Make,share,review,remix: Unpacking the impact of the internet on contemporary creativity

Abstract

This article advances a holistic framework that aims to facilitate a better understanding of the nuanced impact of the internet on contemporary creative participation. Functioning simultaneously as the context, locus, and medium for creative activity, the internet affects each stage in the life cycle of a creative product – creation, distribution, interpretation, and remix. In addition, this influence is felt in a wide range of creative products: off-line and online, professional and vernacular. Previous research has not examined these different processes and types of creative output in conversation with each other; by advancing an integrative analytical approach and synthesizing research from multiple domains, this work attempts to address this gap. As a way to illuminate this impact and demonstrate the value of the proposed framework, the article applies this framework to three case studies: a work of off-line art (The Artist Is Present), online art (Moon), and online nonart or vernacular online creativity (Pepe the Frog memes). This analysis facilitates a deeper understanding of these interrelated processes, attends to the complex ways in which new media blurs the borders between those categorizations, and discusses the potential implications of these complex contemporary dynamics.

Keywords

Art digital art memes new media online creativity vernacular creativity

The field of art and creativity has experienced significant change as new media technologies permeate all aspects of cultural life. More and more artists are using the internet as a platform for creative works; internet-based art is on the rise (Cornell and Halter, 2015), and it is experimenting, increasingly, with participatory approaches to engage digital publics (Literat, 2012). Online platforms and social media are teeming with the products of everyday digital creativity, from memes to YouTube videos to digital art. In addition, many contemporary artists also draw heavily on user-generated content, further blurring boundaries between art and vernacular creativity, and engaging in complex practices of digital remix and appropriation (Halter, 2015; Olson, 2008).

Online spaces fulfill important functions in the distribution, promotion, and commercialization of creative work, from fine art online marketplaces like Artsy or Saatchi Art to platforms like Etsy, which focus on handmade goods and a wide variety of arts and crafts. Contemporary art, so often perceived by the general public as inaccessible or elitist, is welcoming new audiences through web-based means of consumption and criticism. For example, on The Art Assignment, an online video series created in partnership with PBS Digital Studios, artists describe their practice in short videos, and then give viewers an open-ended ‘assignment’ – for example, ‘Find an object you feel bad for [and] fix it in your own style’ (Shpungin, 2015) – which is then to be uploaded and shared publicly. Platforms such as Yelp make it easier to share vernacular reviews of art shows and museums (Droitcour, 2014) with a more ‘casual’, ‘direct’, and ‘personal’ style than that of formal art criticism in professional venues (Gat, 2013).

Such examples begin to demonstrate the nuanced and often subtle ways in which the internet – as a context, locus, and medium for creative activity – shapes the contemporary field of creative practice, in terms of the public’s engagement with art and creativity, as well as the practices of creators themselves. The key argument advanced here is that the impact of the internet within this domain is multifaceted and complex and that, in order to adequately understand this impact, we need to look at all the key stages in the life cycle of a creative product – (1) creation/production, (2) exhibition/distribution, (3) interpretation/criticism, and (4) appropriation/remix – and at the different kinds of creative products that illustrate these contemporary changes: off-line art, online art, and online nonart.¹ As a way to illuminate this impact and demonstrate the value of the proposed framework, I will apply this framework to three case studies: a work of off-line art (The Artist Is Present), online art (Moon), and online vernacular creativity (Pepe the Frog memes).

The Artist Is Present (Figure 1) was a performance by artist Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in the spring of 2010. Individual museum visitors were invited to sit in a chair facing Abramovic, and maintain eye contact with her for as long as the visitor chose to remain there, which ranged from a few minutes to several hours. The second case study, Moon (Figure 2), is a digital art project, by contemporary artists Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson (2013), which exists entirely online and invites global visitors to create imagery for display on a virtual moon surface at https://www.moonmoonmoonmoon.com/. The third case study, Pepe the Frog (Figure 3), is an internet meme based on an anthropomorphic frog character from the comic series Boy’s Club by Matt Furie. Various incarnations of Pepe have been used as reaction memes – including Feels Good Man, Sad Pepe, Angry Pepe, Smug Pepe, and Well Meme’d – making it one of the most prominent and widely shared memes of 2016 (Know Your Meme, 2017).

Figure 1.

Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, at the Musuem of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, 2010. Image by Andrew Russeth via Flickr.

Figure 2.

Ai Weiwei and Olafur Elliason, Moon (screenshot).

Figure 3.

Pepe the Frog memes. Left to right: Feels Good Man, Smug Pepe, and Well Meme’d.

Each of the four sections – creation/production, exhibition/distribution, interpretation/criticism, and appropriation/remix – will begin by integrating relevant literature, then discussing the nature and scope of the impact of the internet on that particular domain, within the spheres of off-line art, online art, and online vernacular creativity, exemplified by the case studies described above. However, it is important to note that these four key stages, which will represent the focus of this inquiry, are not always neatly defined; in many cases, they overlap or blend together in ways that make them almost indistinguishable.

Indeed, this complexity is an important motive for the current work. In comparing multiple types of creative products (digital and nondigital, professional and vernacular) and considering the interrelation between content generation and other cognate processes, this article aims to introduce a more nuanced framework than earlier theorizations of the impact of the internet on art, such as Couchot’s (2002) discussion of ‘digital hybridization’. While Couchot did consider the impact of digital media on multiple processes beyond production, and while the concept of digital hybridization as emerging aesthetic is certainly useful, the present framework allows for a fuller analysis and a deeper understanding of comparative dynamics. In particular, by comparing the impact on digital and nondigital works, it extends the discussion to include an examination of how the conditions of the internet also shape off-line art. Furthermore, by considering both professional and vernacular art, this framework also addresses gaps in the literature that focus on one or the other; for example, Huhtamo (2006) and Dyson (2005) focus on new media’s effect on high or professional ‘art’, while Milner (2016), Bruns (2008), or Burgess (2006) focus on new media’s enabling of vernacular creativity. Crossing over the divides between professional and vernacular and between digital and nondigital helps reveal not only the artificiality or blurriness of those lines but also the ways in which the internet is affecting the conditions for creative expression and consumption more broadly.

