I’m writing in response to Amy Wilson’s excellent essay “Kitsch and SL, a first try” most of which I agree with but there’s one thing I want to argue with and that is the word “inherently”.
I think that it’s Kitchyness is an accident of history and it will change as time goes by. As Amy points out Linden Labs only enforces “community standards” based on people’s complaints and the complaints or lack of complaints depends on the crowd you hang with. I think that the constitution of who is there to hang with will change over time and so will the effective community standards. (not the official ones, mind you, but the effective ones.)
Basically I think as the total number of avatars rise SL will become less and less like disneyland (where its a safe bet that the majority is there is there for escapism and to not be troubled by anything) and more and more like Cleveland. I mean it will be like Cleveland in that, sure, there will be lots of tacky shopping malls, many of them will be filled with people who love Thomas Kinkade but there will also be “bad parts of town” and dive bars and little known music venues where obscure bands play music including one band that even the most jaded music critic in new york or london would like if only he or she were there to hear it and maybe one art school where offensiveness is considered a good thing, and some churches where mini-skirts are a scandal as well as many where they are not… you get the picture. (please note that i’ve never actually been to Cleveland, i’m just guessing.)
What is happening now in SL, I think, is a similar historical accident to that which is illustrated in this chart:
…as you can see in the early days of the internet as the number of people who knew how to make websites went up there was a HUGE spike in the percentage of all websites devoted to Chess and Star Trek. This was not a result of there being anything intrinsic to the medium of the web that encouraged the creation of websites about chess or Star Trek but rather a coincidence of interest within the subset of the world population that were likely to have heard of HTML as that knowledge filtered out from a hard core of a few thousand scientists to the few tens and hundreds of thousands of more average consumer-level techno-nerds. A large percentage of those people also liked Star Trek and played chess.
It is not shown on this graph but if you looked at a chart of the percentage of websites about Britney Spears or Pokemon or Usher the height of the spikes would never reach the very high peak that the Trek/Chess line makes because the internet is so big now and has been for 10 years that no one subject or subculture will ever dominate it.
Right now, I agree that SL is a Kitschy environment and saying that making art there is like making art within Disneyland is a really clever and accurate comparison. As SL becomes more and more mainstream, however, the percentage of people who want to use it as a way to escape will go down and the percentage of people that want to use it as a communication medium for all kinds of purposes will go up and with it the over all variety of attitudes. As that happens Linden Labs will change their marketing strategy to be less bullshit-utopian and their community standards will loosen and acknowledge different sub-communities with their own standards.
OR…. maybe more likely… Open Sim or something like it will take off and there will no longer be one company and one set of standards but thousands.
There’s already a nice little ecosystem of people and blogs ready to enjoy, critique and bring attention to non-kitschy art in SL and its only expanding, as it expands the degree to which it is true that the kitsch of the environment directly effects the work and its reception will lessen as other factors take precedence.
NOTE: Hollow Prim makes a good case for the tools of SL being intrinsically Kitsch-producing, or at least that its easier to make Kitsch toward the bottom of this earlier post on a related topic. Not sure about that part yet. Maybe the title of this post is wrong after all. This post is mainly about the community standards / corporate standards argument that Amy puts forward.
Thoughtful post Jay. On the surface Second Life does indeed only seem to offer the “tacky shopping malls” and vacuous thrills you mentioned, but if you’re not satisfied with all that and dig a bit deeper, the more diverse possibilities become apparent (just like in Cleveland).
I’ve been in SL since 2005 and I’ve noticed that there is much more of everything, more shops, more sex, more lag and much more art. A large percentage of the ‘art’ being produced is kitsch and those seeking escapism are making it, and apparently buying it.
One very positive development is the emergence of projects like BiW and other individuals, who are talking about the most important work and taking it seriously. If there are to be any real changes of benefit to art and artists then it will likely be directly as a result of this dialogue being allowed to flourish.
SL may well implode before we see the benefits unfortunately.
Left by Arahan Claveau on December 29th, 2008