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Over the weekend, the Times reported on the surprising importance of “stuff”–material goods, especially luxury goods that confer social status on their owners–in Second Life, the massively multiplayer virtual world.

I’m not convinced this is so surprising. What makes a place like Second Life unique is its visual aspect. AIM, Gmail, and other messaging and chat services have been around for over a decade, so the opportunities on the Internet for virtual socializing, both within and beyond real-world friend groups, are well established. While it’s possible to build virtual social worlds without sophisticated graphics (I remember an old game I used to play through AOL called Gemstone III–apparently it still exists, in a pay-to-play version, as Gemstone IV–that was entirely text-based), forums that offer powerful visuals naturally attract and encourage users who are interested in complex visual simulations. Real world items designed to catch the eye–and therefore those that would be most interesting to simulate–are often luxury goods, since goods that confer status are useless if they cannot attract others’ attention. In short, while the “why” of materialism in SL is overdetermined (advanced graphics, technologies for reliably conducting long-distance market transactions, imitation of real-world consumer culture, etc.), the visual nature of Second Life is a major factor. Perhaps, when these virtual spaces provide completely believable simulacra, people will be interested in over-the-top effects like those that predominate in Hollywood blockbusters. In the meantime, it’s not unreasonable to expect virtual visuals to strive to imitate the real world, including an overwhelming focus on virtual fashion and–far more interestingly, from my perspective–virtual art.

Some of the ramifications of this imitative focus are, as the article notes, amusing. I remember attending an Aperture-sponsored opening at the Ars Virtua gallery in SL of Elena Dorfman’s Fandomania work. My boss at the time, who was one of the organizers of the exhibition, offered me a cosmopolitan. Every conversation I had afterwards consisted of other attendees asking where they could get drinks like the one I was carrying. Not unlike a real-world gallery opening…

Incidentally, about a month beforehand, I had stumbled into the 13 Most Beautiful Avatars exhibit at Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea. The series–portrait “photographs” by the always interesting Eva and Franco Mattes–also originally opened at Ars Virtua. The experience of going into a real world gallery to look at virtual photographs was a weird complement to my later experience of entering a virtual world to look at (virtual[?] representations of) real photographs. I find the epistemological and metaphysical questions raised by the kinds of virtual photographs taken in SL far more interesting than the traditional darkroom-to-digital questions about pixels and manipulation. For example, two sentences ago I was struggling with whether it’s fair to call the SL versions of Dorfman’s photos “virtual”–I would never refer to a digital photograph as virtual, but a digital photograph attached to a wall in Second Life seems somehow transformed into a virtual object. Even if it remains two dimensional, it is now two dimensional in three simulated dimensions.

Works like those by Eva and Franco Mattes raise a more general question: if the essence of photography involves the reproduction of reality by means of the light waves reflecting off objects, is it fair to call screenshots taken in a virtual world–which accurately reproduce patterns of light emanating from something that is not real in the first place–”photographs”? For me the answer is instinctively and obviously yes. I’m just not exactly sure why.