pitches we can hear, the minimum pitch differences or maximum number of notes per second we can distinguish, the softest sounds we can hear and the loudest tolerate, and so on. Evolution can change such limits over time, but only relatively slowly. Similarly, cultural evolution can result in people being more familiar with and accepting of new musical forms and techniques over time, but this does not happen overnight.

Given that musical compositions are essentially information products (e.g., like software) there would seem to be no inherent limit other than human ingenuity to the extent to which composers could produce new compositions that improve on prior compositions with respect to one or more aesthetic virtues (dimensions of performance). This is especially true if composers are working in parallel in the context of a particular school or genre, all trying to advance their compositions along the same or similar aesthetic dimensions, since they have the advantage of being able to build on and leverage each others’ compositional (sustaining) innovations.

What then accounts for the sense that the work of composers within a particular musical movement is producing diminishing returns from the point of view of audiences? If we take the diagram referenced above as an accurate model, and focus on the main aesthetic virtue or virtues exemplified in the products of a particular musical movement, earlier in time there is a relatively large gap between what audiences want and can appreciate and what composers are producing, and any progress in closing that gap is welcomed. As composers steadily advance in their ability to produce works that embody that virtue (or virtues), the difference between what audiences want and can appreciate and what composers produce goes from large to small. Beyond that point further incremental improvements in the aesthetic virtue(s) in question may be appreciated by those most engaged with composers’ works (including the composers themselves), but leave all others cold.

Creating disruptive innovations to compete against non-consumption

What happens when customers’ needs are overshot? One possibility is that vendors continue to advance their products along the same dimensions of performance as before, chasing the needs and wants of an ever-smaller group of the most demanding customers. This scenario is very much analogous to the by-now-familiar caricature of modern (or more precisely, modernist) composers. However there are two other general possibilities, corresponding to the two types of disruptive innovation discussed above.

In low-end disruption some vendors find ways to offer new products that satisfy most customers’ needs and preferences along the same or similar dimensions of performance as before, but at significantly lower cost. An example from the world of finance is the invention by Vanguard of mutual funds tied to market indices (e.g, the S&P 500). Index funds offered similar investment opportunities to traditional actively-managed mutual funds (including the ability to target particular regions or sectors) and were perceived as roughly comparable products by investors, but had expense ratios (i.e., costs to customers) that in some cases were almost an order of magnitude lower.

In the world of artistic endeavor we’ve characterized “cost” as not only an issue of monetary price (i.e., how much people must pay to experience a work) but also as related to the level of attention, engagement, and other effort the audience must devote to experiencing the work. In this sense the introduction of recorded music was a major low-end disruptive innovation, allowing people to experience music without the monetary cost of concert tickets and the non-monetary costs in time of getting to the concert hall. Listening to recorded music was inferior to listening to live music in several respects—sound quality, immediacy of the experience, the social aspect, and so on—but audiences were willing to overlook that in exchange for the reduced cost and increased convenience. This trade-off is characteristic of low-end disruptive innovations.

With new-market disruption some vendors find ways to offer new products that enable new uses by either existing or new customers, and that typically address customers’ needs and preferences along different dimensions of performance than before. As noted previously, mobile phone service was a disruptive innovation relative to traditional phone service, allowing existing phone customers to make calls in situations where this was previously impossible. The very first mobile phone customers cared relatively little about voice quality (traditionally among the most important dimensions of performance for telephony) and much more about new dimensions of performance: the size and weight of the handset itself, the geographic extent of the service areas, and the relative convenience of roaming between cellular networks.

I’ve already alluded to minimalist music as a disruptive innovation with respect to the modernist idiom that was prevalent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Another interesting example of disruptive innovation in music occurred in the early 1990s in the context of the popular musical genre electronic dance music (EDM). With roots in disco and related genres, EDM (as the name implies) was created for listening in nightclubs, at raves, and in similar social contexts, and the prioritized dimensions of performance were those like simple song structure, a steady and pronounced beat, and rapid tempo that were conducive to dancing. (These were also present in many minimalist compositions, of course; in The Rest is Noise Alex Ross notes the influence of composers such as Steve Reich on EDM.)

Sustaining innovations within EDM (e.g., increasing the beats per minute) produced improvements along existing dimensions of performance relevant to social dancing, but overshot the needs of listeners who wanted to listen to electronic music at home or in other solitary contexts. Intelligent dance music or IDM, while recognizably grounded in EDM, emphasized different qualities of the music—for example, more variations in timbre and more experimental song structure—that were more important and valued in the context of home listening. IDM allowed EDM fans to listen to variants of their favorite music in the home instead of in clubs, and also attracted new listeners who were not previously going to clubs. By thus supporting new uses and users IDM was a classic new-market disruptive innovation relative to existing EDM works.

Note that new-market disruptive innovations do not compete directly against existing products in the exact same markets addressed by those products. Instead they “compete against non-consumption” as Christensen puts it. Translated into the world of music this means that we should not necessarily expect disruptive musical innovations to compete for and win the loyalties of existing audiences in existing contexts; instead new music would typically give rise to new audiences, or at least new contexts in which existing audiences might experience that new music.