Production/creation

Whereas artists working in traditional media may upload and share their work online, since the 1990s, a growing number of artists have used the internet as a locus for the creation of their work (Greene, 2004; Olson, 2008; Tribe et al., 2006). Internet art is named as such because the internet is the site of its performance (Lin, 2005); code itself may be thought of as the medium. Furthermore, the impact of new media technologies on the evolution of creative practice is not limited to the professional art sphere; it has also shaped the field of vernacular online creativity. As online platforms for making art become increasingly accessible and widely used, online spaces have seen an explosion of vernacular creative content in the form of memes, YouTube videos, remixes and mash-ups, fan fiction, and many other creative genres and user-generated content. Noting the role of new media in facilitating greater grassroots participation, scholars have referred to these vernacular practices of online creativity as ‘vernacular creativity’ (Milner, 2016), ‘peer production’ (Benkler, 2006), or ‘participatory cultures’ (Jenkins et al., 2006) among others. Several descriptors – such as ‘produsage’ (Bruns, 2008) or ‘prosumption’ (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010) – emphasize the hybrid nature of creative production and the dissolving distinctions between production and consumption. At the same time, it is, of course, a fallacy to think that the impact of the internet on creative production can be identified only in regard to online content; rather, it influences off-line and nondigital creative works as well. In contemporary art criticism, ‘post-internet art’ has emerged as a vibrant, though contested, category. In this context, ‘post-internet refers not to a time ‘after’ the internet, but rather to an internet state of mind – to think in the fashion of the network’ (Archey and Peckham, 2014: 8).

Marina Abramovic’s performance art project, The Artist Is Present, exemplifies the ethos of post-internet art. Abramovic explained how her project – which she describes as being ‘about stillness and about literally doing nothing and being in the present’ – is borne from and a direct response to our contemporary culture of digital hyperconnectivity: ‘we are living in this culture that is so isolated – everything is on the computer, and Twitter and blogs – so the people really lost the self a long time ago and they are so desperate to find something else’ (Abramovic, quoted in Stigh and Jackson, 2010, n.p.). Thus, although the internet is not explicitly part of the work itself, it nonetheless shapes the creative process in very significant ways. Furthermore, the proliferation of participatory art in the past two decades can be explained in part as a response to a perceived erosion of social bonds (Bishop, 2006). By incorporating public participation into the design of the artwork, The Artist Is Present emphasizes the significance of restoring genuine interpersonal connections in a post-internet world; in this sense, the technological aspect – while outwardly missing from the work itself – shapes both the aims and the form of the artwork.

Online art also, often, addresses the human condition of living in a digital culture. Moon depicts the online space as a potential platform to establish interpersonal bonds. Its landing page invites participants to:

connect with others through this space of imagination. Look at other people’s drawings and share them with the world. Be part of the growing community to celebrate how creative expression transcends external borders and internal constraints. We are in this world together. (Weiwei and Eliasson, 2013)

Moreover, in this case, the internet functions as a connector and enabler not only in the outward-facing architecture of the project but also behind the scenes. Due to the Chinese government restricting his international travel, Ai Weiwei could not be physically present to cocreate with his collaborators; thus, it was online technologies - including Skype, back-and-forth iPhone videos, and emails to share code and sketches - that connected Weiwei at his studio in Beijing, to artist Olafur Eliason and curator Marcello Pisu in Berlin, to the team of web developers in New York City (Creators, 2014).

Memes, ‘an integral part of the netizen vernacular’ (Shifman, 2013: 362), provide an interesting comparison to online art. Both use digital tools for artistic expression and live online, potentially reaching similar networked audiences. Yet, such a comparison also illuminates significant differences. For example, in the case of a meme like Pepe the Frog, authors are usually anonymous, and authorship in this case both contributes to and draws on a collective repository of cultural resources (Milner, 2016). While Moon is a collaboration as well, the parameters of collaboration are tightly determined and controlled; in contrast, Pepe is more ad hoc and dynamic. Indeed, memes like Pepe the Frog speak to the function of creativity as a form of communication, lending credence to a distributed view of creativity (Glaveanu, 2014), where vernacular creativity becomes inextricably intertwined with sociality (Milner, 2016).

In considering how the internet shapes the production context across the three cases, it becomes apparent that new media significantly affects the aims and authorship of creative works. The Artist Is Present demonstrates the internet’s influence on the aims of (post-internet) art, even when it does not explicitly play a role in how the art is made. The implications of new media technologies in terms of authorship are especially visible in creative products like memes, where authorship is fundamentally distributed, collective, and most often undetectable, but also in participatory digital art like Moon, which complicate traditional understandings of creative authorship. In Moon, who is the author? Is it Weiwei and Eliasson, the initiators of the project (‘alpha artists’; Literat, 2012), or the contributors who provided the actual content – or perhaps both? This determination is tricky, yet it is crucial, not only for ethical reasons (Literat, 2012), but also because of the social, cultural, and financial privileges that society reserves for cultural creators deemed as artists (Becker, 1984). It is also worth noting that Moon is now closed to further contributions – the home page mentions that the artists decided to end the project in September 2017 – which further reinforces the ‘alpha artist’ status of Weiwei and Eliasson and emphasizes the artistic control that they maintain over the artwork: a type of agency that the contributors do not have.

