How easily we seem to accept that producing an image with paint can somehow “immortalize” a person. Does the validity of this “immortalization factor” increase with the permanence of the recording substance? That is, is an oil portrait of a child more “immortal” than, say, a videotape? One is as vulnerable as the other, unless kept in a museum bunker behind a velvet rope. Is a family snapshot less immortal than a bronze sculpture? It’s unlikely that the bronze with be lost behind the sofa cushions. Is a book more immortal than a pamphlet — a hardcover more than a paperback? Is a diary less immortal than a novel? Is Virginia Woolfe’s diary more immortal than a Jackie Collins novel?

Is a memory, the most mysterious of recorded media, inconsequential on the “immortality scale”? It would seem so. What’s more vapor-like than a memory? Then again, doesn’t The Book of James teach that our lives — in the physical sense at least — are “but a vapor,” here today and gone tomorrow? Or is a memory, when it becomes part of our life’s scripting, become the foundation of our earthly reality, a subtle trigger for our thoughts and actions, the most truly immortal medium of all?

In the BBC television series The Clive James Show, writer and physician Jonathan Miller spoke of an experiment in which, with no instruction other than to concentrate, college students were shown 10,000 images at five-second intervals. A week later, Miller recounted, “5,000 photographs were shown to them with 5,000 they had not seen before and they simply had to press a button when it was one that they recognized. And they were ninety-five percent right.” What Miller described is called “recognition memory” as opposed to “retrieval memory.” If a student had been asked to compile a list of what images they had seen, they most likely wouldn’t have been able to do it. But retrieving something we’ve seen before is much easier. We do this instinctively when we visit a place we’re never been before — we look for landmarks to help us find our way.

Are we looking for landmarks of another world, another landscape, a city not built with hands?

Immortality in art takes on three elements, in unequal amounts: the subject, the artist, and the medium. In a work of art, is it the subject that is “immortal,” or the artist? This, of course, may depend on the fame of the subject itself. Stuart’s unfinished oil portrait of George Washington is more a tribute to Washington as President. Stuart the artist is almost a footnote to the immense recognizeability of the subject (although it may be argued that the portrait itself, and so the artist, created the recognition in the first place). But who is immortalized in Gainsbourough’s Blue Boy? Or Picasso’s Mademoiselles de Avingnon? The subject, and the elements of the subject that we associate with life — thought, personality, vitality — is lost with time, stripped away, leaving only the artist’s subjective translation of the subject, the artifice, the shining veneer that the artist has frozen in pigment.

The subject can be, well, virtually anything. Anything that interests and inspires you. The artist may incorporate his or her upbringing, socio-economic position, the surrounding culture, physical abilities, education, aesthetic influences, artistic precedents, and so on. All of the above may be accepted or rejected by the artist, each producing a unique result. The medium is whatever conduit for expression is available or desirable for the artist. Andrew Wyeth chose egg tempura as his medium, a notoriously slow method with which to paint, specifically because it slowed him down. Musicians are often attracted to a specific instrument because it embodies their sensibilities similar to the way a specific animal totem is believed to inhabit an Inuit boy when he comes of age.

A masterpiece has the curious ability to be both completely obvious and completely original at the same time. How can this be? A work of art often provokes a response of why didn’t someone think of that already, such as Jackson Pollack’s action paintings, or William S. Burroughs’ non-linear storytelling. But masterpieces are also said to be “ahead of their time,” such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Philip Glass’s repetitious mandala-like note loops. Glass’s work, thought to be so disagreeable in an early performance that an audience member pounded his shoe on the edge of the stage to get the orchestra to stop, is used in films and television commercials now. As Gilbert Seldes noted in his book The Seven Lively Arts, an artwork that withstands the test of time is adorned with, “the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself.”

In a letter found after his death in 1827, Beethoven called the love of his life, a woman who was never named, his “Immortal Beloved.” Do you suppose he ever suspected that his music would be still be studied and performed nearly two hundred years later? Consider what you’re working on right now. Imagine that it might have significance in the year 2208. Would that thought change what you’re doing?

I’ve never heard of a web site referred to as a “masterpiece” in the same way a film or classic television may be. That may change someday. But could it be that a web site, a YouTube video, an e-mail, will never be considered a masterpiece or even a work of art, even though considerable skill, insight, and resources may be applied? It’s not simply the fact that web sites are commercial ventures, or that they are made for a specific function. Quaker furniture was created for function alone, almost anti-aesthetic, and today it is revered for its’ design and form as well as function. Calling web sites a commercial craft and not art isn’t an excuse either. Charles Dickens wrote with a goal of commercial success. So did Shakespeare. And even now, the overwhelming majority of blogs and web sites are non-commercial. someone created them out a desire for expression. The creator is free to do whatever their wallets, schedules and abilities may afford. A web site can be art, but a masterpiece?

A web site may never be considered a masterpiece for this one reason alone: they are far too changeable, too ephemeral for us to believe that they may tap into immortality. It would be like calling a news program a masterpiece. If this is true, does this reflect how we view our lives in an age of extreme novelty? As Paul Simon wrote in Boy In The Bubble,

These are the days of lasers in the jungle,
Lasers in the jungle somewhere,
Staccato signals of constant information,
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires…
The way we look to a distant constellation
That's dying in a corner of the sky,
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don't cry baby don't cry…

We’re swimming in the shallows, with little challenge, interest or inclination to explore the mysterious depths of the wide blue sea.

In addition to the subject, the artist, and the medium, a fourth element is present in the best art, one that is far harder to measure, something we might call transcendence, the quality of a work that transcends fashion, or time, or gender, age, culture, or language. No one masterpiece will be everything to all people, but it’s this transcendence, the hope it engenders, and the glimpse of eternity it reflects, that enables a work to open the universe a little wider than it was before, and reveal the possibilities ahead.

(Article artwork a detail of Timepiece by Richard W. Field)