I don’t like to quote Cory Doctorow too much as, well, he does tend to get a little weary after a while. And even though I pretty much agree with everything he says it’s rather like being Hit With A Big Stick Repeatedly. But this interview that appeared on Kottke the other week bears excerpting.

We live in a century in which copying is only going to get easier. It’s the 21st century, there’s not going to be a year in which it’s harder to copy than this year; there’s not going to be a day in which it’s harder to copy than this day; from now on. Right? If copying gets harder, it’s because of a nuclear holocaust. There’s nothing else that’s going to make copying harder from now on. And so, if your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work is intended not to be copied, you’re fundamentally not making art for the 21st century. It might be quaint, it might be interesting, but it’s not particularly contemporary to produce art that demands these constraints from a bygone era. You might as well be writing 15-hour Ring Cycle knock-offs and hoping that they’ll be performed at the local opera. I mean, yes, there’s a tiny market for that, but it’s hardly what you’d call contemporary art.

Ties in with something I was thinking about television programs and BitTorrent. One of the arguments goes that as viewer figures drop advertising revenue will drop with them so the budgets for the likes of Lost, et al, will shrink, meaning we won’t get the sorts of programs that are so popular on BitTorrent. Which is a fair comment, except these programs are already produced to a budget that has limitations. Compare, for example, the different in production values of the Firefly tv series and the subsequent Serenity film. Or, sticking with the geek, Smallville and Superman Returns.

Interestingly George Lucas seems to get it. Regarding the Forthcoming Star Wars TV series “Lucas has stated that, in producing the show, ‘we will do what would typically cost $20 million, for $1 million.’” A million dollars might still seem a lot but this is Star Wars we’re talking about. Apply that 1/20 to normal TV and you start to see what the budgets of the future might be.

Is this a problem? I don’t necessarily think so. Already I’m finding that mainstream feature films are, quite simply, boring. Superman Returns was a complete yawnfest yet cost an obscene $204 million. Smallville, to which I was converted earlier in the year, is fantastic stuff and Clark Kent doesn’t even fly. And The Wire, while it reportedly costs $1.5m per episode, is really at its best when the characters are just talking to each other.

Okay, at least Cory gets to the point quickly. What’s mine?

I guess it’s that the costs we’ve become accustomed to for our entertainment isn’t set in stone. That we can have the good stuff for a lower budget. That perhaps the excess we’ve seen over the last few decades is really just a blip. And that, since I’m an eternal optimist, as the money goes down the quality will go up as producers are forces to concentrate on character and story rather than spectacle. That’s what 21st Century Art means to me.