Introduction

            Prior to the spring of the year 2000, scholars investigating the history and theory of Steve Havelka’s Pokey the Penguin had few resources available to them.  Beyond Havelka’s online archives and the dubious reports of fan-controlled sites, researchers would meet with a complete void; there were no magazine articles, no books, no newspaper stories, nor any definitive statement from the “authors” (the website stating “POKEY THE PENGUIN IS COPYRIGHT © 1998-2002 THE AUTHORS”).  Even the names of the authors were not known until Havelka revealed himself to be the sole author in the fall of 2000.  Interested scholars had little basis for the disciplined study of Havelka’s budding web comic.  Luckily, there were no interested scholars.

            Pokey the Penguin first appeared online Feb 18th, 1998.  Within two years, it was receiving over 40,000 hits daily.  Comics imitating Havelka’s visual style and humor began to flood the internet (see www.keenspace.com for examples).  Pokey’s popularity continued increasing until Havelka stopped producing strips on a daily basis.  With lulls of weeks or months between new comics, Pokey’s daily hits dwindled to about 10,000, and have shown no signs of recovery.  Despite its quick rise and many imitations, by the year 2000 it seemed that Pokey the Penguin’s time had come and gone.

            Pokey’s first significant mention came, oddly enough, from an aging author’s lecture at Oxford in the spring of 2000.  Rudger Beerglass, best known for his novels Mending Dumplings (1978) and The Biochemistry of Lewis C. Koltas (1997), preached his desire that the art of the new century break ways with the past whenever possible.  However, his Oxford lecture (later repeated at Cambridge in the spring of 2001), Why There Are Master-Pieces And What Are The Few Of Them, revealed views much more extreme than those of his previous writings.  Beerglass managed to isolate himself from the vast majority of the literary and artistic world, and he has since published no essays, books, articles, or any manner of writing at all.

Beerglass’ lecture, however despised, made Pokey the Penguin a household name, when he named the comic strip as one of the few currently-existing masterpieces.  In the weeks following his Oxford lecture, scholars and students scrambled to find out what Beerglass had been talking about, and the literary void surrounding Pokey was soon filled with essays, analyses, books, and theses of all kinds.  Although his artistic theories were largely dismissed, Beerglass had achieved a small victory in bringing a beloved cartoon to the attention of the world.

I here reprint the whole of Beerglass’ lecture, as he himself inscribed it after his Cambridge lecture ^[1].  The bulk of his remarks do not relate directly to Pokey, but his general dismissal of art expresses many of the destructive principles of Pokey, about which I shall make some comment afterward.

 

 

Why There Are Master-Pieces And What Are The Few Of Them (Cambridge Version)

by Rudger Beerglass ^[2]

 

            Maybe it was when a caveman dragged some bloody bone across the ground, or when some cavewoman beat on the rocks with her open palms, or maybe it was when Beethoven was pounding on his keys with a lowered head, trying to catch some drift of the sound.  It doesn't really matter what you call the beginning and the not-beginning and the pre-beginning and the end; our principles go backwards, and anything we learn today is just as good yesterday and tomorrow.

            So we got photography now, and anyone with any sense is saying: what's the point of drawing something inexactly when you can photograph it exactly?  But a million people respond: oh, we just like that flavor, you know, of the old school drawin' an' paintin'.  Well, so be it, but nostalgia for the past can hardly be grounds for some kind of esthetic theory, and really, no matter how shitful the past was, you'll have people feeling sorry for having lost it.  Nevertheless, there is something there, and certainly there is some freedom in the inexactness of art, and that may be what they'd really mean if they had any sense.  But then, the paintings are useful insofar as they don't reflect reality.  So what's the big deal here?

            And of course, with computers now, it takes a click or two and any photograph is converted into the old-style paint or ink or black-and-white.  Those simple transformations don't do it any more.  Art has to come from something much higher, much more thoughtful and revolutionary and unexpected, and so convinced am I of this truth that I feel uninhibited shouting: representational art is dead.

            Not that I am the first to say so, of course.  And even people who didn't say so were saying so.  Picasso probably opened the wound as much as anyone, and more than anyone, but everything has its origin.  Starry Night didn't look like anything in this world, although since it was drawn by a madman, it could have been full of what he saw.  And even Van Gogh had his origins, but this is not a history, and let's move back on forward to Picasso.

            Now, Picasso gets slated as the man, the one what brought this all to the fore, although it wasn't just him in reality, and everyone knows that.  For one thing, art is being killed in every form.  Our principles must be generalizable.  And in fact, Picasso wasn't all that important from an idealistic standpoint, because all he did was make beauty, and it took at least one other person to say, "Look, he has made beauty, and it's nothing like we thought it was."  But of course, millions of people were saying that.  But that just opened the same old can of worms, because then people were looking: well then, what is beauty?  And is cubism beauty, or (and then Dali and Bunuel and a million other freaks popped up) is it surrealism or what?  And what they didn't realize is that all those fads would pass and what we'd finally realize is that beauty is everywhere, and so utterly simple to discover and reproduce that art is unnecessary.

