Virginia Heffernan in January 20, 2008 NY Times Magazine

A work today must become a franchise, generate tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There must be “Such and Such: Origins” and “Such and Such Touchdown” for PlayStation. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of her or his work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise. But it’s a mistake to see this imperative to branch out as a simple coarsening of culture. In fact, rhizome art is both lower-brow (“American Idol”) and more avant-garde (Ryan Trecartin’s “I-Be Area”) than linear, author-controlled narrative, which takes its cues from the middle-class novel and guards its borders, refines its aesthetic, defines a particular reality and insists on authenticity. It shuts fans out. Today a wiki has to form on the Web, along with fan fiction (viewer-written stories that take off on the canon). The narrative needs a set of logical givens, the kind that are a staple of sci-fi and fantasy, which empower fans to speculate about outcomes. It cannot be like fine embroidery or precise machinery, which extinguishes the desire in laypeople to try it themselves. It cannot bring on museum fatigue, a sense of uselessness and enervation in the face of art that doesn’t need us. Without a sense of being needed or at least included, fans snub art. Without online dialogues and events, message boards and chat rooms and video games, platforms for supplementary advertising aren’t built. Aloof and passive fans kill their darlings. Art and entertainment in the digital age are highly collaborative, and none of it can thrive without engaging audiences more actively than ever before. Fans today see themselves as doing business with television shows, movies, even books. They want to rate, review, remix. They want to make tributes and parodies, create footnotes and concordances, mess with volume and color values, talk back and shout down.