I only glanced at a few episodes of the New Three Kingdoms television drama, and I haven’t read many related reviews either. At present I also do not want to offer any comment on the drama itself; works of that sort are not worth criticizing. I am merely using New Three Kingdoms to recall certain general phenomena of audiovisual works in this era.
When watching New Three Kingdoms, and when in earlier years watching various remade historical costume dramas, I often could not help thinking: why can’t you just make it properly? Why must the screenwriters insist on adding so many melodramatic, soap-opera-style gimmicks? Why can’t they show more respect for the original work or for history? Is it because the director and screenwriters are too uneducated? (The screenwriters of New Three Kingdoms really are.) Then why hire those screenwriters at all? Is there really no one in China? Why not just randomly ask a proper academy to have a history graduate student take a quick look at it for review—you wouldn’t even need a professor? How many elementary mistakes could that avoid? When remaking classic masterpieces, why not ask some people who genuinely have deep feelings for those classics to write or direct them? Are such people really so hard to find? Around me I can easily find several people who have read Romance of the Three Kingdoms seventeen or eighteen times. Why, then, insist on hiring someone who hasn’t even finished reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms once and has merely looked at the comic-book adaptation to write the script? These questions undoubtedly trouble me, but on further thought they are all, in fact, perfectly natural things—this is precisely the inevitable tendency of works carried by mass media; this is the logic of mass media.
On every kind of medium, corresponding artistic works develop. The artistic forms brought about by different media are vastly different, but the special feature of mass media is precisely that, in essence, it is anti-art. Although mass media may also produce works of art—for example, the old version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms may perhaps count as one; and some excellent television dramas, documentaries, and even variety galas may become unique artistic forms offered by mass media—as the logic of mass media continues to unfold, artistic value will increasingly fade, until consumer goods swallow up works of art, so that works of art can only gain legitimacy by becoming consumer goods (or commodities), rather than the other way around.
In the past, any medium could provide both works of art and consumer goods. These two were not mutually contradictory. But only with mass media are their positions reversed: works of art are no longer the highest form of consumer good, and goods are no longer measured by artistic value; instead, works of art are measured by commercial value.
So-called works of art and consumer goods probably make no difference in the eyes of postmodernity, but I still want to state their distinction in a classical way: the former are free and eternal, while the latter are utilitarian and fashionable. By “free” and “eternal,” I do not mean that art is some mysterious existence transcending the context of its time; I simply mean its orientation of value. The value of a work of art is self-revealing. If we regard a television drama or anything else as a work of art and evaluate it, then we might say: it is beautifully made, very moving, very lovely, and so on. Such an evaluation is of course contextual; in another cultural or historical setting, people might think it is not beautiful, is ugly, and so on. But one must note that art is not the same as beauty. It is not that something necessarily judged beautiful by the majority is a work of art; rather, the very possibility of “being able to be judged beautiful” is itself a characteristic of a work of art. In other words, when we judge that it is not good-looking, that it is not beautiful, we are already treating it as a work of art, judging it in the manner of contemplating art. Thus, of course, there are successful works of art and unsuccessful works of art. A successful work of art is a work that has obtained the evaluation the artist expected, and to evaluate a work of art is to speak only from the work itself—whether it is beautiful or not, lovely or not, delicate or rough, gentle or dazzling, and so on. But the value of a commodity is not evaluated in this way. If we say a commodity is successful, then we cannot simply draw a conclusion from the commodity itself; rather, we say: how well did it sell? How widely was it distributed? How much profit did it bring in?—these are the value of a commodity. That is to say, the value of a commodity is not internal; it depends on the external circumstances of its use and acceptance.
The difference between mass media and traditional media lies in this: in mass media, evaluations that treat a work as a work of art almost no longer affect—at least no longer dominate—the work’s survival and dissemination. In other words, the value of a work as a work of art becomes utterly insignificant. In traditional media, discursive power was held by elites. Elites were first and foremost people with too much free time on their hands, and also people who paid attention to “taste.” They first evaluated the works being disseminated, seeing whether these works were any good. Good works would then receive more support and only then become successful commodities, widely circulated. But in mass media, evaluation of the work itself is entirely unnecessary. What is needed is merely the dissemination of the work itself. If evaluation of the work itself can still affect its dissemination, then such evaluation need not even be better the higher it is. In the final analysis, the work no longer needs to pursue evaluation of itself; it only needs to pursue the dissemination effect itself. New Three Kingdoms is a typical example: condemnations of it have been all over the place, yet its ratings continued to climb steadily—many people shout “so hilariously bad,” “so ridiculous,” “so awful,” while still enthusiastically watching it on and on. One even begins to suspect that many of the erroneous arrangements in the details are deliberately designed as a strategy to draw attention. Many people are carefully following it precisely in order to hunt for cringe-worthy moments or continuity errors, and controversy itself can also function as free advertising; quite a few television dramas and other programs have indeed adopted similar strategies. Of course, in order to be accepted by more ordinary people, respect for history, logical rigor, and painstaking attention to detail are not merely unnecessary, but even negative. Having someone with a higher cultural level write the script would certainly elevate the work’s artistic quality, but if lowering the work’s cultural register to primary-school level can make it accepted by more viewers, then the logic of mass media will not choose the former.
May 23, 2010
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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