            Which is not to say that art is unnecessary.  Our romantic inclinations would like us to believe that looking at a painting is something holy and incredible, but we know from experience that any woman on the street, that is any woman, beautiful or ugly, is a million times more interesting than the Mona Lisa.  But how can that be? you say.  The Mona Lisa is being studied and talked about and worshipped centuries upon centuries after its creation, but these people will die and be forgotten. YES, and that is true, but that is because no one will take it into their heads to study them.  I look out my window now and I see automobiles racing to and fro, and if Da Vinci had created an automobile, we would be talking about them every day in awe and wonder; we would drive the Mona Lisa to work.  The problem with art is that it involves creation by an artist.  The Mona Lisa is not considered an important work of art because the woman herself is of any interest, no matter how many people want to argue about who she was and was she Leonardo and why is she smiling?  People look like her everyday, and have much more beautiful smiles.  The Mona Lisa is studied because people want to know more about Da Vinci, and people care about Da Vinci because he fooled people into thinking he was important, by making them all think they were uglier than his stupid painting.

            I pick on Da Vinci, but he probably didn't understand how pointless it was.  Drawing people is hard.  It is very difficult to make the Mona Lisa, and it is somewhat beautiful, and in everyone's minds there's this bizarre superstition that the harder someone works to make something beautiful the more beautiful the thing is.  So people spent a lot of time working out proportions, and digging symmetry and whatnot, and then, because it had all gotten very complicated, even though it had nothing to do with beauty anymore, people had to study and work hard and try a lot to make something beautiful, and then everyone felt obliged to admit, yes, that is very beautiful.

            This is certainly not limited to the visual arts, or the Renaissance.  It still amazes me that people are blind enough to pretend that Ulysses is a readable, let alone beautiful, book.  I have read it; I do not speak in ignorance.  I have read the unreadable, read about the unreadable, and I cannot claim to understand everything any more than anyone else; but what difference does that make?  Does it make the book any more beautiful to know that Joyce painstakingly inserted reference after reference to Shakespeare and Homer?  Certainly not, especially if you need a few additional volumes to educate you about the references.  Writing that way simply made writing Ulysses more difficult, and we assume that makes it better, but it doesn't.  Beauty is not mathematically proven, or painfully extracted; the only joy to be had from reading Ulysses is the smug satisfaction of having understood something which very few others will, and happily pretending that they are worse off for it.

            And Bach provides a happy dichotomy, for the majority of his works are beautiful and pleasing to all of the masses.  We hear the name Bach, and we know to expect beauty.  Yet, what among the scholars is his end-all being of genius?  A Musical Offering, the most horrid and disappointing work I have ever heard.  Bach has taken a dreadful theme, transformed and fixed it about itself, with different tempos and inversions and variations, and we are left with a mathematical abstraction, an offensive and perverse disdain for the human listener.  Beauty is not mechanics.

            Let us say that a different way.  The problem with art, as has been throughout known time, is this: people have found beautiful things, and tried to isolate the properties which made those things beautiful, and then generalized those principles for use in production of beauty.  The method seems sound enough, admirable enough, simple enough.  And what has gone wrong?

            We all know by now what has gone wrong.  There is no single, great, Platonic beauty.  The very idea of beauty is impossible to define, when we realize how subjective the experience is.  For some, beauty is a flower, while for others, it is raping children.  How do we abstract from these facts?  How do we build a general theory in view of the fact that beauty changes from person to person, from epoch to epoch?

            Well, many would like to claim that great art is great art precisely because it generalizes to so many times and people; Beethoven is great because everyone everywhere loves Beethoven.  The Sex Pistols are not great because no one will like them in the distant future, and very few people like them now.

            I am not deeply opposed to this rating of art, but I still find it weak in application.  Artists from the past enjoy a much greater position in the world than newer artists.  Beethoven was the greatest composer in the world in a time when the world's population was next to nothing (compared to our modern days, I mean).  He also lived in a time when the poor and starving were highly unlikely to become professional composers (though certainly this occurred).  In Beethoven's days, in most anyone's olden days, it was not nearly as difficult to be the greatest composer on earth.

            But that misses the point anyway, because true genius does exist.  Shakespeare was great, of course, but he is not remembered today just because he is great.  Most people do not even enjoy reading Shakespeare; he is a grudging task in high school, and an angelic bogeyman before then.  Afterwards, he is probably neither seen nor heard, save for the odd phrase which we borrow from him, whose theft won't be noticed anyway.  And in fact, there's the pudding: although Shakespeare's plays are typically lost on the uneducated, his words and phrases still exist in the common tongue.  There is no other work which has so ingrained itself in the minds of English-speaking people, with the possible exception of the King James Bible, as the works of Shakespeare.

            But I digress; I apologize, because praising Shakespeare is a redundant practice in this world.  That is part of the problem.  Shakespeare was not a terrific innovator in the realm of plot; everyone knows that he stole all his storylines.  He was not at all experimental with the organizations of his plays: all five acts, with predictable climaxes and resolutions.  He did not display any insight into human nature or individuality; all of his protagonists speak with the same gigantic metaphors, with the same long-winded asides, with the same exaggerated emotions.  Shakespeare's plays are all somewhat laughable in their predictability and fakeness.

            Why can we not separate the two?  Shakespeare was a poet, and a wonderful turner of phrase, but he was not one for plot or characterization.  Well, even as I say that, there are at least a hundred books in existence ready to contradict me, as would be the case no matter what one chooses to say about Shakespeare.  William is so well protected in the scholarly eye that it is difficult to take a shot and be taken seriously.  And although it would not be difficult to find people who agree that Shakespeare's plots and characters are weak, dismissing Shakespeare because of those faults is unthinkable.

