*casually draping my arm around your shoulder and gesturing with my other hand*
Now hear me out, pal, what if– what if I think ALL culture, art and writing are important and worth preserving, regardless of who wrote it and whether or not they’re deemed marketable by the capitalist institution?
I went to an exhibition of folk art once at a major national gallery. It was so vibrant and fascinating and culturally important – more so in a lot of ways than some of the art in the main galleries because this was art made by common people as something for pleasure or to express something in their lives. Sometimes it was made as a commission for someone but not for the aristocracy necessarily, it was made to be lived with and to be enjoyed.
The other notable thing about this exhibition was that it was so sparse.
Folk art, craft, it isn’t kept. It doesn’t last. A rich person hasn’t deemed it the cream of the crop and declared it to be worth a whole bunch of money so unless it is kept out of sheer love, it disappears when it’s owner is gone. It’s an ephemeral act of craft and creativity made by people that might be an expert in their specific field but one that isn’t currently deemed ‘high art’ or commercially popular or just plain fashionable enough to be kept after the owner or the artist is gone.
Sometimes this can be because the creators are marginalised groups and sometimes they don’t have the access to artistic and creative training. Sometimes they are just doing something they love and are good at but which no one else appreciates at that point in time.
Sometimes their motivations aren’t based in getting published or bought by collectors or whatever. Sometimes someone just wants to create.
The act of creating is what makes art art. It’s the intention. It’s not the result.
So yeah. Like. Fuck you dickweed. Not everything is about you and not everything is for you.
I’m an archivist and historian by profession, and a volunteer with AO3 since 2010. Often the most interesting and significant things in archives are things that were never “meant” to be preserved (notes in margins, candid photos, fliers and posters and ephemera). And AO3 absolutely serves as an archive, so saying that it doesn’t “really” archive or preserve things is actively stupid and false. For instance, AO3’s Open Doors project preserves and saves fanworks from sites that are defunct or no longer maintained, and is engaged in digitizing paper zines from the pre-internet period. That is 100% the definition of archiving and preserving material that would otherwise be lost.
But archives (I mean real, professional, official archives staffed by people with advanced degrees who get paid to be there) also have projects that look very much like AO3. For instance, many archives organized ways for people to submit materials about their experiences during COVID-19. This includes stuff like: poetry, diary entries, personal reflections, people’s feelings and thoughts. People self-submitting their own written material, unfiltered, honest, not highly polished or professionally published, was like gold to archives.
So, you might say, ok, that’s people reflecting about an important historical event, that tells future historians things they will want to know, that’s important. Not like AO3.
Now let’s imagine that we could discover a lost body of ordinary people’s writing from 100 or 300 or 500 years ago. A huge collection of the things everyday people, not just elite wealthy highly educated men, were thinking about, their fantasies and fears and hopes and things they loved, and how they felt about the books they read or the plays they saw or the music they listened to, from 1900 or 1700 or 1500. People’s writings, in their own words, without a filter. The graffiti at Pompeii, or Onfim’s writing lessons, or Ea-Nasir’s hate mail, but in 50k or 500k word installments instead of 5 or 10 or 50 word snippets. That would be, and I’m not exaggerating here, a literal gold mine for historians and literary scholars and linguists and anthropologists and all kinds of other fields. It would be the source material for countless research projects and dissertations and books.
Now, historical value isn’t particularly why I work on and contribute my writing to AO3. I work on AO3 because I think having a secure and reliable site, that isn’t vulnerable to whims and technical failures and changing policies, that is free to use and free of advertising, where people can safely post their fanworks is important. I think giving enjoyment and relaxation and comfort to people is worthwhile in and of itself, even if it wasn’t a contribution to the historical record.
But it fucking chaps my hide AS A HISTORIAN to have people say “ah, this collection of ordinary people’s writing, it’s pointless and meaningless, no one cares,” when that is an overt lie. Tell me you’ve never talked to a historian in your fucking life without telling me you’ve never talked to a historian in your fucking life. Historians eat this stuff up with a spoon.
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