Exhibition/distribution

For online creative works, the site of production (i.e. the online realm) is also the site of exhibition and distribution. But new media technologies impact the distribution of off-line and nondigital creativity as well:

even if the artist doesn’t put it on the internet, the work will be cast into the internet world, and at this point, contemporary art, as a category, will be forced against its will to deal with this new distribution context, or at least acknowledge it. (McHugh, 2015: 197)

This is evidenced in the proliferation of ever more detailed reproductions (both digital, like the Google Art Project, and physical, like the Van Gogh Museum’s Relievo Collection) which go far beyond what Walter Benjamin could have dreamed of when writing about the mechanical reproduction of art. Furthermore, artwork and artistic experiences are shared widely on online platforms by both museums and individual users. Indeed, museums, galleries, and other art institutions are attuned to the role of social media, and even consider the influence of such channels, particularly Instagram, when making exhibition decisions (Schwab, 2016). In addition, artists’ websites and new distribution and commercialization platforms (from high-end marketplaces like Artsy to more craft-oriented ones like Etsy) make art available for browsing, buying, and collecting at the click of a button. As Joselit (2013: 16) concludes, ‘one could say…that it is saturation through mass circulation – the status of being everywhere at once rather than belonging to a single place – that now produces value for and through images’. In this sense, the internet – as an ‘other' social space that juxtaposes disparate images along multiple spatial and temporal lines – could be considered a heterotopic space (or, more accurately, a collection of heterotopic spaces; Young, 1998 ²), in the same way that Foucault (1986) wrote about the museum as heterotopia.

Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present exemplifies this multi-spatiality enabled by the internet – being simultaneously ‘everywhere’ and in a single place – as well as the idea of saturation via mediated circulation. The work attracted long lines of visitors hoping to sit with the artist, but the number of participants pales in comparison to the artwork’s substantial online audience. There was a live web feed of the performance, and the New York Times reported that close to 800,000 viewers watched online as the performance unfolded (Cotter, 2010); however, the live stream was critiqued by some as a marketing gimmick rather than a meaningful engagement tool (Knight, 2010) and acknowledged by MoMA staff as a controversial and potentially problematic way to engage with performance art (Hart, 2010). The Artist Is Present also lives on through online records of its existence (photos, videos, GIFs, etc.) – both official, as portraits of each participant were assembled in an online gallery – and unofficial (for instance, Tumblr sites like ‘Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry’; see Notopoulos, 2010). The centrality of digitally mediated experiences – the webcast, the photographs, and the user-generated content – in this case is somewhat ironic, given Abramovic’s intention and the rationale of the project. As discussed previously, Abramovic stated that her main motivation concerned a perceived disconnectedness fostered by the internet, yet most people who saw this work did not view it from the participant’s chair in front of Abramovic herself but rather, they viewed pictures or live videos of the performance online.

Moon, as an internet-native artwork realized through collaboration, depends on the internet for exhibition, distribution, and collection. This is reflected in its design and presentation: Moon invites both contributors and viewers to use hashtags for each user-submitted square, and every contribution has a ‘share’ button (for posting on social media or sending via email) and a ‘collect’ button (for pinning specific squares to the visitor’s personal archives). As a work of online art, Moon erodes the separation between production and exhibition. The work is shown where it is also produced, in sharp contrast to the traditional model of the artist working behind closed doors in his studio (Groys, 2015). Furthermore, because of this conflation of production and exhibition – where the online medium replaces the traditional role of the museum or gallery as exhibitor and distributor of art – the context of the art world as legitimator is missing (Groys, 2015), although it is true that the names of the world-renowned artists, Weiwei and Eliasson, are prominently displayed in several places on the website.

Like Moon, memes are also internet-native works and meant for sharing. By definition, as spreadable units of culture (Shifman, 2013), memes are, in a sense, pioneers of digitally mediated circulation and distribution. Here, too, memes stand outside the context of museum or gallery as legitimator, and consequently occupy a more ambiguous status as ‘art’. In contrast to Moon, which is arguably a more aesthetically impressive online work of art, heuristically, memes are generally not considered ‘art’, in large part because of the ‘internet ugly aesthetic’ that they employ to resist elitist connotations (Douglas, 2014). However, the lack of legitimating context, coupled with the heuristic status of the meme as online nonart, poses significant questions regarding the boundaries between art and nonart in the digital age: Specifically, what if an artist had created a meme-like product (or even a meme itself) with the same aesthetic? As I argue elsewhere (Literat, 2017), the designation of creative products as ‘art’ relies on several interrelated considerations; among them, primary are those related to authorship (is it created by an artist, and reflective of an artist’s aesthetic intentions?) and context (does it exist within an ‘art world’, which functions as legitimator?). Given the fact that memes are a product of vernacular, collective creativity – indeed, in most cases authorship is unknown – and given the lack of a legitimating context, memes are not considered art; however, one could imagine that if a professional artist would create a meme or employ the same mode of expression, their creation would indeed be legitimated as art.

As the prototypical spreadable media, memes also illustrate how distribution (which, in the dynamic online environment, cannot be controlled or predicted) can critically change the meaning and valence of creative content. Pepe the Frog is a telling example in this regard, as his adoption by the alt-right movement – following the sharing of Pepe memes by individuals and organizations affiliated with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign (Malmgren, 2017) – led to a significant shift in the meanings associations with Pepe memes. Distribution might also change the value of the meme for specific audiences, as evidenced by the concept of collecting ‘rare’ Pepes. For these audiences, the rarity of the meme increases its value (Applegate and Cohen, 2017; Notopoulos, 2015), while also allowing these audiences to extoll their own expertise and cultural capital as meme connoisseurs (Literat and van den Berg, 2017).

