The world of culture is full of unspoken distinctions and barriers. One of the most persistent is between types of art which people think can and can't be collaborative. Examples of the former include soap operas, pop songs, musicals and film scripts. Examples of the latter include classical music, literary fiction, plays and poems. The visual arts hover somewhere in the middle: we expect most paintings and sculptures to be by individuals, but we don't mind the odd maverick exception, such as the Chapman brothers or Gilbert & George.
The picture is complicated, of course, by the fact that some art forms are inherently more collaborative than others. Writing an opera, unlike writing a poem, necessarily involves more than one person (unless the composer also writes the libretto). And once an opera is written, performing it requires singers, musicians, stage designers and so on. Yet even within the category of the performing arts, there are differences in the degree to which collaboration is acceptable. Take operas and musicals. There are no substantive differences between these two forms. Both, in essence, are plays set to music. Yet musicals tend to be seen as the work of partnerships (Rogers and Hammerstein, Lloyd Webber and Rice), whereas operas are invariably attributed to solitary geniuses. The only opera-writing team to have achieved popular recognition is Gilbert and Sullivan—which is an exception that really does prove the rule.
There is a trend here: the more highbrow the art form, the greater the requirement that it be the work of one person. We do not like the idea of great art being produced by committee (although we make an exception for the King James Bible). The achievement of Mozart dwarfed the achievement of his librettist, Da Ponte, but the achievement of Andrew Lloyd Webber doesn't eclipse that of Tim Rice. Creative genius is a solitary attribute—at least when it's attached to a suitably rarefied art form. When the work in question is of the type that habitually rakes in millions at the box office, or reaches the top of the charts, the requirement of solo creative responsibility suddenly disappears.
There are signs, however, that this situation is changing. In the last decade or so, our definitions of high and low art have become more fluid, partly as a result of the arrival on our television screens of high-quality drama series from the US. It is well known that shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire are created by teams of writers. Such programmes are undeniably commercial, but their quality and inventiveness have led many to claim that they should qualify as high art. (For an example of this argument, see Erik Tarloff's piece on The Wire in last month's Prospect.) Film-writing, too, is well known to be a collaborative enterprise: one often hears talk of films written by committee, or of script-doctors being called in to rescue a project.
All this has gone some way to eroding the view that there is an automatic connection between great art and solitary inspiration. And this awareness is beginning to filter into the world of books. Many people instinctively recoil at the idea of serious fiction being produced by more than one person. But in fact this has already happened. One of the most interesting new "writers" to emerge from Italy in the last few years is a four-man "collective" from Bologna. Their first novel, Q, a Reformation-era thriller written under the name "Luther Blissett" (a joke reference to the English footballer, who once spent a season playing for AC Milan), earned very respectable reviews, sold more than 200,000 copies in Italy and was shortlisted for various prizes. Its successor, 54, an Alfred Hitchcock parody featuring Cary Grant, has also done well.
In Britain, collective novel-writing is already a reality outside the domain of literary fiction. Companies specialising in "collaborative fiction" have started emerging, although for the moment their efforts are confined to children's and genre fiction. One such company, Hothouse, won this year's Waterstone's children's book prize with a teenage fantasy called Darkside. The emergence of collaborative novels fits with the diminishing importance that readers seem to attach to authorship. People are quite happy to read novels with the name "Katie Price" (aka glamour model Jordan) on the cover, even though they know perfectly well that she didn't write them.
Aesthetic purists will see all this as regrettable, but I'm not sure that they are right. The requirement that works of art be created by individuals was an invention of the Renaissance; before that ideas about creativity were less rigid. The increasing acceptability of artistic collaboration, therefore, could be seen as a reversion to the norm. Besides, why should we be so precious about how our art is produced? When defending the view that great art must be the work of individuals, people often refer to things like "voice" and "vision." But why, logically, must voice be an attribute of one person—and not two, three or ten? Our ideas about genius are also ripe for revision. Genius often does attach to individuals—but must it always? John Lennon and Paul McCartney are seen as geniuses, but the relative unimpressiveness of their solo careers indicates that, individually, neither were. It was only when working as the songwriting entity "Lennon-McCartney" that their brilliance blossomed. Collaboration, in other words, may be the very thing that sets creativity free. If we are starting to see it as an acceptable means of producing serious art, then that is a good thing.
