Dave's Sneaky Thoughts On ... Digital Art

If fan art is a ‘drawing on materials from the dominant media and employing them in ways that serve their own interests and facilitate their own pleasures’ then ‘the nature of [such] production is shaped through social norms, aesthetic conventions, interpretive protocols, technological resources and technical competence’ (Jenkins, 224). But what does this mean for fan art’s ability to comment on culture and society? Or does this entail a limited ability to comment solely on its own subculture, or only on the cultures drawn upon in its creation?

The very idea of fan art as creations based around other media denotes a blurring of the lines between producer and audience, and reflects the development of a society critical of, one might even say obsessed with, the media it consumes. Fan art is, essentially, Oedipus to the original media’s Jocasta: tied continuously and inextricably from that which creates it. In this manner, it can be said that fan art may serve as a cultural critique by exposing a cultural obsession with the media, and propagating that obsession of its own virtue.

The growth of fan communities, and of fan art within them, highlights how fans create in order to appreciate: and thus by producing derivative works of the media they underline a fixation with it. For example, NarutoFan, a fan website about the manga/anime Naruto, maintains roughly 1,158 works of art sufficiently altered to be considered digital (possibly more, in other sections such as wallpapers, etc), and DeviantArt, a free internet art community, contains 309,887 works on Naruto, all of which is done by fans, and develops in tandem with the original Naruto storyline. This clearly suggests that fan art, as a genre, propagates the media that creates it, and thereby reflects a relationship that denotes a fixation with the media. But, as Henry Jenkins points out:

‘[fan] texts … do not … provide a very good basis for constructing a theory of
dominant reading practices, since [fan] production reflects the particular
demands and expectations of a subcultural community which are different in kind
as well as degree from the types of semiotic production occurring within the
larger culture.’

Essentially, it may not be entirely correct to extend the commentary inferred from fan art as to society as a whole, because the fan subculture is distinct from the mainstream that spawned it. That being the case, the critique of fan art may be limited to the fan community, or possibly to fan communities in general, because the ‘mainstream’ consumers do not engage in such activity, it would perhaps be inaccurate to implicate them as media-fixated.

One particular trend in fan art, notably in Japanese-based media such as anime and manga, is a reflection, sometimes undeniably explicit, of homoeroticism between male characters. As Sharon Kinsella writes, ‘[the] majority of activists in amateur manga subculture are working-class girls, and what turns them on more than anything else is violent homosexual romance between male hermaphrodites’ (Kinsella, 289). Although she is referring to the underground amateur manga subculture, the attraction among Japanese girls (and homosexual boys) to homoerotic depictions and bishounen in Japanese popular culture extends to the fan art community, and is particularly visible in the works of artists such as orin on DeviantArt which depict homoeroticism among well known anime and animated characters, from shows such as Naruto, Bleach and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Within this subset of fan art then, there exists a cultural commentary that promotes the idea of homosexuality and represents it dually: in the idealised light of shonen-ai (literally meaning ‘boy-love’), a style of manga that romanticises and desexualises young men, and yaoi, a generally more sexually explicit variety. While this commentary exists independently of fan art, its presence amongst the audience, or the masses, who create such overtones where there are none in the original media by remaking artworks produced for one purpose to serve alternative interests, and thereby ‘serve their own interests and facilitate their own pleasures’ (Jenkins, 224), means that a cultural critique is in fact underway, and that it is contemplative of a cultural desire for such media.

Again, the idea of a general cultural critique by fan art needs be circumscribed by the fact that such a critique may not apply to society at large. The homoerotic bent of fan art could belong to the subculture itself, thereby limiting any commentary to that subculture, rather than the hegemonic culture from which it springs.