Online art challenges the established exhibition and distribution dynamics of the art market. As Jeremy Strick, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, notes, new media art challenges the fundamental assumptions and foundation of museums, throwing into question: ‘What is a work? How do you collect? What is preservation? What is ownership?’ (quoted in Dietz, 2013: 85). The internet, as a channel for displaying and sharing creative content, is less selective than traditional institutions like museums and galleries (Groys, 2015), but this also becomes a potential problem, as the lack of ‘aesthetic censorship’ can lead to good art drowning in a sea of banality. On the other hand, spatial and temporal constraints do not apply in the online environment, which also means the ability to play to the niches, increase diversity, and cater to the long tail (Leckey, 2015). Jones (2005/2006) argues that web artists pose the greatest challenge to the art world’s consumerist attitude, but this challenge goes even further to the very notion of what it means to create and market art. Internet artists often incorporate these concerns – explicitly and often playfully – into their own art. For instance, just as Moon gives a different (virtualized) meaning to collecting, Anthony Antonellis’ online art plays with notions of exhibition: in put it on a pedestal .com, the viewer is invited to arrange digital objects on a selection of pedestals within a virtual gallery space, while Public Domain presents a random selection of GIFs hung in virtual gilded frames. As illustrated by the comparison between the exhibition and distribution processes that shape our encounter with these examples of off-line art, online art, and online vernacular creativity, there are significant opportunities for the integration of internet art into traditional art institutions, and experimentation with new modes of curation, exhibition, and engagement. Indeed, art institutions are increasingly embracing such opportunities; leading organizations like the MoMA or the Victoria and Albert Museum often commission works of internet art, and the Whitney has even established an online exhibition space, ArtPort, which is entirely dedicated to new media exhibitions.

Interpretation/criticism

Given the evolving nature of our encounters with art, it becomes vital to also consider the role of online networked technologies in shaping how we interpret and talk about art, and whether the internet has caused fundamental changes in how we respond to art because of its role in mediating our encounters with it. In other words, if we are talking about ‘post-internet art’ (Archey and Peckham, 2014), does it also make sense to talk about ‘post-internet interpretation’ or ‘post-internet criticism’? What kinds of reactions, interactions, and modes of interpretation is the internet facilitating or reinforcing or, conversely, discouraging? In an age when everyone – knowledgeable or not, credentialed or not, ‘right’ or not – can publicize their views in online vernacular criticism (Droitcour, 2014), the role of the professional critic is decentered. Variously termed ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ (Rosen, 2006), the ‘everyday amateur expert’ (Kristensen and From, 2015), and ‘internet’ or ‘peer critic’ (Verboord, 2010), public audiences employ new media to voice their opinions and ‘talk back’ to the establishment media producers (van Dijck, 2009), challenging the power dynamic that favored elite or expert critics. As Arora and Vermeylen (2013: 198) remind us, ‘for centuries, the art world has constructed its identity against that of the masses’. Traditional art institutions are very much aware of these cultural shifts and have been embracing their publics’ impulses toward participation, which often includes practices of vernacular criticism; indeed, Proctor (2010: 36) identifies this move on the part of galleries and museums as ‘a transition from Acropolis – that inaccessible treasury on the fortified hill – to Agora, a marketplace of ideas offering space for conversation, a forum for civic engagement and debate, and opportunity for a variety of encounters’.

Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present is a good illustration of the impact of online technologies on arts criticism, given the buzz that the performance generated online; the MoMA’s Flickr account received over 1.7 million views (Museum of Modern Art, 2010), and the live stream had nearly 800,000 hits (Cotter, 2010). The extensive coverage of this artwork in both professional and vernacular online spaces speaks to the way in which the internet amplifies and multiplies all voices: both of professional critics and of everyday people making their opinions known online (Arora and Vermeylen, 2013). A potential visitor to Abramovic’s performance might simultaneously encounter the professional review of the show in The New York Times (which included a critical overview of Abramovic’s body of work and called The Artist Is Present ‘a 700-hour silent opera’; Cotter, 2010) and the humorous Tumblrs about it and her friend’s informal review posted on Facebook; indeed, these different sources are certainly not mutually exclusive, as audience members are exposed to multiple critical perspectives – professional and vernacular – simultaneously. A crucial question that merits further attention is how this context, consisting of unprecedented access to a diversified range of critical perspectives, affects or preconditions one’s experience of the artwork itself (or even the decision of whether to experience it in person or to forego the visit altogether)?

As the collaborative work of two renowned and popular contemporary artists, Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson, Moon has also benefitted from professional criticism (Cembalest, 2013; Cianciotta, 2014), although not to the same extent that The Artist Is Present has. Its reviews focused, in often utopian terms, on notions of mediated global connection: Artnews, for instance, referred to it as ‘the collective work of art in the age of virtual connectivity’ and noted that Moon ‘exists beyond the art world, beyond borders, beyond traditional ideas of authorship and value’ (Cembalest, 2013). Compared to off-line art, however, internet-based art is reviewed less, and most often in specialized forums dedicated to digital culture, such as Rhizome – an organization and online platform focusing on new media art – or, outside the art world, popular tech-focused websites such as Mashable or TechCrunch. Furthermore, critics writing on internet art need to have not only a technical understanding of the infrastructure of the piece but also a deep cultural understanding of new media as both content and context. Many professional critics and curators find this context to be outside their area of expertise (Graham and Cook, 2010), which might explain the comparative scarcity of critical voices in online versus off-line art – although this is gradually changing as internet art is becoming more prominent and increasingly legitimized within the art world.