Overlapping vs. independent value networks

Following on from the preceding point, disruptive innovations don’t just give rise to new markets. Truly successful disruptive innovations simultaneously both depend on and give rise to entirely new value networks (defined above as “[a firm’s] upstream suppliers; its downstream customers, retailers, and distributors; and its partners and ancillary industry players”).

For example, early transistor radios were a disruptive innovation relative to traditional tube-based radios (SWN, 157): They were both cheaper and lighter than existing radios (albeit inferior in sound to tube-based radios), and so could be adopted by new users like teenagers for new uses like listening to radio outside the house. (As Christensen notes, “Even the poorest of sound qualities delighted teenagers, because for most of them, the alternative was to have no radio at all.”) Tube-based radios were typically sold by specialty appliance stores that were equipped to provide the post-sale service that such appliances required. Such stores had no interest in selling cheap radios that were designed to be replaced rather than repaired in the event of a problem. However transistor radios were perfect for the newly emerging discount stores (e.g., K-Mart) since they could be sold cheaply in high volumes and required no post-sale maintenance.

If the value network for a disruptive innovation overlaps too much with the value network for existing products then the disruptive force of the new innovation may be blunted “When there are overlapping suppliers, distribution networks, sales forces, or ancillary providers, firms can face severe pressure to create something that makes sense to the [incumbent] competitor’s value network and hence makes sense to the competitor.” (SWN, 63) This overlap allows incumbent vendors to either directly impede new market entrants (e.g., through particular “choke points” controlled by incumbents), or to compete with new entrants by co-opting particular features of the new products into their own.

In the context of music the value network associated with composers and their works includes performers (both individual and ensembles), critics and musicologists, music schools (teaching both performance skills and compositional techniques), performance venues and the organizations that control them, concert promoters, record labels, individual and institutional patrons, prize committees, and so on. Kyle Gann’s writings on the “downtown” and “uptown” music scenes offer a classic picture of one value network resisting disruptive innovations, with attempts to create a new value network in response.

Integrated vs. modular solutions

The association of successful disruptive innovations with new value networks is related to another aspect of disruptive innovation, namely the extent to which successful disruptive products are created in a vertically integrated fashion, with a monolithic (as opposed to modular) architecture. As noted previously, disruptive innovations are typically objectively inferior to existing products when judged against the prevailing criteria: they are designed to be cheaper at the expense of lower performance and/or are designed to meet an entirely different set of criteria. In order to be successful disruptive innovations must be designed to be as good as they possibly can be given the cost targets they must meet and the new contexts in which they’ll be used.

The best way for a vendor to do this is to develop, manufacture, and distribute the product in an integrated manner, controlling as many of the aspects as needed in order to achieve the desired customer experience. This point is at the core of the “value chain evolution” (VCE) theory, the third component of Christensen’s overall theoretical framework (after disruptive innovation theory and the resources, processes, and values (RPV) theory):

The [VCE] theory suggests companies ought to control any activity or combination of activities within the value chain that drive performance along dimensions that matter most to customers. Directly controlling, or integrating, an activity gives companies the ability to run experiments and push the frontiers of what is possible. . . .

Consider IBM’s early mainframe computers. IBM needed to improve the mainframe’s overall performance. It integrated the design and assembly processes for individual components and the entire computer. Complete control gave IBM the design freedom to experiment and improve mainframes to meet customer needs. A modular, nonintegrated strategy would have produced an underperforming product that customers would have rejected. (SWN, xix)

This integrated approach is also characteristic of newly-introduced disruptive innovations in music and other arts. For example, we see innovative composers exercising control over as many aspects of the overall musical experience as needed to achieve success for their innovations: designing new instruments or making their own idiosyncratic uses of existing instruments, creating their own ensembles, embedding their works within a larger philosophical framework, prioritizing live performances over recordings or written scores, or even building their own performance spaces.

This reach for control could simply be laid to the personality of particular artists; however it can also be thought of as a practical response to the problem of creating disruptive aesthetic innovations. Also, control need not be total—it need extend only to those aspects of the work that are most critical to improving performance along the dimensions that are most important to demanding customers (remembering again that the artist is often the most demanding customer of all).

Christensen contends that over time the need for complete integration lessens as companies learn to modularize products and outsource some aspects to others:

Modular architectures that facilitate (or permit) disintegration sacrifice raw performance in the name of speed to market, responsiveness, and convenience. This sacrifice allows companies to customize their products by upgrading individual subsystems without needing to redesign an entire product. They can mix and match components from best of breed suppliers to respond conveniently to individual customers’ needs. (SWN, xx)

Modular architectures are made possible by the creation of standard interfaces between components that allow specification of the desired inter-modular behavior, verification that the behavior is as designed, and predictability that the correct behavior will always occur (SWN, 283). In the context of music modularization of the aesthetic experience has been made possible by the invention of various forms of musical notation, the invention of various tunings and their eventual replacement by the “equal temperament” system, the invention and standardization of new instruments and types of instruments, the classification of voice types both at the gross level (e.g., bass, baritone, tenor) and with more specificity (e.g., by Fach), and the invention and standardization of various types of ensembles (e.g., the string quartet or the symphony orchestra), among others. All of these form the context within which sustaining musical innovations can be created.