            Influence.  Shakespeare's plays, no matter how weak and silly, cannot be allowed to die, because they have inspired so many other great works of art.  Let Shakespeare fall, and where is Joyce?  Being old, and having been loved a long time, an artist is unlikely to fall.  Why else is Homer regarded as history’s greatest poet, when virtually no one (by percentage) can read him in the original Greek?  Why else is Michelangelo history's greatest visual artist, when virtually no one (by percentage) has seen David?  There is too much scholarship, too much history, too many assumptions laid in place by the intelligentsia.  Dylan Thomas better than Homer?  Ridiculous.  Pokey the Penguin better than the Sistine Chapel?  Get out now.

            The sad and obvious truth of the matter is that art, once formalized or mechanized, is no longer art; and the few arts that have not been formalized are now being mechanized.  There is no mystery or talent required to create "artistic" beauty; and if a talentless person can do, why should we give any regard to those who require talent to produce the same result?   John may spend a week painting a tree, but Jane will take a photograph, and then use a workshop program to make the picture appear painted.  Fuck John.  We need you no longer.

            Jim may spend a month painting a unicorn fighting Cerberus on Venus.  Jane can morph existing photos and backdrops to create the same scene, in any style, in a matter of hours (depending on the level of quality requested).  Fuck Jim.  We need you no longer.

            Examples of this sort generally come in threes, but let us move onward.  There is no visual art created before the last century that modern technology would not have allowed a less talented person to make better and faster.  Let us be realistic and assume this trend will continue.  There is nothing we can do to avoid the solemn fact that Michelangelos are no longer needed.

            Now, what about ideas?  Visual arts are something else, of course, and by visual arts I don't mean to include film, of course; but what about music and literature and poetry?  Now, it used to be that words and poetry told stories, and just told things about what they were.  The stories were not even constant then, and a sense of that remains, which is to say, some people think that it is the plot of a story that matters.  But the plot doesn't matter very much, because it's not very difficult to think up plots.  Good plots don't make books interesting, really, and they certainly don't make poems interesting, although bad plots can ruin anything.

            Now, you take the Iliad, for example.  Does anyone really care about all these gods and goddesses, and Trojans and Greeks and things?  Certainly not, and anyone who really does can read a plot summary in five minutes.  The manner of telling the story is what makes the story art.  Now, in poetry, there's some kind of an obvious mechanism there, or there used to be: rhyme, meter, whatever.  But it's pretty easy to put a story into any given meter, into any given rhyme scheme.  So that's not what makes poetry great.

            But, maybe I should dip my hand.  Poetry wasn't great.  And if you go back to the original Iliad, it's doggerel.  But then, what rhyming or metrical poetry isn't?  When most of the population is illiterate, it's a big deal to be able to set down thoughts for future generations.  There were no other lasting voices beyond the literate, although it's ironic that I say that since Homer never wrote anything down.  But that's a rare case, because Homer probably didn't exist.  And anyway, the point is that when millions of people know how to read and write and measure meter, anyone can make poetry as good as Homer's or Shakespeare's.  The problem is that they are old, and if you try to do anything people are going to say you are not doing it as good as they did, unless you rip them off, and then people will say that you are ripping them off and therefore not as good as they were.  You might as well toss in your hat in the poetry game, if you want to be the greatest there ever was.

            What then literature?  Anyone can write a book, and although many books are very enjoyable, most people would rather watch the movie than read the book.  And movies are almost always terrible.  Books get along by having some kind of appeal to some certain group of people, but very few books actually seem beautiful to any large group of people unless the book has some political or social message, in which case you don't know if people like the book or the message.  And anyway, once the movement passes, the book can be dismissed.  Look out now, Ayn Rand, Camus; your days will not last long.

            But I'm probably slipping away from you here, so let me see if I can catch you back up.  Most books that are thought by scholastic institutions to be great books do not appeal to the masses.  Most books that appeal to the masses will not be of interest to anyone in a few decades.   There's no real connection between the artistry going into a work and the beauty coming out.  Esthetics is dead, and rightfully so, because if you care about beauty, art is not your concern.

            With a few exceptions, of course, and those being master-pieces.

            Because although everything will be mechanized and formalized some day, there will always be something which has not yet been.  Master-pieces will only stand for a little while, of course, depending on how well they hide their form.  Keep in mind here, this has nothing to do with beauty at all.  It has only to do with art being irreplicable.

            Already, everyone will object to the idea that master-pieces are only master-pieces temporarily.  I apologize, but that is the way things are.  A master-piece must be the master of its genre, and anything reproducible is not an undisputed king; and anything formulizable is mechanizable; and anything mechanizable is reproducible.  Most genres, being sufficiently studied and codified, will have no master-pieces.

            It is hard to say how long master-pieces will stand.  To some degree, we might consider the length of life as ranking of greatness.  Although I have chided him earlier, Joyce is a master of master-pieces, having two very different god-works to his name (a true rarity for artists, as their best works often supercede all lesser works).  Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are sufficiently complicated that they have not yet been completely understood, let alone formalized.  No one has yet successfully imitated Joyce; they have come close to Ulysses, but Finnegan’s Wake is a horrible tangle of confusion that a thousand scholars working for a hundred years have not unraveled.  Work is ever proceeding forward, and someday the work will be dissected, and we will know exactly how every piece was made, and what his tendencies were, and computer program, properly equipped with dictionaries, will begin to churn out polyglot puns and scatological references.  Will it be Joyce?  It will be better.  But until that day, he is our king.

