Someone said to me recently — I cannot remember where, which is either embarrassing or appropriate — that art is only art, is only great, when it isn’t scalable. I have been thinking about this for a few weeks and I think it is pointing at something real that it cannot quite name yet.
What it is pointing at is not Walter Benjamin, exactly, though Benjamin is nearby. Benjamin was interested in the aura — the quality that attaches to an original and drains away in reproduction, the here-and-now of the thing that copying cannot transmit. The scalability claim is adjacent but different. It is not about originals and copies. It is about whether the power of a work survives being generalised — being made available to anyone, anywhere, without the specific conditions that produced the encounter. A performance that destroys you the night you see it. A poem that arrives at exactly the wrong moment in your life and never arrives the same way again. A film that requires a particular kind of attention the streaming interface is structurally designed to prevent. The claim is that the power is in the resistance — that whatever makes something great is exactly what gets lost when it circulates.
I find this persuasive and also immediately troubled by what we spent last session doing. Because Gauguin is scaled. His paintings are on postcards in the Musée d’Orsay gift shop, on tote bags, on the covers of books about Tahiti that have nothing to do with the girls in the paintings. The scalability has been total and uninterrupted for over a century. And the work is still called great — is still in the permanent collections, still on the syllabi, still the subject of the involuntary response Dederer describes, the beauty that arrives before the judgment and does not wait for it. If the scalability claim were right, the postcards should have done something to the greatness. They haven’t, or at least not in any way the institutions have acknowledged. Which means either the claim is wrong, or the work’s continued greatness is being produced by something other than the work.
The Nobel Prize is a scaling machine. This is what it is for: to select certain works for global circulation, to make them available as great to audiences who have never encountered them in their original language, their original context, the specific conditions of their production. What the committee in Stockholm does, every year, is not discover greatness already present in the world. It manufactures a particular kind of greatness — the kind that travels, that can be summarised in a press release, that fits the criteria of a specific institutional tradition with a specific history of what literature is supposed to be and do. And the Arabic literary tradition has one laureate in 120 years. One. If the Nobel both confers and constitutes greatness — if being recognised is part of what being great means — then the prize has spent 120 years producing a world in which Arabic literature is less great than it would otherwise be. Not failing to notice an existing quality. Actively not producing it.
The scalability claim should make this worse, but I think it actually makes it more interesting. Because what the Nobel selects for is, in part, translatability — the quality of surviving being moved across languages and contexts without total loss. Certain kinds of work travel better than others. Certain literary traditions have spent longer learning how to make work that European institutions recognise as universal. And the work that doesn’t travel — that is embedded in a specific linguistic texture, a specific cultural density, a specific moment — that work is, by the scalability argument, potentially the most alive. The most resistant. The least recoverable in a press release. Adonis has been nominated for the Nobel repeatedly and has never won. Whether this is because his work is too difficult, too political, too rooted in an Arabic tradition the committee cannot read without losing everything, or simply because he is Adonis and the politics around his name are intractable — I don’t know. But the fact that the most celebrated living poet in Arabic has no Nobel is a statement about scaling and about who gets to decide what survives the journey.
Dederer’s note on involuntary beauty is the thing that resists this most interestingly I think. You cannot decide to find something beautiful, she says, which is also to say you cannot decide not to. The response arrives before the apparatus of judgment has assembled itself. And this might be the one place where the scalability claim holds absolutely: you can put Gauguin on a postcard, but you cannot put the involuntary response on a postcard. The response belongs to the encounter, which is singular, which happens once in a specific body at a specific moment. What the postcard scales is the image. What it cannot scale is what the image does. If greatness lives in that doing — in the specific event of the encounter — then the institutions that confer greatness are always conferring it on the wrong thing. On the image rather than the event. On the work rather than what happens between the work and the person standing in front of it, without having planned to be affected, discovering they are.
Which leaves us somewhere difficult before next session. The problem of time — whether historical distance dissolves complicity or just makes it comfortable — is also a problem about scaling. Wagner’s antisemitism feels different from Polanski’s rape not only because one of them is dead. It feels different because Wagner has been scaled into the infrastructure of Western music in a way that makes the antisemitism feel like a feature of the past the music has survived, rather than a condition of the present the music is still producing. The distance is real. But the comfort of the distance might be a scaling effect — the consequence of a century of institutional reproduction that has smoothed the surface, made the encounter feel clean, taught us to receive the work without the conditions of its production pressing through.
For next session — the problem of time: Find one work you consume or produce today that will feel, in fifty years, the way Wagner feels now. Not a work by a bad person. A work that is entangled, right now, with something that future audiences will find it uncomfortable to have ignored. What is the entanglement, and what are you doing with it?
Watch before we meet: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) — not because Tarkovsky was a monster, but because the film is about what time does to longing, and to the question of whether something can be recovered intact across historical distance. Watch the final sequence. We will start there.
Some things worth reading:
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935) — the aura argument. The essay that the scalability claim is in conversation with, whether it knows it or not. Short enough to read in one sitting; the implications take longer.
Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997) — Dederer’s source for the involuntary beauty argument. Hickey is a critic who wrote about beauty when beauty was unfashionable in the art world, and the essays have the quality of someone defending something they shouldn’t have to defend. Read “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty.”
On the Nobel and Arabic literature: M. Lynx Qualey’s writing at ArabLit Quarterly is the best sustained critical attention to Arabic literature in English — the question of what gets translated, reviewed, and circulated in Western markets is her actual subject. Not a single text but a place to start.