As implied by the term “value chain evolution” the introduction of modularization can change the nature of an industry, most notably by allowing perceived value (and the consequent economic rewards) to migrate from one part of the value chain to another. For example, in the PC industry the introduction of standard “IBM-compatible” hardware interfaces and the MS-DOS operating system APIs allowed the perceived value and realized profits to shift from the manufacturer of the PC itself (IBM) to the suppliers of the microprocessor (Intel) and the operating system and major applications (Microsoft).

In the field of music this tendency is accelerated by the fact that composers’ works live on past their own deaths and in the limit pass into the public domain, at which point they have no economic value in and of themselves. The focus then shifts to others in the value chain: While there is no possibility for further evolution in the works of (say) Beethoven, individual performers and ensembles can compete to produce new interpretations of Beethoven, and the most successful (according to the prevailing standards of taste and virtuosity) will be rewarded accordingly.

In the extreme case of the industrial-era symphony orchestra almost all value accrues to the conductor / music director as the “systems integrator” of the aesthetic experience, as almost every other component in the musical value chain becomes fungible. The focus then shifts to the ability of the conductor to elicit a high level of performance from the orchestra, create novel interpretations of individual works, and combine multiple works into an interesting program.

Asymmetric skills and motivations in competitive battles

What happens when new market entrants introduce a disruptive innovation into existing markets? Assuming that the new market entrants do not fail due simply to poor execution, there are two general possible outcomes: The new market entrants and their disruptive innovations thrive and perhaps even displace the incumbent vendors, or the disruptive innovations get co-opted by incumbent vendors.

Success and even displacement due to disruptive innovation can occur when new entrants are protected by the “shield of asymmetric motivation” and are able to wield the “sword of asymmetric skill,” as Christensen puts it (SWN, 43–45). Asymmetric motivation occurs when incumbent vendors view disruptive innovations as having limited market opportunities, a potential customer base that is undesirable relative to the incumbents’ current customers, and no potential for profitability given the incumbents’ current business models. Protected by the unwillingness of incumbents to exploit the disruptive innovations, new market entrants can then develop asymmetric skills, i.e., unique ways of doing things that incumbent vendors cannot match, and that can potentially be used to compete with incumbents:

A company’s skills come largely from its processes. A process comes from repeatedly solving a particular class of problem. . . . Asymmetric skills arise when one firm, through repeatedly completing the same task, has developed a unique ability to do something that its competitor is uniquely unable to do. (SWN, 44)

For example, in the late 1900s Western Union was focused on providing long-distance telegraphy for business and was not motivated to worry about telephone service, which at that time was local only and primarily for personal use. Protected by this lack of motivation, telephone companies, most notably AT&T, were able to build critical skills in network operations, billing, and so on.

Kyle Gann’s “Breaking the Chain Letter: An Essay on Downtown Music” offers an example of this in the aesthetic realm:

Quite often, Downtown composers are lacking in skills that a European conservatory would consider essential to a composer’s education: orchestration, counterpoint, 12-tone set manipulation. Downtowners, however, have their own sets of skills—just intonation, sound processing, South Indian rhythmic cycles—that are more intimately relevant to the music they’re trying to create.

In essence Downtown composers developed a unique set of compositional techniques and processes in the course of repeatedly attempting to solve a particular class of musical problems; these were asymmetric skills in relation to those of Uptown composers.

Downtown composers and others working in similar spaces were then able to use these asymmetric skills over time to create works that addressed dimensions of performance similar to those addressed by traditional modernist composers. For example, early minimalist music was criticized for its lack of depth (though of course in historical context this was more a virtue than a failing). However over time composers working in such idioms as postminimalism and totalism were able to build on minimalist techniques and produce works of comparable depth to traditional modernist compositions.

In the case of telephony companies such as AT&T were eventually able to leverage their asymmetric skills to move from providing local service to providing long-distance service, and eventually displaced Western Union as the dominant provider of long-distance communications for businesses. An analogous example of displacement in the aesthetic realm is the rise of hip-hop and its competition with rock to become the most popular musical genre in the US and elsewhere.

In the decades since rock and roll’s creation in the early 1950s rock artists used a standard set of compositional techniques (originally derived from the blues), instrumentation (most notably the electric guitar), ensemble structure (the classic rock band featuring lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, and drums), and other aesthetic innovations to become the dominant popular music genre and achieve worldwide success. As part of that process rock artists were able to move up-market to satisfy the needs of more demanding listeners, in the process almost totally displacing existing genres like jazz.