            In music, the noisy and persistent Beck Hansen is our focus.  Not that he has made a master-piece, of course.  The Beatles made the last known master-piece with the White Album, which mysteriously arose from the bowels of popular music.  After and before, noise and formulas.  Thirty years passed before Beck Hansen arose and began to reinvent music, with lessons drawn from every pathetic, failing genre.  The key to masterful music is not reiteration of ancient genres, or collective participation in a growing movement, or random desperation to avoid conformity.  Beck took all the sounds he heard, in life, in music, in dreams, and wove them together into ever-changing, undefinable life’s work.  The musical master-piece must avoid the static compositions of notes and paper, and seek out all the sounds of the world and studio; bars and notes are limited and predictable, but the world offers infinite surprises.  Beck has learned to coordinate sounds like an orchestra.  When he is dead and finished, we may stand back and formulize, and create the master-piece he never could; for no single work of his stands sufficiently from the others, and none have surpassed the Big White.  For now, we watch Beck Hansen silently, and pray for the fulfillment of his destiny.

            The visual arts are a vacant, scorched wasteland.  There is only one body of work which has raised its head, above all history and tradition, to become the master of all that is seen.  Pokey the Penguin, an obscure and anonymously-authored internet comic strip, has staked its reputation on the ability to remain novel in severely constrained medium.  Using repasted images, crude hand drawings, consistent panel lengths, and an eternal setting, Pokey the Penguin has explored the depths of humor and irony in a limited, symbolic setting.  Of all the master-pieces still surviving on earth, Pokey the Penguin may likely be the hardest to formulize.  Until some scholarly attention is paid to this work of genius, the underlying structure will remain hidden, and the master-piece shall stand before us. 

            Ladies and gentlemen, it is our duty to destroy every master-piece that comes before us.  Esthetics has assassinated the early arts, but beauty is no longer our concern.  We must uncover forms and patterns, and show the emptiness of the past.  Art is not magical or mystical.  It has no special essence.  It is a sham that has been prolonged by the ignorance of the non-artist.  Art has value only insofar as it is beyond our comprehension, only insofar as it forces us to look deeper and farther to discover its source.  Once it is explained away, we can ignore the work, or exploit it for cheap pleasure as we see fit.  There are undoubtedly more master-pieces than I have named, although I doubt that many more exist, or that those which do will stand for long.

I have spent a lifetime searching for master-pieces, and indeed the ones I have named may be somewhat suspect; I have chosen to err on the side of caution and ascribe greatness whenever possible, even if I am not perfectly certain of a work’s master-piece status.  You may well disagree my particular choices.  I take no offense.  These distinctions are small.  What we must accept is our solemn duty as critics, scholars, and artists.  We must dismiss those works which no longer retain hidden treasures.  We must seek means of creation that evade known formula and mechanism.  We must seek out those works that yet remain in shadow, and endeavor to illuminate them. 

We have been handed the torch.  Let the burning begin.

 

            [Editor’s summary: At this point, Watkins begins a long-winded assault against the Beerglass lecture.  He notes several inconsistencies, such as Beerglass’ condemnation of Shakespeare’s plots and his later assertion that plots don’t matter.  Watkins also finds fault with Beerglass’ generalizations from visual arts to art in general.  He argues that Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, while not completely unraveled, are sufficiently understood to eliminate them as masterpieces (under Beerglass’ definition).  Beerglass’ comments on Beck are dismissed as emotional, mystical, and without any indication that Beck Hansen’s music is in any way different from that of other avante garde artists who have incorporated everyday sounds into their music; in particular, Watkins claims that Revolution 9, from the “White Album” (actually entitled The Beatles), is far beyond anything that Beck has done.  However, Watkins concludes by saying that if Beerglass had elaborated on his essay, he might have answered his many critics.  Watkins gives a few hypothetical arguments which might save Beerglass’ philosophy, none of which I found relevant to Pokey the Penguin.]

            Whether or not Beerglass realized the connection, Pokey the Penguin embraces, in a lightened form, much of his disrespect for popular and “high” art.  In Chapter 1, we will analyze Havelka’s comics individually, and will uncover winking jabs at Shakespeare (comics #7, #154, #356), Kafka (224), Dante (61), Gilbert and Sullivan (61), Mark Twain (93), Diogenes (115), Nietzsche (287), Wordsworth (356), etc.[editor’s note: None of these “winking jabs” are contained in the edited Chapter 1.  They are easily found by visiting the archives.].  While Havelka does not ever express opinions as extreme as those of Beerglass, he nevertheless entices us to question what we consider great art, and why.  And, certainly, Havelka would agree that Pokey the Penguin is a singular masterpiece.