In the case of memes like Pepe the Frog, the lack of professional criticism does not mean that these creative products are not discussed, evaluated, and sometimes even appraised. Vernacular criticism generated by interest-based participatory cultures (Jenkins et al., 2006) performs the function of professional criticism in the absence of the latter (Literat and van den Berg, 2017), as illustrated by platforms like Know Your Meme (KYM). Relying on the expertise and collective intelligence of its participants, the online community of KYM takes its role as meme critic and researcher seriously. Members devote significant time and energy to documenting internet memes, and disseminating this knowledge within the larger community in the forum of encyclopedia-style entries, reviews, rankings, video primers, forums, and so on. The entry for Pepe the Frog, for instance, includes a well-researched and detailed account – with external references – of the meme’s origin, spread, usage, various incarnations, and cultural impact (Know Your Meme, 2017). Another example is the Reddit community of MemeEconomy, a subreddit devoted to the discussion and appraisal of current memes, which appropriates of stock market jargon to discuss memes as investment-worthy commodities (see Literat and van den Berg, 2017). Members post requests for meme ‘appraisals’, and commenters respond by advising on whether it is safe or risky to ‘invest’ in particular memes – although, unlike the stock market, no real money is involved. Within this community, Pepe memes are among the most popular commodities, as they are considered to be a ‘safe’ investment due to their versatility and cultural relevance (Literat and van den Berg, 2017). Participation in such a community requires cultural connoisseurship, not unlike professional art criticism; furthermore, like in the professional sphere of art criticism, this connoisseurship is considered to translate to accurate appraisals and determinations of value in the context of creative works.

If, as Sontag (1966: 7) wrote, interpretation had become ‘the revenge of the intellectual upon art’, the advent of the internet reverses this dynamic by encouraging responses that are not based on extensive expertise. As vernacular responses that are based on subjectivity and immediacy are celebrated and amplified (Suhr, 2015), perhaps, in some ways, we are witnessing the internet’s revenge upon the intellect’s revenge upon art. At the same time, although the multiplication of platforms for the interpretation and criticism of creative works has the potential to give voice to a broader and more diverse range of perspectives, it is also important not to overly romanticize or idealize these shifts. As Arora and Vermeylen (2013: 197) aptly note, there remain many challenges, including but not limited to the following:

(1) virtual amateur participation still adheres to hierarchical structures; (2) it does not necessarily result in a more equitable say in art valuations; (3) expertise is privileged, not only because of knowledge but also because of institutional linkages, separating them from the amateurs; and (4) the role of participation itself needs to be extricated from the normative assumptions of it being positive and inherently democratic.

Consistent with their caveats, there is also the question of whether wider participation results in better judgments or better understandings of art. Literature in crowdsourcing and online participation has praised the value of collective intelligence in terms of improving quality and accuracy (e.g. Benkler, 2006; Surowiecki, 2005). One could argue that crowd-friendly tasks like estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar are very different endeavors than collectively assessing the value and merit of creative works. However, in a study comparing the decisions of crowds versus experts in regards to funding creative works (more specifically, a theater production), Mollick and Nanda (2016: 1551) reached a similar conclusion, finding significant agreement between the two groups; they conclude that ‘the crowd is more wise than mad, generally agreeing with the experts, and that, on average, the projects selected by the crowd alone seem to do as well as those selected by experts’. Further empirical research is needed in this area, with the aim of adding more nuance and specificity to these initial conclusions.

Remix/appropriation

In the current cultural moment, remix and appropriation practices have gained unprecedented prominence, as content today (both digital and nondigital) is quintessentially dynamic – open to being repurposed, reframed, and injected with new meaning. Scholars have used many terms to describe the movements of creative content across contexts: remix (Jewitt and Yar, 2013; Murray, 2010), mash-up (Le Cor, 2016; Sinnreich, 2010), (re)appropriation (Frølunde, 2012; Olson, 2008), digital bricolage (Milner, 2016), to name just a few – each with its own aesthetic tradition and cultural ethos. Describing the past few decades as ‘an era marked by hip-hop appropriation, self-ironizing television shows, literary parody, and cinematic homage’, art critic AO Scott (2016: 22–23) suggests that in this context ‘we are accustomed, in the post-everything present, to an aesthetic of the sample, the mash-up, and the pastiche’. Processes of digital bricolage have shaped creativity both within and outside the boundaries of the art world. In the art world, Joselit (2013: 34) notes a ‘shift in emphasis among contemporary artists from individual or serial discrete objects to the disruption and manipulation of populations of images through various methods of selecting and reframing existing content’. While comparisons to found art are apt, Marisa Olson (2008: 1), one of the earliest critics and definers of internet art, argues that in digital bricolage:

the act of finding is elevated to a performance in its own right, and the ways in which the images are appropriated distinguishes this practice from one of quotation by taking them out of circulation and reinscribing them with new meaning and authority.

The aesthetic heritage of remixing and repurposing of images in digital art shows that these practices are not new, but they are becoming more prominent, more diversified, and more frequent.