When hip-hop was invented in the 1970s hip-hop artists used a much simpler set of aesthetic resources than their rock contemporaries, at heart just a beat and spoken words. As an outgrowth of urban dance culture hip-hop initially addressed a much different market than that of rock (traditionally focused on white suburban teenagers and the adults they became). It was also evaluated along different dimensions of performance (e.g., the quality and novelty of beats and samples, cleverness in rhyming, and verbal facility and “flow”) and gave rise to a separate value network (e.g., new distribution mechanisms for hip-hop releases that bypassed the traditional major recording labels)—all hallmarks of a classic disruptive innovation.

Because hip-hop did not compete for the same audiences and share the same value networks as rock, traditional rock artists were not motivated to competely directly with hip-hop in its initial market. Under this shield of asymmetric motivation hip-hop artists were then able to develop asymmetric skills—for example, the ability to achieve aesthetic depth through building a dense collage of samples (as in Public Enemy’s releases).

As hip-hop evolved (most notably with the advent of gangsta rap in the 1980s) it was eventually able to take over the original (and still relevant) job of rock, namely to provide a compelling vision of rebellion and excess to white suburban teenagers. In this context hip-hop can be seen as a low-end disruptive innovation that could accomplish the same job as rock but in a simpler (in our context, “lower cost”) manner, both from the point of view of producers (since hip-hop could be produced by a single person working alone) and consumers (since hip-hop’s elements were stripped down and thus arguably required less engagement to produce an aesthetically satisfying effect on the listener). Thus hip-hop was able to displace rock in many of rock’s traditional markets.

However would-be disruptors are not always successful. In many cases incumbent vendors are able to fend off competitive threats by co-opting disruptive innovations, i.e., incorporating them in some manner in their existing products and business models. For example, as noted above mobile phone service was originally a disruptive innovation relative to traditional wireline telephony, enabling users to make calls in new contexts, and as such was pioneered by new market entrants (e.g., McCaw Cellular), not the incumbent service providers.

However in the end incumbent vendors were able to co-opt wireless telephony and incorporate it into their service offerings, either through acquiring existing cellular providers (as AT&T did with McCaw) or by building their own cellular networks through dedicated subsidiaries (e.g., Verizon Wireless). As Christensen and his co-authors note (SWN, 64), this co-option was made possible in large part because of overlapping markets and value networks: Wireless providers focused on integrating their own offerings with the existing landline networks and with those of other wireless providers, so that wireless service came to be seen by consumers as simply an extension of traditional phone service. This in turn enabled incumbent telephone companies to leverage their traditional strengths in network operations and interconnection, billing, and so on, to provide wireless services as good as or better than what new entrants could provide.

Analogous attempts to co-opt disruptive innovations can occur in music and other arts. In some cases attempts at co-option are really just “cramming” as defined by Christensen: “trying to stretch an underperforming disruptive innovation to meet the needs of demanding customers in a mainstream market” (SWN, 292). One thinks for example of many of the early lame attempts to incorporate rapping into rock music, or the more risible experiments in enlivening orchestral performances by including rock musicians. In other cases attempts at co-option can achieve some success but still not protect incumbents against displacement. For example, the attempts by Miles Davis and others to incorporate elements of rock into jazz spawned the relatively popular “fusion” subgenre but did not ultimately prevent rock displacing jazz in overall popularity.

In general successful co-option is more likely when incumbents are motivated to respond, when they have resources, processes, and values similar to those of new entrants, and when the respective value networks overlap. As an example, many contemporary classical composers and performers are attempting to go after new markets by introducing more informal performance practices, playing in more casual venues, organizing in smaller and more flexible ensembles, and the like—essentially trying to attract many of the same listeners who currently make up the audience for indie rock and pop.

I think this is a great idea, and I myself am a fan of several of these artists; however I’m not sure that “indie classical” will ultimately be successful as an independent movement. After all, rock has already successfully incorporated practices such as creating extended instrumental compositions (as in post-rock), using classical instruments and orchestration (as in chamber pop), and others traditionally associated with classical music. It’s not out of the question that rock could incorporate even more classically-derived elements.

The value networks for indie classical and indie rock also overlap significantly: they appeal to many of the same listeners, are played in some of the same venues, reviewed in some of the same publications, and so on. Many contemporary classical artists also perform or collaborate with indie rock artists. If I were a betting man I’d lay odds that the majority of what we know today as the contemporary classical (or “new music”) scene will not survive as an autonomous movement but rather be absorbed into the broader indie rock genre as rock (or at least certain segments of it) moves relentlessly up-market in response to competitive pressures from below.