            The first two books published in response to the stunning Beerglass lectures were The Pogo Principle, by Winstence Kant, and The Yoko Principle ^[3] , by Penny Witchblood.  Beerglass had not made any claims requiring strong refutation, but Kant and Witchblood nevertheless took up arms against him.  Kant and Witchblood thus had a common enemy, but were also adversaries; Kant dismissed Pokey as trash based on randomness and inside jokes; Witchblood likewise accepted the randomness of Pokey, but claimed that the random surrealism of Pokey made it an important and beautiful work.  Both Witchblood and Kant did a disservice to Pokey, but it was not until Alfred Dutsch Agosto’s Pokesthetics was published that the structure and logic of Pokey was brought to light (see Chapter 1).

Kant attacked Pokey the Penguin while promoting the traditional masters of the comic strip: George Herriman (Krazy Kat); Charles Schulz (Peanuts); Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes); and particularly Walt Kelly (Pogo), whom Kant considers the greatest comic artist in history.  In the following passage from the introduction to The Pogo Principle, Kant shows his disdain for Pokey the Penguin and its defenders:

 

Pokey the Penguin’s followers attribute to it some amount of importance based on the fact that it has spawned so many imitations.  However, even laying aside my profound doubt about Pokey the Penguin’s originality, I do not see the value of inspiring creations that everyone admits are terrible.  Moreover, as none of Pokey’s fans seem to understand its alleged hidden structure, of what importance was its short-lived, mediocre popularity?  The quantifiable facts of the matter do not lend any value to this pathetic abomination.

As for the supposed structure…the truth of the matter is that any piece of art, no matter how worthless or patently inferior, can be glorified through sufficiently esoteric analysis.  Cente Watkins’s self-indulgent The Pokey Principle is a perfect example of this process.  By way of long explorations of irrelevant artistic theories, Watkins creates an illusory association between Pokey the Penguin and complex aesthetics.  Such sophistry is similar to mapping mathematical functions onto arbitrary, squiggly lines drawn on a piece of graph paper.  Any random creation can be described using complex terms and methods, but this a posteriori pedantry implies nothing about the talent of the artist or the value of the art.

 

On the other hand, Witchblood praised Pokey wholeheartedly while condemning the silly and predictable amateurs of the past: George Herriman (Krazy Kat); Charles Schulz (Peanuts); Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes); and particularly Walt Kelly (Pogo), whom Witchblood considers the most overrated comic artist in history. In her book, The Yoko Principle (taking its name from the eccentric artist Yoko Ono), Witchblood claimed that surprise and disorder were the most important elements of modern art, and (as Beerglass had said) that art consciously based on formulas and patterns was worthless.  In the following passage from the introduction to The Yoko Principle, Witchblood shows her love for Pokey the Penguin and its imitators:

 

Pokey the Penguin’s enemies attribute to it some amount of irrelevance based on the fact that it has spawned so many imitations.  However, even laying aside my profound convictions about Pokey the Penguin’s originality, I do not see the challenge posed by rival creations that everyone admits are equally good.  Moreover, as none of the imitative comic artists seem to understand the alleged structure, how do we explain their enduring, mediocre popularities? The quantifiable facts of the matter lend equal and great value to Pokey the Penguin and all of its subsequent offspring.

As for the supposed structure…The truth of the matter is that any piece of art, no matter how random or unpredictable, can be trivialized through sufficiently objective analysis.  Winstence Kant’s self-indulgent The Pogo Principle is a perfect example of this process.  By way of long explorations of irrelevant artistic theories, Kant reveals the discrepancy between Pokey the Penguin and complex aesthetics.  Such sophistry is similar to computing a cost-benefit analysis of humankind’s indulgence in art.  Any artistic creation can be proven obvious and pointless with sufficient dissection and disgust, but these a posteriori dismissals imply nothing about the talent of the artist or the value of the art.

 

This book is my response to Witchblood, Kant, and all other critics of Pokey the Penguin.  It is largely an archive of important documents concerning Pokey, and the artistic movements it followed or caused.  I have supplied my own commentary on all selections; my lengthy correspondences with Steve Havelka have given me an insight and erudition that cannot be matched, and I feel obligated to use my wisdom to shed light on the often misguided opinions of others.

To Penny and Winstence, I offer this immediate rebuttal, that they may read only my introduction and know they have been fools.  Pokey the Penguin’s enemies attribute to it some amount of simplicity based on the fact that it has spawned so many imitations.  However, even laying aside my profound convictions about Pokey the Penguin’s originality, I do not see the challenge posed by rival creations that everyone admits are terrible.  Moreover, as none of the imitative comic artists have understood the hidden structure of Pokey, of what importance are their short-lived, mediocre popularities? The quantifiable facts of the matter do not lend equal consideration to Pokey’s inferior doppelgangers.

As for the hidden structure, you must read further before that is revealed to you, although I take great offense to those who would ignorantly mock this comic masterpiece.  To not see beauty where beauty exists is a tragedy, but to deny there is beauty where beauty exists is a crime.  The truth of the matter is that any piece of art, no matter how complex or supposedly superior, can be denigrated through sufficiently mechanical analysis.  Winstence Kant’s self-indulgent The Pogo Principle is a perfect example of this process.  By way of long explorations of irrelevant artistic theories, Kant reveals the discrepancy between Pokey the Penguin and complex aesthetics.  Such sophistry is similar to computing the market-value of the chemicals in the human brain.  Any artistic creation can be proven obvious and pointless with sufficient dissection and indifference, but these a posteriori dismissals imply nothing about the talent of the artist or the value of the art.

