Time for some more work notes. Things are coming together, but there are still many points of decided uncertainty: I expect my Scylla will be the risk of ending up with something not merely different but disconnected from previous heritage thinking, my Charybdis high compatibility but ending up taking a new route to unremarkable conclusions. In the current session of performing open heart surgery on my ideas, I want to ask whether the case of Outsider Art poses a difficulty for what I'm doing.
As I noted before, fandom involves valuing as a psychological act, or rather, a disposition towards it, whereas heritage looks more like a situation, not something that requires one to associate oneself with it in order to have it. So if I want to talk about 'use' and 'activity' in relation to heritage objects, it looks likely that I'll end up adding the qualification 'potential' (which does go nicely with the idea of bequeathing things to future generations). Demontrating the existence of activity, sometimes passionate activity, in relation to cultural objects is easy enough; but on the whole we think of archæological objects especially as being capable of being buried and forgotten about, and nonetheless sometimes (I'd contend always) able to qualify as cultural objects.
However, I'm keen to build activity into heritage because I think it offers a way of sidestepping the intrinsic/extrinsic value problem. Suppose someone points out that Holmes Rolston III uses a stamp collection as an example of something that can't have intrinsic value:
this is just the aggregated value of individual stamps. ... Nothing in the stamp collection is alive; the collection is neither self-generating nor self-maintaining. Neither stamp nor collection is valuable on its own.
I can reply that indeed the collection in itself isn't self-sustaining, but also that separating collection from collector is itself an artificial move.
I'm noting that the value of a collection can be more than the aggregate value of its members (hence e.g. the breaking up of libraries as a loss), and moving on to suggest that large-scale, complex phenomena like the Web can be ascribed a heritage value. Another aspect of that is the role of information in heritage, e.g. archæological context as part of what makes an artefact archæologically valuable:
...assemblage, context or provenance... are all now key concepts in archaeological theory and practice. To put it simply, there can be no archaeological reconstruction without knowledge of where an object was found (its provenance) and what it was found with it (its context)... Each of the individual objects found in [the Sutton Hoo ship] burial is of interest in itself, but their historical importance is magnified many times over once it is known that they were found together in a seventh-century AD Anglian ship burial.
That leads me to suggest that information is actually part of the heritage object (i.e. the physical thing and the information embodied in it are together the locus of heritage value).
The other ingredient involves looking at inspiration, adaptation, etc. One question that can be asked about the value of a work has to do with the role of its derivatives: does their value affect that of the original? (If a work inspires many others we might praise it for that reason; there’s no obvious reason not to extend that praise to derivative works which reuse elements of the original.) Or not? (If book A, unexceptionable in itself, inspires a somehow objectionable parody B, it seems intuitive that B’s reception should not taint A.) Wondering what happens to the integrity of Lovecraftiana when inserted into office comedy (Charles Stross, The Concrete Jungle), or Baker Street (Neil Gaiman's A Study In Emerald [PDF] and the rest of Shadows Over Baker Street), or video game development (Marc Laidlaw, The Vicar of R'lyeh) just makes me think (in the best philosophical tradition) that I need to re-examine the question. A third possibility seems to be that what primarily bears value is the cluster of ideas, themes, phrases, etc. manifested in the original and its derivatives together.
Since I've already set up a distinction between 'heritage' and {heritage objects}, and am working towards quite a fluid view of the former, there's some potential for denying a real distinction between 'people', 'their culture' and 'their heritage'.
So, the idea makes good sense; but in the cold light of day it still looks challenging. The Web gives me a nice case to work with, though: so nice, in fact, that I'm having trouble thinking of others as good to employ alongside it. At the moment I'm quite bothered by the heritage potential of Outsider Art: 'There is no organisation devoted to preserving these works and many have been lost. One man spent 15 years encrusting his entire garden with sculptures and sea shells, only to have it pulled down by his son with a JCB when he died.' While there seems to be a meaningful (if imprecise) category of 'Outsider Art', with many fascinating and beautiful works falling into it, by definition these works are disparate, and that makes the category tricky to identify as a locus of value, even though there's nothing obviously wrong with saying, 'Outsider Art is worth preserving'.
Following its introduction in 1972 by the British art historian Roger Cardinal, the notion of 'outsider art' has been subject to equally passionate waves of acceptance and opposition. For some, the term continues to serve as useful critical shorthand effectively encompassing a wide range of unconventional artistic production, including work by autodidacts, religious visionaries, the mentally ill, and a host of obsessive personalities. For others, to label someone an 'outsider artist' is frequently seen as a gesture of restriction that places these individuals, already alienated by their wildly divergent artistic practices, into aesthetic ghettos.
Marcus Davies, 'On Outsider Art and the Margins of the Mainstream'
It's not a wholly arbitrary category, like 'pastel works by European or Sri Lankan artists featuring a cat and at least two persons, one of them clad partly in blue'; but not only is there no movement, there's no milieu. A category like '18th Century French paintings' involves wholly extrinsic qualities, but with my approach understanding how value might be loosely attributed to the category isn't difficult: the works collectively form the context for each other (and we'll take 'century' to be used loosely). For Outsider Art that won't work. 'Unlike popular or folk art, an overwhelming sense of dramatic rupture is what may be said to be the single defining and unifying element of outsider art, wrenching it from any historical context and rendering comparison nearly impossible.' (Ibid) A specific piece of Outsider Art will have some kind of context, though its relation to mainstream art will be negative, but Outsider Art as a category is something else again.
Well, maybe the category has no value of its own—but by what method could I tell? Besides, much has been written about the category of Outsider Art: how do we go about assessing the value of that material? Maybe this is where I should bring in information: the category 'Outsider Art' is basically an information object, and it's as information that it's valuable, making the category and the works on Outsider Art into a combined whole which (as information) is a value-bearer.
That looks promising. I think the obvious rejoinder is going to be, surely not all information is created equal, so how shall we evaluate this information? And isn't it information about... Outsider Art, making it no solution?
I think my response to the first point would have to be that to talk of an absolute value for information is silly: the value of a piece of information depends on what you want to do with it. (Value in potential use, again.) Although admittedly I did start off looking for quasi-intrinsic value in heritage... I am bothered by the question of how the content of information works here, and I think what I'll do is expand the theme of information in the heritage objects generally in the next post in this series.
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