Suggestions for further research

This concludes (finally!) my sketch of the possible connections between Clayton Christensen’s ideas and aesthetic innovation in music and other arts. When all is said and done this might simply be an example of muddled thinking and forced analogies carried out to absurd length. However if there are any useful insights at all contained within this post, it’s worth taking a moment to outline some ways in which this picture could be filled out:

• One could do a full treatment of the “jobs to be done” by music and other arts. As I noted previously, I think that some of the answers here are to be found in human physiology and psychology, and other answers in sociology and economics.
• One could also construct a reasonably comprehensive list of the dimensions of performance against which aesthetic experiences might be evaluated. This would essentially be a formalization and expansion of the ideas on aesthetic virtues and their combinations discussed by Gann, supplemented perhaps by some other dimensions of performance relevant to music’s social and economic aspects.
• An investigation of the historical evolution of music or other arts could identify candidates for sustaining or disruptive innovations. Such an investigation would look at the exact techniques used by artists to create sustaining innovations, as well as the ways in which disruptive innovations were characterized by new dimensions of performance and new uses and users. A full treatment would also address how disruptive innovations were either co-opted by existing movements or eventually succeeded in displacing them, including the effects of the value networks associated with particular artists and artistic movements.
• Finally, if the overall theoretical framework seems robust based on the historical evidence then it could be used to predict future developments in the arts, including identifying areas where nonconsumption presents opportunities for new disruptive innovations, and projecting whether nascent artistic movements are likely to be successful or not.

If this outline is indeed of interest to anyone then perhaps they’ll be willing and able to take it further. For myself this will be the last word, as I’ve gone much further than my very limited knowledge might justify and have exhausted anything useful I might have to say on this general subject.

Glyn Moody (glynmoody) ’s status on Sunday, 06-Sep-09 08:20:46 UTC - Identi.ca - 2009-09-06 08:20

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[…] Music and the theory of disruptive innovation Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation was originally formulated in the context of technology-based businesses (e.g., computer companies), and thus our basic strategy is to equate the world of art with the world of business at a fairly deep level. (If this offends you please stop reading now.) […]

Spinning Beach Ball of Death is one of those works that most decidedly depends on one’s knowledge of “external facts” to elicit a proper appreciation. The naïve viewer will see simply a rainbow-colored paper circle spinning around. Clearly the circle is reminiscent of a beach ball, and as a first order analysis they might note the incongruity between the image of a child’s toy and the mention of death and conclude that the artist has given the work this particular title in order to invoke a particular set of emotional associations (e.g., a sea-side vacation tragically interrupted by a child’s death by drowning).

However in this case a naïve viewer would be very hard to find. Anyone who’s ever used a Mac, which includes pretty much everyone in the artworld, would immediately recognize the image as being that of the spinning wait cursor (to use its official name) that indicates that an application running under OS X is being unresponsive. The name “spinning beach ball of death” was not created by the artist, but is instead one of the many colloquial terms coined by Mac users to refer to this cursor. (Others include “pinwheel of death,” “marble of doom,” and so on).

OK, we get it: Strange has simply appropriated the image and placed it in another context to make an artwork. The work’s title, rather than being arbitrarily incongruous, reflects the dread Mac users feel when they see the cursor appear and know that the application they’re using may have some sort of unrecoverable problem. Of course this emotion can’t really be equated with the true dread of mortality, but that’s part of the joke: It’s a toy sort of dread, and as such its representation by a childish image is quite appropriate.

But let’s not stop there: Why instantiate this particular image in physical form, and a rather crude form at that? One possibility is that Strange is making some sort of statement about the contrasts between the virtual world and the physical world. (Or, alternatively, viewers might plausibly infer some sort of statement, whether intended by the artist or not.) What might that statement be?

Let’s go back to the original context: An OS X application showing the spinning wait cursor is not literally dead, i.e., it hasn’t crashed or “abended” (to use a delightfully antique term). On earlier Mac operating systems predecessors of the spinning wait cursor (e.g., the image of a watch) indicated that the application was engaged in some lengthy operation. We can imagine users impatiently glancing at their own watches as the virtual watch is simultaneously displayed onscreen.

However for OS X Apple not only gave the wait cursor a more colorful and dynamic appearance (perhaps to give users something prettier to look at while waiting?), it also changed the meaning of the cursor. To quote Wikipedia:

Rather than being an indication that an application was performing an action it expected to take a while, it meant that the system software had noticed that an application had stopped responding to events. This could indicate that the application was in an infinite loop, or just performing a lengthy operation and ignoring events.

Put simply, in OS X the spinning wait cursor indicates that the application is in a digital coma. It may wake up and resume normal functioning, or it may stay forever in the virtual equivalent of a persistent vegetative state. The dread associated with the spinning wait cursor is a dread provoked by uncertainty, both of what might happen and of one what should do. Should one simply wait to see what the application does, or should one deliberately terminate (“force quit”) the application (and thus risk losing one’s work)?

So, as with g, Spinning Beach Ball of Death can be seen as a kind of memento mori, reminding us not of death itself but of the possibility of being trapped in a “living death,” becoming a “vegetable” suspended in a state between consciousness and final oblivion.

All cultures have a rich iconography of death—skulls and skeletons, tombstones, the sickle of the Grim Reaper, and so on. There is no exactly analogous iconography for comas, persistent vegetative states, and related syndromes, perhaps because historically it would have been rare for anyone to exist in a prolonged coma: People lacked either the technical or the economic means to keep a coma victim alive for any length of time, so that the idea of the sleeper who would not wake was for the most part confined to legends and fairy tales, for example Briar Rose (“Sleeping Beauty”) or Snow White. In contrast, modern medical technology and economic affluence enable us to keep people in persistent vegetative states alive almost indefinitely. Spinning Beach Ball of Death provides an emblem for that state, one drawn from the world of technology—a fitting choice, given the role of technology in prolonging the coma victim’s life.