 

Why There Are Master-Pieces And What Are The Few Of Them (Oxford Version)

by Rudger Beerglass ^[4]

 

            Maybe it was when a caveman dragged some bloody bone across the ground or when some cavewoman beat on the rocks with her open palms or maybe it was when Beethoven was pounding on his keys with a lowered head trying to catch some drift of the sound but it doesn't really matter what you call the beginning and the notbeginning and the prebeginning and the end because our principles go backwards and anything we learn today is just as good yesterday and tomorrow.

            So we have photography now and anyone with any sense is asking what's the point of drawing something inexactly when you can photograph it exactly but a million people respond, oh, we just like the flavor of the old school drawing and painting.  So be it but nostalgia for the past can hardly be grounds for some kind of esthetic theory and really no matter how ridiculous the past was you'll have people feeling sorry for having lost it.  Nevertheless there is something there and certainly there is some freedom in the inexactness of art and that may be what they'd really mean if they had any sense.  But then the paintings are useful insofar as they don’t reflect reality.  So what's the big deal here?

            And of course with computers now it takes a click or two and any photograph is converted into the old style paint or ink or black and white.  Those simple transformations don't do it any more.  Art has to come from something much higher and much more thoughtful and revolutionary and unexpected and so convinced am I of this truth that I feel uninhibited shouting that representational art is dead.

            Not that I am the first to say so of course.  And even people who didn't say so were saying so.  Picasso probably opened the wound as much as anyone and more than anyone but everything has its origin.  Before him Starry Night didn't look like anything in this world although since it was drawn by a madman it could have been full of what he saw.  And even Van Gogh had his origins but this is not a history and let's move back on forward to Picasso.

            Now Picasso gets slated as the man that brought this all to the fore, although it wasn't just him in reality and everyone knows that.  For one thing art is being killed in every form.  Our principles must be generalizable.  And in fact Picasso wasn't all that important from an idealistic standpoint because all he did was make beauty and it took at least one other person to say, look, he has made beauty and it's nothing like we thought it was.  But of course millions of people were saying that.  But that just opened the same old can of worms because then people were thinking, well then what is beauty?  And is cubism beauty or is it surrealism or what?  And what they didn't realize is that all those fads would pass and what we'd finally realize is that beauty is everywhere and so utterly simple to discover and reproduce that art is unnecessary.

            Which is not to say that art is unnecessary.  Our romantic inclinations would like us to believe that looking at a painting is something holy and incredible but we know from experience that any woman on the street that is any woman, beautiful or ugly, is a million times more interesting than the Mona Lisa.  But how can that be? you say.  The Mona Lisa is being studied and talked about and worshipped centuries upon centuries after its creation but these people will die and be forgotten. Yes and that is true but that is because no one will take it into their heads to study them.  I look out my window now and I see automobiles racing to and fro and if Da Vinci had created an automobile we would be talking about them every day in awe and wonder and we would drive the Mona Lisa to work.  The problem with art is that it involves creation by an artist.  The Mona Lisa is not considered an important work of art because the woman herself is of any interest no matter how many people want to argue about who she was and was she Leonardo and why is she smiling?  People look like her everyday and have much more beautiful smiles.  The Mona Lisa is studied because people want to know more about Da Vinci and people care about Da Vinci because he fooled people into thinking he was important by making them all think they were uglier than his stupid painting.

            I pick on Da Vinci but he probably didn't understand how pointless it was.  Drawing people is difficult.  It is very difficult to make the Mona Lisa and it is somewhat beautiful and in everyone's mind there is this bizarre superstition that the harder someone works to make something beautiful the more beautiful the thing is.  So people spent a lot of time working out proportions, and digging symmetry and whatnot and then because it had all gotten very complicated, even though it had nothing to do with beauty anymore people had to study and work hard and try a lot to make something beautiful and then everyone felt obliged to admit, yes that is very beautiful.

            This is certainly not limited to the visual arts or the Renaissance.  It still amazes me that people are blind enough to pretend that Ulysses is a readable let alone beautiful book.  I have read it, I have read the unreadable, read about the unreadable, and I cannot claim to understand everything any more than anyone else but what difference does that make?  Does it make the book any more beautiful to know that Joyce painstakingly inserted reference after reference to Shakespeare and Homer?  Certainly not especially if you need a few additional volumes to educate you about the references.  Writing that way simply made writing Ulysses more difficult and we assume that makes it better but it doesn't.  Beauty is not mathematically proven or painfully extracted and the only joy to be had from reading Ulysses is the smug satisfaction of having understood something which very few others will and happily pretending that they are worse off for it.

            And Bach provides a happy dichotomy because the majority of his works are beautiful and pleasing to all of the masses, we hear the name Bach and we know to expect beauty,  yet what among the scholars is his end-all being of genius?  A Musical Offering, the most horrid and disappointing work I have ever heard, in which Bach has taken a dreadful theme and transformed and fixed it about itself with different tempos and inversions and variations and we are left with a mathematical abstraction, an offensive and perverse disdain for the human listener.  Beauty is not mechanics.

            Let us say that a different way.  The problem with art as has been evidenced throughout known time is this, that people have found beautiful things and tried to isolate the properties which made those things beautiful and then generalized those principles for use in production of beauty.  The method seems sound enough and admirable enough and simple enough.  And what has gone wrong?

