I am sure you have heard the lament before; “artwork made by using a computer requires less talent than artwork made by traditional means”. Most of you probably already know the inherent falseness of this statement but should you find yourself in need of an analogy, I offer the following:
Talent is not merely resigned to technique, seductive as it may be.
I would say that seeing any of the Abstract Expressionist works done by Jackson Pollock made using not paint and canvas but instead, light and silver halide is very talented. This is not to say photography of existing paintings but rather abstract expressionist work done using a camera. To most people familiar with both Pollock’s work and photography in general, this is would be an obvious feat of some skill. But there are reason we use the medium we do. Superficially it can be said that cameras are good at making photographs and pencils are good at making pencil drawings. What we should say is, people are the ones who are actually good at making these things, the camera or the pencil are just tools available to the artist. All that can be successfully argued is that there are different techniques. There are those who say it takes more talent to render a pencil drawing, presumable of the same scene as it does to render that scene with a camera. I ask, does writing a novel by hand using a pen require more talent than writing a novel using a computer keyboard or is it really just more fascinating to wonder why someone, with modern tools available would choose to spend more time using traditional means to do something the traditional way?
Really, all that you can say definitively is that it comes down to a matter of choice, and available resources. While it is true that not everyone has access to a computer and there are even those who find that using a pen to write is, for them, more efficient, this in no way equates causally, to an inconsistency of the content. Differences result from the intent of the novelist making the work, and therein lies the real estimation of talent. Ultimately, regardless of the methods and mechanics of writing, the goal is to read the novel. How it was made and how it will be reprinted or distributed are incidental compared to the content that it contains. The message that it sends, the story that it tells, these are the actual factors we are interested in dedicating time to considering. There are novels written in many different languages, many unintelligible to ourselves because we have never had the benefit of learning those particular languages. Should we dismiss these works in tongues foreign to us simply because we do not know the letterforms of the languages in which they were originally written? And, is it wiser to base our estimation of the talent of the author upon what language the novel is written in or upon the meaning of content?
Senecal
(originally published June 2003)