This may help account for why the work is physical in nature, not virtual. But why is it executed so crudely—the paper not cut in a perfect circle, the colors seemingly filled in using crayons (not painted), the spiral lines irregularly drawn? (The crudeness is reinforced even more in an unauthorized YouTube video of the work.) Perhaps it echos the crudeness and messiness of physical being: In the virtual world the unresponsive application persists in perfect stasis, and given a suitable computing substrate could remain so till the world’s end. In the physical world coma victims are nothing like the perfectly preserved princesses of fairy tales: they urinate and defecate, their bodies atrophy and decay, just as Spinning Beach Ball of Death will eventually decay now that it has been removed from its virtual origins. There is also something pathetic and even a bit tawdry in the crudeness of the work that reminds one of the public controversies that raged over the comatose forms of Karen Ann Quinlan, Terry Schiavo, and others.

A final contrast between the world of the spinning beach ball of death and the world of Spinning Beach Ball of Death: Even if you have to force-quit an unresponsive application you can still re-launch it, and if the application is well-designed you’ll lose little or even no work—the application might have suffered a brief spell of virtual amnesia, but nothing more. In the real world if one is forced to “pull the plug” (again, note the technological metaphor) then the resulting death is final and irrevocable. Some may have faith in the resurrection to come, but Spinning Beach Ball of Death provides neither hint nor hope of it.

Like g, Spinning Beach Ball of Death was acquired by MoMA for its permanent collection. Again I think they made a good choice. I’ll be checking out more of Strange’s art, but of what I’ve seen thus far these two works have made the most impression on me and provoked the most thought.

UPDATE: Fixed the URL pointing to the MoMA site.

The announcement for Strange’s “Wallowing” exhibit at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery describes g as follows:

Simplicity of means and materials used to evocative ends . . . characterizes “g,” a white laptop with a large ball of lead sitting on the “g” key, creating an endless string of the letter, which will continue until the laptop fails. The effect is ghostly and hypnotic.

I consider this pretty much first-order analysis, not much advanced over my own “OK . . .” stage.

An ArtSlant Berlin review of Strange’s exhibit at Maribel Lopez Gallery mentions g in passing and contains another comment relevant to it:

In works such as g (2008) or Study group (2008), Strange’s humour turns menacing and suggests the break-up of the ego and loss of meaning. . . . An illuminating way of assessing Strange’s overall project might be to turn to the idea of invocation. Invocations do not draw on reasoning, but on thoughts cut short and unfinished sentences - they do not try to explain anything, but rather seek to create a mood conducive to portent and magic. This mood is best achieved by repetition.

I think the “menacing” comment is spot-on; g does induce a sense of foreboding, analogous to that caused by a ticking bomb—you know something is going to happen, but you don’t know when or what. The second part of the sentence seems to draw an analogy between the “ego” and the ordered rational operation of the laptop application; I can see that applying as well. However I think any “meaning” in the laptop’s “mind” is superficially simple and bare; hence the analogy to an invocation made more forceful via repetition.

Finally, Strange himself spoke about g in an interview conducted by Ryan Gander:

When I asked him if [g] was durational, his reply was that the work was as durational as the space on the hard disk, and at some point, of course, the application would crash or the hard disk would be devoured. He also pointed out that, physically, and in a very real sense, this laptop—which was then being hailed as a revelation in product design—had been made defunct by this primitive-looking lead sphere, because the glowing LCD screen lid could no longer be closed. He’d transformed it into a spasticated clamshell.

The latter comment echoes my previous comments about the contrast of a heavy dull gray lead sphere pressing on a lightweight shiny white laptop—antiquity (op)pressing modernity. The thought of the laptop as a clamshell is interesting; note that early models of Apple’s iBook laptop were actually referred to as “clamshells.”

As for the work being durational, this is certainly true. It would be interesting to do a classification of the possible types of durational artworks, drawing on ideas from mathematics and elsewhere. For now I’ll limit myself to noting that g falls into that class of works having finite duration but for which the beginning and ending are relatively undetermined in time: Looking at the work, one doesn’t know if the ball started its “fall” a minute ago, or an hour, or a day; the ending time is equally uncertain, though (as Strange notes) we know it must come sometime.

We can make a Fermi estimate of how long g will run. On an Apple laptop running OS X the preference values for keyboard repeat rate can normally be set from 2 to 120; the preference value is then multiplied by 15 milliseconds to get the actual times between the key being repeated. The default value (which I presume Strange used) is 6, corresponding to a key repeat every 90 milliseconds, or about 11.1 key presses per second (1,000 divided by 90). This corresponds to almost a million key presses per day (960,000 to be precise, or 86,400,000 milliseconds per day divided by 90 milliseconds per keypress).