            We all know by now what has gone wrong.  There is no single great Platonic beauty.  The very idea of beauty is impossible to define when we realize how subjective the experience is.  For some beauty is a flower while for others it is torturous violence.  How do we abstract from these facts?  How do we build a general theory in view of the fact that beauty changes from person to person and from epoch to epoch?

            Many would like to claim that great art is great art precisely because it generalizes to so many times and people, that Beethoven is great because everyone everywhere loves Beethoven, that the Sex Pistols are not great because no one will like them in the distant future and very few people like them now.  I am not deeply opposed to this rating of art but I still find it weak in application as artists from the past enjoy a much greater position in the world than newer artists.  Beethoven was the greatest composer in the world in a time when the world's population was next to nothing and when the poor and starving were highly unlikely to become professional composers.  In Beethoven's days as in most anyone's olden days it was not nearly as difficult to be the greatest composer on earth.

            But that misses the point anyway because true genius does exist.  Shakespeare was great of course but he is not remembered today just because he is great.  Most people do not even enjoy reading Shakespeare, he is a grudging task in high school and an angelic bogeyman before then.  Afterwards he is probably neither seen nor heard save for the odd phrase that we borrow from him whose theft won't be noticed anyway.  And in fact there's the pudding, that although Shakespeare's plays are typically lost on the uneducated his words and phrases still exist in the common tongue.  There is no other work that has so ingrained itself in the minds of English-speaking people as the works of Shakespeare with the possible exception of the King James Bible.

            But I digress, I apologize, because praising Shakespeare is a redundant practice in this world.  That is part of the problem.  Shakespeare was not a terrific innovator in the realm of plot.  Everyone knows that he stole all his storylines.  He was not at all experimental with the organizations of his plays: all five acts with predictable climaxes and resolutions.  He did not display any insight into human nature or individuality: all of his protagonists speak with the same gigantic metaphors and the same long-winded asides and the same exaggerated emotions.  Shakespeare's plays are all somewhat laughable in their predictability and fakeness.  But why can we not separate the two?  Shakespeare was a poet and a wonderful turner of phrase but he was not one for plot or characterization.  There are at least a hundred books in existence ready to contradict me as would be the case no matter what I chose to say about Shakespeare.  William is so well protected in the scholarly eye that it is difficult to take a shot and be taken seriously, and although it would not be difficult to find people who agree that Shakespeare's plots and characters are weak it is unthinkable to dismiss Shakespeare because of those faults.

            Shakespeare's plays no matter how weak and silly they might be cannot be allowed to die because they have inspired so many other great works of art and no one wants to disrupt the cultural institutions based on current assumptions of greatness.  Let Shakespeare fall and where is Joyce?  Being old and having been loved a long time makes an artist nearly invincible.  Why else is Homer regarded as history’s greatest poet when virtually no one can read him in the original Greek and why else is Michelangelo history's greatest visual artist when virtually no one has seen David?  There is too much scholarship and too much history and too many assumptions laid in place by the intelligentsia.  Dylan Thomas cannot be better than Homer and Pokey the Penguin cannot be better than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

            The sad and obvious truth of the matter is that once formalized or mechanized art is no longer art and the few arts that have not been formalized are now being mechanized.  There is no mystery or talent required to create artistic beauty and if a talentless person can do it why should we give any regard to those who require talent to produce the same result?   John may spend a week painting a tree but Jane will take a photograph, and then use a workshop program to make the picture appear painted.  Foolish John, we need you no longer.

            Jim may spend a month painting a unicorn fighting Cerberus on Venus.  Jane can morph existing photos and backdrops to create the same scene in any style in a matter of hours.  Faithful Jim, we need you no longer.

            Examples of this sort generally come in threes but let us move onward.  There is no visual art created before the last century that modern technology would not have allowed a less talented person to make better and faster.  Let us be realistic and assume this trend will continue.  There is nothing we can do to avoid the solemn fact that Michelangelos are no longer needed.  But what about ideas?  Visual arts are something else of course and by visual arts I don't mean to include film of course but what about music and literature and poetry?  It used to be that words and poetry told stories and just told things about what they were.  The stories were not even constant then and a sense of that remains which is to say that some people think that it is the plot of a story that matters.  But the plot doesn't matter very much because it's not very difficult to think up plots.  Good plots don't really make books interesting and they certainly don't make poems interesting although bad plots can ruin anything.

            Take the Iliad for example and ask, does anyone really care about all these gods and goddesses and Trojans and Greeks and things?  Certainly not and anyone who really does can read a plot summary in five minutes but the manner of telling the story is what makes the story art.  With poetry there's some kind of an obvious mechanism there or at least there used to be in the form of rhyme or meter or whatever.  But it is very easy to put a story into any given meter and into any given rhyme scheme so that is not what makes poetry great.

            But maybe I should tip  my hand and say that poetry was never great.  Even the original Iliad  is doggerel but then what rhyming or metrical poetry isn't?  When most of the population is illiterate it's a big deal to be able to set down thoughts for future generations although it's ironic that I say that since Homer never wrote anything down.  But that's a rare case because Homer probably didn't exist and anyway the point is that when millions of people know how to read and write and measure meter anyone can make poetry as good as Homer's or Shakespeare's.  The problem is that they are old and if you try to do anything people are going to say you are not doing it as good as they did unless you rip them off and then people will say that you are ripping them off and therefore not as good as they were.  You might as well toss in your hat in the poetry game if you want to be the greatest there ever was.

