Not so much on artblogging per se, but reading this thread I found some overlap with issues I’d recently touched on regarding the nature of the web as a meeting point of public and private discourse. I see that Sally picked up on that in her comments at MTAA, which is gratifying.
My thinking in this direction has generally been more from what I’d call (for want of a better term) a spiritual viewpoint. If we have any access to spirituality, it’s not so much about another world as it is about the remoter possibilities of this one. At this time the web seems to offer a vision of hope for our communications, and artblogging, I suppose, offers hope for improving the status of art-related discourse, which many of us think needs some sort of kick in the butt.
As far as actual art goes, it’s harder to say. Bill gets to it with the idea of “post studio liberation” which borders on spiritual talk. The spiritual problem is always that it turns out to be a sort of shell game, with each level of attainment leading to a new level of ignorance. It can turn into a hall of mirrors, like Tom making fun of the old slides while worshiping at the altar of old-tech high-tech like MS Paint. The problem is that we continue to have to work through some sort of medium, whether it’s ocher in oil or code composed of symbolic digits. Psychedelicist Terence McKenna used to talk about the possibilities of visual language, but even that only leads to another vision: of visible thought. In heaven there is total transparency; everyone knows everything about everyone; ideas play out without the messy resistance of a medium, and things become so obvious that we all end up in agreement.
But it looks like it’s going to take an awful lot of messy talking and making to get to that point. Should be fun.
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My thinking in this direction has generally been more from what I’d call (for want of a better term) a spiritual viewpoint. If we have any access to spirituality, it’s not so much about another world as it is about the remoter possibilities of this one. At this time the web seems to offer a vision of hope for our communications, and artblogging, I suppose, offers hope for improving the status of art-related discourse, which many of us think needs some sort of kick in the butt.
As far as actual art goes, it’s harder to say. Bill gets to it with the idea of “post studio liberation” which borders on spiritual talk. The spiritual problem is always that it turns out to be a sort of shell game, with each level of attainment leading to a new level of ignorance. It can turn into a hall of mirrors, like Tom making fun of the old slides while worshiping at the altar of old-tech high-tech like MS Paint. The problem is that we continue to have to work through some sort of medium, whether it’s ocher in oil or code composed of symbolic digits. Psychedelicist Terence McKenna used to talk about the possibilities of visual language, but even that only leads to another vision: of visible thought. In heaven there is total transparency; everyone knows everything about everyone; ideas play out without the messy resistance of a medium, and things become so obvious that we all end up in agreement.
But it looks like it’s going to take an awful lot of messy talking and making to get to that point. Should be fun.
- alex 6-24-2004 9:54 pm