At what point would the repeated key presses cause a problem? The maximum size of the text in a Word document is apparently 32MB. At almost a million key presses a day g would thus run undisturbed for over a month before encountering this limit and causing an error. If we view g as symbolically enacting a literal fall (as I’ll stubbornly continue to do until someone tells me to stop) then this is a rather long one, about four times longer than the nine days Satan fell from heaven in Paradise Lost (starting perhaps from somewhere around the orbit of the moon).

But let’s let our imagination run free and hypothesize that we’re limited only by the size of the hard disk. Since g was apparently created in 2008, we’ll assume that it uses the early 2008 model of the MacBook, which in its cheapest version had a 120GB hard drive. If we assume that the laptop has about 100GB of free disk space after allowing for the operating system, Microsoft Word, and other content, then the disk space would be exhausted in about a hundred thousand days (about 100 billion characters divided by about a million characters typed per day), or almost three hundred years.

This is a fall of much more than Miltonian dimensions; the closest physical equivalent is that of a long-period comet ejected from the Oort cloud and falling toward the Sun from the outer reaches of the solar system. Though apparently such objects pose only a very small risk to Earth, they exemplify the various threats, from asteroids to global warming, that the future might bring. From this perspective g can be seen as a modern memento mori, not for ourselves but for our technological civilization, reminding us that as g sits in a museum counting the days away, our destroyer may even now be departing on its long journey to meet us.

A final note, before I’m done with g for good: The folks at the Museum of Modern Art apparently liked g enough to acquire it for the MoMA permanent collection—certainly a major endorsement of Strange and his work. Not that anyone cares, but I’ll second that endorsement.

Santiago Gala - 2009-08-05 20:19

Thanks for sharing. I liked a lot both the photo and references to this art piece and your comments on its qualities. Three hundred years is more than, but in the same order of magnitude, than what you can expect a building or open air sculpture to stand without needing a heavy restoration, so I guess this is fairly reasonable as a goal, in scope or even more advanced than current “real world” art pieces.

hecker - 2009-08-05 20:28

Santiago: Thanks for your comment. I find it interesting that if “g” were really limited by the size of the hard drive (rather than Word’s limit on maximum document size) then it would likely take longer to complete the piece than the laptop would actually last. In that case the appeal of the work would truly be in imagining the end, not actually experiencing it.

I had that experience recently with Jack Strange’s 2008 work g, which I encountered in a Rhizome post. My initial reaction was a classic “OK . . .” one: OK, it’s a lead ball sitting on a computer keyboard, OK, the pressure of the ball causes the ‘g’ key to auto-repeat until the document gets very long and the computer (allegedly) crashes, but I’m not really seeing it.

Then when I was walking around my neighborhood I had my “aha!” moment: OK, the ball is sitting on the letter ‘g’, and g is the title of the work. But why ‘g’? Why not ‘a’, or ‘z’, or any other letter? Then I remembered: hey, I was a physics major, and I know what g is: it’s the symbol we use in formulas to denote the acceleration of a falling body in the Earth’s gravitational field.

In the idealized world of high school physics, a falling object (say, a heavy lead ball) would accelerate at the rate of about 9.8 meters per second per second, until such time as it hit an intervening object (say, a laptop keyboard). At that point the kinetic energy of the falling ball would be converted into kinetic energy of the key itself as it was depressed, perhaps the kinetic energy of pieces of the key or keyboard as they broke and shattered, and ultimately some thermal energy as the ball, key, and keyboard heated up a bit from the collision. (If, on the other hand, the ball were just sitting on a rigid surface like a table then it would have potential energy by virtue of its position, but nothing else would be happening.)

That was my entry point into the work: g can be seen as (and perhaps was intended as—I haven’t yet read an artist’s statement or critic’s evaluation) a symbolic rendering in software of the physical reality of a falling object: First the work embodies accelerating free fall as the pressure of the ball causes the letter ‘g’ to be typed over and over again, and then the “energy” of the ball ultimately is converted into energy of a different form as the ball collides with the limits of the computer application and OS in a crash of a virtual kind.

(One interesting side point is that after the system crashes someone must manually remove the ball, reboot the system, and restore the work to its initial configuration. This is analogous to the physical work needed to restore a fallen object to its former height, providing it with potential energy to be then (re)converted into kinetic energy when the object is released again.)

Once I had this model in mind it led to a flood of other associations and perceptions, some from physics and some not:

• ‘g’ can stand for Galileo, forever (and apparently apocryphally) identified in the popular mind with having dropped lead balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to illustrate that objects of different masses fall at the same rate.
• ‘g’ also can stand for geometry and general relativity, and anyone who’s read introductions to general relativity will remember the (popular but misleading) model of heavy balls sitting on a rubber sheet used to illustrate how physical objects distort (or, from another perspective, create) the geometry of space-time. Here the set of keys differentially depressed by the ball stands in for the rubber sheet.
• “Gravity” is also used as a term to describe an emotional state, and lead in its heaviness and grey-black dullness is among the most grave of materials. (Recall for example Emily Dickinson’s “This is the hour of lead . . ..”)
• Lead is also both an ancient material and a toxic one—recall the popular legend of the fall of Rome being caused in part by poisoning of the water supply by lead pipes. Here the material is contrasted with the light modern material (plastics and/or aluminum) of the laptop, the old symbolically weighing upon and ultimately destroying the new.
• Lack of time precludes my hunting down links to examples, but the history of art is replete with works juxtaposing circular and spherical forms against rectangular forms. The ball, keyboard, and laptop screen together remind us of a minimalist spherical sculpture installed in a gallery. The resemblance is heightened by the whiteness of the laptop itself, the pedestal on which it sits, and the background, which echo the blank white space of the stereotypical contemporary art gallery.
• Coming back to physics, the laptop keyboard and screen evoke two of the three planes in the Cartesian coordinate system used to represent Euclidean 3-dimensional space, with the ball an object situated within that space.
• Finally, any work involving or alluding to the act of falling can inspire thoughts of famous falls in literature and mythology, from Icarus to Lucifer, as well as the Fall itself.

Are all the above essential parts of what g is really about? Not necessarily, but some at least may have been part of the artist’s intentions. (For example, I think the choice of laptop color was deliberate.) Even the more marginal interpretations are worth noting for the way in which a work can inspire novel and interesting thoughts and emotions in the mind of the person experiencing it.

I should also add that art works, even contemporary ones, can also be experienced simply as works of beauty, not as puzzles to be solved; I remember visiting the Tate Modern and being stopped in my tracks by Donald Judd’s Untitled (1980). But thinking on a work can be an essential element of experiencing it; g has entered my life in a deeper way than when I first saw it, and I feel that I now “own” it just as much as the person or institution in whose gallery it’s now sitting.

UPDATE: See my follow-up post for more thoughts on g.

Back in my obsessive phase one of the books I read and enjoyed was But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland. It’s a good introduction to definitions and theories of art, especially as applied to some of the “edge cases” of art produced over the last hundred years. (It also quotes and endorses one of the better definitions of art I’ve read: “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium.”) I’d recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about what’s going on in the “artworld.”

Even without getting into deep philosophical questions, it’s clear that familiarity and context are two important (and related) factors in understanding art. Anyone who regularly enjoys watching music videos encounters and appreciates artistic techniques that would have been totally alien to almost anyone living 50 years ago, let alone people living 100 or 1,000 years ago. Many of those techniques were pioneered in contemporary art of the past, and then crossed over into popular culture. We recognize such techniques as being deployed in an identifiable context (we know what a music video is, and how it is different than other video forms like sitcoms, news reports, or televised sports events), and by watching hundreds of videos we learn to see connections among different examples of the form and with the larger world of culture and society, and acquire at least a rough ability to judge relative aesthetic worth.

Appreciating contemporary art is essentially no different. Like a lot of cultural endeavors it can be a fun game for those who play it and/or watch it, and in its better moments it can be something more than just a game. I’m the rankest of amateurs at it, but occasionally even I can understand and appreciate what’s happening on the field.

The Juicer - 2009-07-19 14:49

Nice post Frank, very lucid. I love Art, in all forms. To me expression in any form is beautiful. And I guess, I am biased in that sense. But yes, at times I do feel challenged when viewing and apprising contemporary works of art. I would love to read more from you on this topic, you have touched upon it in a very relatable manner (oh that’s not a word!:D). I will be checking out ‘But is it Art?’ right away!

Gerv - 2009-07-19 15:12

As the colleague in the discussion in question, a clarification or two: I said some contemporary art wasn’t art, and that the title of the shark work was very pretentious. I didn’t say the shark wasn’t art. I remembered the title because I’d been having exactly the same conversation with someone else by email a few days before and had looked it up at the time. Although I admit the title is sticky - but only because of its pretentiousness. And the art is iconic. My example of stuff which wasn’t art was the copy of International Klein Blue hanging in Tate Modern. Having said all that, I am quite happy to concede your point that art appreciation and criticism is a skill to be acquired. Gerv

hecker - 2009-07-20 13:38

Gerv, my apologies for mischaracterizing your position. For what it’s worth you’re correct, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” is in fact a pretentious title; that may be part of the point. (Though to be honest a lot of artwork titles are pretentious.) However I disagree with you regarding IKB. If we’re going to accord art status to monochromatic works (which I think we should, and certainly the art world has accepted them as such), then I think IKB qualifies, especially given its status as the personal expression of Yves Klein.

Like almost all my obsessive interests my exploration of contemporary art eventually waned. I recycled my issues of Artforum and other magazines, though I kept all my art books and still go to exhibits a couple of times a year. However my interest was recently revived by a discussion about a possible work-related project (about which I’ll blog further in future, if and when the project goes forward). I’m not diving back into the deep end just yet, but I did revisit Rhizome, a web site devoted to uses of new technologies in art that used to be one of my favorite resources. I’m subscribed to their blog feed and likely will occasionally check out some of the discussions as well.

I’m also starting an art category on my blog, so that I’ve somewhere to put the occasional art-related post I’m moved to write. I feel a couple coming on now, so perhaps this won’t forever be the only post in this category.