Various remixes and appropriations of The Artist Is Present show that even nondigital art is not immune to taking on new forms through creative remixing. Some are humorous parodies, such as Vladimir Maislin’s Photoshop memes, which take photographs of Marina Abramovic from her endurance performances, including The Artist Is Present, and turn them into mock ads for over-the-counter medicines such as Theraflu and ‘Aspirina’ (Figure 4). In these Abramovic memes, we witness professional nondigital art crossing over to vernacular online creativity. An Xiao’s The Artist Is Kinda Present (2010) is another interesting remix: in this performance, Xiao sets up a physical space similar to Abramovic’s, but she invites her audience to communicate with her solely through their mobile phones and a Macbook which sits on a low folding table between the artist and the audience member (Figure 5). Abramovic herself participated in Jay-Z’s appropriation of her endurance performance art, as she made an appearance at his 6-hour live rapping of his song Picasso Baby (2013). Art critic Jerry Saltz, in attendance at the performance, described Abramovic’s gesture of approaching Jay-Z with her palms open as saying, ‘I gave you permission to steal my act; now I am taking it back’ (Saltz, 2013). The various appropriations, responses, and remixes of The Artist Is Present carry the concept of the work across contexts – vernacular and professional, digital and nondigital – illustrating a wealth of interpretations around social connections, brand, and art-world culture.

Figure 4.

Mock ads parodying Marina Abramovic’s performance in The Artist Is Present. Image by Vladimir Maislin via Facebook.

Figure 5.

An Xiao, ‘The Artist Is Kinda Present’ (2010). Image by Hrag via Flickr.

In Moon, while Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson create the digital canvas, the composition of the work becomes a mash-up of participant contributions. Participants are invited to ‘make your mark’ as well as to ‘respond to other people’s marks by making your own next to theirs’. The result is a mix of individual expressions and collaborative projects, which are often riffs on images from art history and pop culture, such as a Mona Lisa created by a half dozen participants. Collaborative projects such as the Mona Lisa on Moon are not only appropriations of iconic imagery but also remixes of style, as parts of her face are rendered realistically and other parts, such as an eye that appears to be a camera or telescope lens with a moon in the pupil, are surrealist. Participatory creative projects like Moon operate with the idea that the resulting mash-ups are more than the sum of its parts. The resulting collages could be dismissed of derivative, but Olson (2008: 4) rightly argues that there is greater meaning in these aesthetics of the remix and mash-up:

Despite the implied claim that anything derivative is incapable of signifying on its own, the representational practice upon which this work hinges – montage – is by definition an act of bringing meaning to something. It borrows the techniques of collage – namely piecing together fragments, objects, and ideas in what Roland Barthes might call a “tissue of quotations” – to create new valences. This is not so much derivative as dialectical. Each “lifted” piece is put in conversation with each other, so that the combination creates a third (or fourth or fifth…) “term”.

Memes by definition are imitations of preexisting units that are remixed and modified to express a range of ideas or emotions for various audiences (Milner, 2016; Shifman, 2013). Their ability to spread by imitation (with fixed elements that show fidelity to the core image, e.g. the original image of Pepe the Frog) and reappropriation (with novel elements that transform the image and communicate specific messages, e.g. in Pepe’s case, anything from Katy Perry’s jetlag to alt-right politics) contributes to their life span (Milner, 2016; Shifman, 2013). Thus, in many ways, memes epitomize the contemporary culture of remix and appropriation: here, remix is expected, in contrast to ‘professional’ contemporary creative products which are behind copyright walls and fiercely protected.

As bricolage becomes the aesthetic of the internet, we’re also reminded that imitation and appropriation are not new practices in art history (or culture at large), but they are made much easier through digital technology (Olson, 2008). Memes are, by definition, imitations with modifications, and the term itself is an appropriation of a term that refers to biological phenomena (Dawkins, 1976). As Scott (2016: 24–25) argues in regards to imitation, ‘the thread that connects the generations is a relentless dialectic of copying and reinvention. Every explosion of transformative newness turns out, on closer inspection, to be the recovery and recasting of what was already there, aided by new technology’. These ‘threads’ of memetic media, as Milner (2016) puts it, weave a tapestry of individual contributions to a collective expression of digital cultures.

In the same time, the implications of these practices for authorship and ethics are becoming more complicated. For example, Richard Prince’s recent work, New Portraits, where he printed Instagram selfies for gallery exhibition without obtaining permission from users, was extremely divisive and exposed conflicting opinions around copyright and ownership in the digital age – especially since Prince’s reproduced images sold for up to US$100,000 (Parkinson, 2015). Commenters have argued that what is needed are new copyright laws, given that the current laws haven’t caught up to the ‘wild west’ of the web, where nearly every act of viewing or listening to art online involves, technically, an act of copying (Gallagher, 2012).

Conclusion

Tracing the internet’s impact on the production, distribution, interpretation, and appropriation of three very different types of creative works illustrates some of the ways in which new media shapes our encounters with contemporary creativity. In the words of Tess Edmonson, ‘an artist can choose the degree to which they’ll engage with the fact of the internet, but to live with the omnipresence of the internet is necessarily to make art under the same circumstances’ (quoted in Archey and Peckham, 2014: 92). The interaction between the dynamics of contemporary creativity and the new media technologies that facilitate (and, amplify, alter or multiply) them redefines what it means to be a creator in the digital age (Literat and Glaveanu, 2016; Sinnreich, 2010) – and what it means for audiences and cultural producers to navigate the spheres of activity that relate to making, sharing, interpreting, and reworking creative products. The role that internet technologies play in these processes is not always straightforward; rather, their impact is increasingly complex and multifaceted as these domains of activity become fundamentally interconnected. Indeed, a significant advantage of taking a holistic perspective, such as the one advanced here, is that it facilitates a better understanding of how these different domains inform each other and come to bear on the cultural life cycles of different kinds of creative content. By adopting this approach and illustrating it using three different case studies, as explained above, this article has aimed to provide a framework – applicable to a wide range of creative products (off-line or online, professional or vernacular) – that facilitates a more nuanced and complete understanding of the multifaceted impact of the internet on contemporary creativity.