            What then literature?  Anyone can write a book and although many books are very enjoyable most people would rather watch the movie than read the book and movies are almost always terrible.  Books get along by having some kind of appeal to some certain group of people but very few books actually seem beautiful to any large group of people unless the book has some political or social message in which case you don't know if people like the book or the message.  And anyway once the movement passes the book can be dismissed.  The works of bully-pulpit authors like Ayn Rand and Camus will not endure long or rank as master-pieces on any intelligent person’s list.

            I'm probably slipping away from you here even though I’m really still on the topic and what I’m saying is clear and obvious but let me see if I bring you back in.  Most books that are thought by scholastic institutions to be great books do not appeal to the masses and most books that appeal to the masses will not be of interest to anyone in a few decades.   There's no real connection between the artistry going into a work and the beauty coming out.  Esthetics is dead and rightfully so because if you care about beauty then art is not your concern.

            With a few exceptions of course and those being master-pieces.  Because although everything will be mechanized and formalized some day there will always be something which has not yet been.  Master-pieces will only stand for a little while of course depending on how well they hide their form.  You should keep in mind here against all your instinctual oppositions that this has nothing to do with beauty at all, it has only to do with art being irreplicable.

            Already everyone will object to the idea that master-pieces are only master-pieces temporarily and I apologize but that is the way things are and have to be whether everyone likes it or not.  A master-piece must be the master of its genre and anything reproducible is not an undisputed king and anything formalizable is mechanizable and anything mechanizable is reproducible.  Most genres being sufficiently studied and codified will have no master-pieces.  It is hard to say how long master-pieces will stand but to some degree we might consider the length of life as ranking of greatness although that might be unfair because mechanization and formalization are much easier now then long ago. 

Although I have chided him earlier Joyce is a master of master-pieces, having two very different god-works to his name which is a true rarity for artists as their best works often supercede all lesser works.  Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake are sufficiently complicated that they have not yet been completely understood let alone formalized.  No one has yet successfully imitated Joyce, they have come close to Ulysses but Finnegan’s Wake is a horrible tangle of confusion that a thousand scholars working for a hundred years have not unraveled.  Work is ever proceeding forward and someday the work will be dissected and we will know exactly how every piece was made and what his tendencies were and some computer program properly equipped with dictionaries will begin to churn out polyglot puns and scatological references.  Will it be Joyce?  No, it will be better but that day may be long off but anyway that day is not today and today Joyce is our king.

            In the world of music the noisy and persistent Beck Hansen is our focus although he has made no master-pieces.  The Beatles made the last known master-piece with The White Album which mysteriously arose from the bowels of popular music which after and before was nothing but noise and formulas.  Thirty years passed before Beck Hansen arose and began to reinvent music with lessons drawn from every pathetic failing genre and showed that the key to masterful music is not reiteration of ancient genres or collective participation in a growing movement or random desperation to avoid conformity.  Beck took all the sounds he heard in life and in music and wove them together into an ever-changing indefinable life’s work.  The musical master-piece must avoid the static compositions of notes and paper and seek out all the sounds of the world and studio because bars and notes are limited and predictable but the world offers infinite surprises.  Beck has learned to coordinate sounds like an orchestra and when he is dead and finished we may stand back and rearrange and create the master-piece he never could but as of now no single work of his stands sufficiently apart from the others and none have surpassed the Big White.

            The visual arts are a relatively vacant and uninteresting area of study.  There is only one body of work which has raised its head above all history and tradition to become the master of all that is seen.  Pokey the Penguin is an obscure and anonymously-authored internet comic strip that has staked its reputation on the ability to remain novel in severely constrained medium.  Using re-pasted images, crude hand drawings, consistent panel lengths and an eternal background Pokey the Penguin has explored the depths of humor and irony in a limited symbolic setting.  Of all the master-pieces still surviving on earth Pokey the Penguin may likely be the hardest to formalize and until some scholarly attention is paid to this work of genius the underlying structure will remain hidden and the master-piece will continue to exist.

            Ladies and gentlemen it is our solemn moral duty to unravel every master-piece that comes before us.  Esthetics has assassinated the early arts but beauty is no longer our concern,  we must uncover forms and patterns and show the emptiness of the past.  Art is not magical or mystical, it has no special essence, it is a hobby that has been prolonged by the ignorance of the non-artist.  Art has value only insofar as it is beyond our comprehension and only insofar as it forces us to look deeper and farther to discover its source.  Once it is explained away we can ignore the work or exploit it for pleasure as we see fit.  There are undoubtedly more master-pieces than I have named although I doubt that many more exist or that those that do will stand for long.  I have spent a lifetime searching for master-pieces and indeed the ones I have named may be somewhat suspect, I have chosen to err on the side of caution and ascribe greatness whenever possible even if I am not perfectly certain of a work’s master-piece status.  You may well disagree with my particular choices and I will take no offense as these distinctions are small.  What we must accept is our solemn duty as critics, scholars and artists.  We must dismiss those works which no longer retain hidden treasures, we must seek means of creation that evade known formula and mechanism, we must seek out those works that yet remain in shadow and endeavor to illuminate them.  All these things we owe to art and artists and especially master-pieces and ourselves.