There are, of course, other vital questions that are outside the scope of this current article, yet nonetheless carry significant implications for new media and creativity. Chief among these are issues of preservation and funding. The proliferation of digital creative content poses a significant preservation challenge, as its very existence and accessibility depends on a series of technical and infrastructural protocols that change at an increasingly accelerated pace. What do we preserve and how do we preserve it? In answering this question, distinctions such as those between high art and vernacular creativity – between Moon and Pepe the Frog memes – become particularly significant. Last but not least, in the realm of funding, new media-enabled mechanisms of financial support – from crowdfunding and new collective forms of patronage enabled by platforms such as Patreon, to direct sales on artist websites or easily accessible marketplaces like Etsy and Artsy – may change the way we think about supporting creative work that brings aesthetic value to our lives. These are just some of the ways in which online participation and collaboration have the potential to redefine established genres and traditions around creativity, and facilitate the rise of new forms of participation that are quintessentially networked and dynamic.

Footnotes

Notes

References

Applegate

Cohen

(2017) Communicating graphically: Mimesis, visual language, and commodification as culture. Cultural Politics 13(1): 81–100.

Archey

Peckham

(2014) Art Post-Internet. Exhibition Catalogue. Available at: http://post-inter.net (accessed 8 March 2017).

Arora

Vermeylen

(2013) The end of the art connoisseur? Experts and knowledge production in the visual arts in the digital age. Information, Communication and Society 16(2): 194–214.

Becker

(1984) Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Benkler

(2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bishop

(2006) Introduction: Viewers as producers. In: Bishop

(ed) Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 10–17.

Bruns

(2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. London, UK: Peter Lang.

Burgess

(2006) Hearing ordinary voices: Cultural studies, vernacular creativity and digital storytelling. Continuum 20(2): 201–214.

Cembalest

(2013) How Ai Weiwei and Olafur Eliasson got 35,000 people to draw on the Moon. Artnews, 19 December. Available at: http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/19/how-ai-weiwei-and-olafur-eliasson-got-35000-people-to-draw-on-the-moon/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

10.

Cianciotta

(2014) Moon by Ai Wei Wei and Olafur Eliasson, collective testament. Neural: Critical Digital Culture and Media Arts, 22 April. Available at: http://neural.it/2014/04/ai-wei-wei-olafur-eliasson-moon-collective-testament/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

11.

Cornell

Halter

(2015) Hard reboot: An introduction to mass effect. In: Cornell

Halter

(eds) Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: MIT Press, pp. xv–xxxiv.

12.

Cotter

(2010) 700-hour silent opera reaches finale at MoMA. The New York Times, 30 May. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/arts/design/31diva.html (accessed 1 March 2017).

13.

Couchot

(2002) Digital hybridisation: A technique, an aesthetic. Convergence 8(4): 19–28.

14.

Creators (2014) Draw on the Moon: Ai Weiwei And Olafur Eliassons’ interactive art project. YouTube, 19 February. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFqpogR-ki8 (accessed 1 March 2017).

15.

Dawkins

(1976) The Selfish Gene. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

16.

Dietz

(2013) Collecting new media art: Just like anything else, only different. In: Altshuler

(ed) Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 85–102.

17.

Douglas

(2014) It’s supposed to look like shit: The internet ugly aesthetic. Journal of Visual Culture 13(3): 314–339.

18.

Droitcour

(2014) Vernacular criticism. The New Inquiry, 25 July. Available at: https://thenewinquiry.com/vernacular-criticism/ (accessed 8 March 2017).

19.

Dyson

(2005) Wireless affections: Embodiment and emotions in new media/theory and art. Convergence 11(4): 85–105.

20.

Foucault

(1986) Of other spaces. Diacritics 16: 22–27.

21.

Frølunde

(2012) Animated war: Perspectives on resemiosis and authorship applied to two DIY film projects. Convergence 18(1): 93–103.

22.

Gallagher

(2012) The assault on creative culture: Politics of cultural ownership. In: Delwiche

Henderson

(eds) The Participatory Cultures Handbook. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 86–96.

23.

Gat

(2013) Art criticism in the age of Yelp. Rhizome, 12 November. Available at: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/12/art-criticism-age-yelp/ (accessed 8 March 2017).

24.

Glaveanu

(2014) Distributed Creativity: Thinking Outside the Box of the Creative Individual. Cham: Springer.

25.

Graham

Cook

(2010) Conclusions: Histories, vocabularies, modes. In: Graham

Cook

(eds) Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 283–306.

26.

Greene

(2004) Internet Art. London, UK: Thames & Hudson.

27.

Groys

(2015) Art workers: Between utopia and the archive. In: Cornell

Halter

(eds) Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: MIT Press, pp. 357–368.

28.

Halter

(2015) The centaur and the hummingbird. In: Cornell

Halter

(eds) Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: MIT Press, pp. 231–242.

29.

Hart

(2010) Live-streaming Marina Abramović: Crazy or brave? Inside/Out. MoMA, 15 March. Available at: http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/03/15/live-streaming-marina-abramovic-crazy-or-brave/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

30.

Huhtamo

(2006) Focus on media art histories. Convergence 12(3): 357–360.

31.

Jenkins

Purushotma

Clinton

, et al. (2006) Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago, IL: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

32.

Jewitt

Yar

(2013) Consuming the illegal: Situating piracy in everyday experience. Convergence 19(1): 3–8.

33.

Jones

(2005/2006) My art world is bigger than your art world. The Believer, December/January. Available at: http://www.believermag.com/issues/200512/?read=article_jones (accessed 12 January 2017).

34.

Joselit

(2013) After Art. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

35.

Knight

(2010) I see you: Marina Abramović live video-feed performance at MOMA. Los Angeles Times, 15 March. Available at: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/marina-abramovi%C4%87-at-moma.html (accessed 1 March 2017).

36.

Know Your Meme (2017) Pepe the Frog. Available at: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog (accessed 15 March 2017).

37.

Kristensen

From

(2015) From ivory tower to cross-media personas: The heterogeneous cultural critic in the media. Journalism Practice 8(6): 853–971.

38.

Le Cor

(2016) From erasure poetry to e-mash-ups, “reel on/another! power!”: Repetition, replication, and resonance. Convergence. Epub ahead of print 23 November 2016. DOI: 10.1177/1354856516675254.

39.

Leckey

(2015) In the long tail. In: Cornell

Halter

(eds) Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: MIT Press, pp. 199–212.

40.

Lin

P-H

(2005) A dream of digital art: Beyond the myth of contemporary computer technology in visual arts. Visual Arts Research 31(1): 4–12.

41.

Literat

(2012) The work of art in the age of mediated participation: Crowdsourced art and collective creativity. International Journal of Communication 6: 2962–2984.

42.

Literat

(2017) Contemporary creativity online: An examination of the interplay between art and vernacular creativity on the internet. Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) Annual Conference, Tartu, Estonia, October 18–21.

43.

Literat

Glaveanu

(2016) Same but different? Distributed creativity in the internet age. Creativity: Theory, Research, Applications 3(2): 330–342.

44.

Literat

van den

Berg S

(2017) Buy memes low, sell memes high: Online creativity, vernacular criticism and collective negotiations of value on Reddit’s MemeEconomy. Information, Communication & Society. Epub ahead of print 22 August 2017. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2017.1366540.

45.

Malmgren

(2017) Don’t feed the trolls. Dissent 64(2): 9–12.

46.

McHugh

(2015) Excerpts from post internet. In: Cornell

Halter

(eds) Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century. New York, NY: MIT Press, pp. 185–198.

47.

Milner

(2016) The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

48.

Mollick

Nanda

(2016) Wisdom or madness? Comparing crowds with expert evaluation in funding the arts. Management Science 62(6): 1533–1553.

49.

Murray

(2010) ‘Remix My Lit’ towards an open access literary culture. Convergence 16(1): 23–38.

50.

Museum of Modern Art (2010) Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present – Portraits. Flickr. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/themuseumofmodernart/sets/72157623741486824/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

51.

Notopoulous

(2010) Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry [Tumblr]. Available at: http://marinaabramovicmademecry.tumblr.com/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

52.

Notopoulos

(2015) We asked the art world how much rare Pepes are going for. BuzzFeedNews, 27 October. Available at: https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/what-is-the-market-value-of-a-rare-pepe?utm_term=.foBj6jVJd9#.hfR2k29OpM (accessed 8 March 2017).

53.

Olson

(2008) Lost not found: The circulation of images in digital visual culture. In: Cotton

Klein

(eds) Words Without Pictures. New York, NY: Aperture Foundation: pp. 1–5.

54.

Parkinson

(2015) Instagram, an artist and the $100,000 selfies – appropriation in the digital age. The Guardian, 18 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/18/instagram-artist-richard-prince-selfies (accessed 8 March 2017).

55.

Proctor

(2010) Digital: Museums as platform, curator as champion, in the age of social media. Curator: The Museum Journal 53: 35–43.

56.

Ritzer

Jurgenson

(2010) Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’. Journal of Consumer Culture 10(1): 13–36.

57.

Rosen

(2006) The people formerly known as the audience. PressThink: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine, 27 June. Available at: http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html (accessed 12 January 2017).

58.

Rymarczuk

Derksen

(2014). Different spaces: Exploring Facebook as heterotopia. First Monday 19(6). Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5006/4091 (accessed 29 November 2017).

59.

Saltz

(2013) ‘Picasso Baby’ live: Jerry Saltz goes face-to-face with Jay-Z. Vulture, 11 July. Available at: http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/jerry-saltz-face-to-face-with-jay-z.html (accessed 8 March 2017).

60.

Schwab (2016) Art for Instagram’s sake. The Atlantic, 17 February. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/instagram-art-wonder-renwick-rain-room/463173/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

61.

Scott

(2016) Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

62.

Shifman

(2013) Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18(3): 362–377.

63.

Shpungin

(2015) Object empathy. The Art Assignment. Available at: http://www.theartassignment.com/assignments/object-empathy (accessed 24 October 2016).

64.

Sinnreich

(2010) Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

65.

Sontag

(1966) Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. New York, NY: Picador.

66.

Stigh

Jackson

(2010) Marina Abramović: The artist speaks. Inside/Out: A MoMA/PS1 Blog, 3 June. Available at: http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/06/03/marina-abramovic-the-artist-speaks (accessed 8 March 2017).

67.

Suhr

(2015). Introduction: Toward an interdisciplinary understanding of online evaluation of creativity and the arts. In: Suhr

(ed) Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts. New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 1–19.

68.

Surowiecki

(2005) The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor.

69.

Tribe

Jana

Grosenick

(2006) New Media Art. London, UK: Taschen.

70.

van Dijck

(2009) Users like you? Theorizing agency in user-generated content. Media, Culture and Society 31(1): 41–58.

71.

Verboord

(2010) The legitimacy of book critics in the age of the internet and omnivorousness: Expert critics, internet critics and peer critics in Flanders and the Netherlands. European Sociological Review 26(6): 623–637.

72.

Wark

(1993) Lost in space: Into the digital image labyrinth. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 7(1): 140–160.

73.

Young

(1998) Of cyber spaces: The internet & heterotopias. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). Available at: http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/hetero.php.