"This Is My Art"
Last week, Galley Slave Jonathan V. Last linked to this Jeff Rosen NYT piece on blogs. It's a good article, starting with the Wonkette/Washingtonienne scandal that got me regularly reading political blogs in the first place (and yes, I know that's shallow, but who doesn't love a good sex scandal? I mean, really.)
Much of the article recounted stories that I'd heard somewhere else on the blogosphere, at some point during the past eight or so months. I realized, though, that I know very, very little about the true early days of blogs. Oh, I read Lileks two years ago, but at the time I didn't think of it as a "blog" (I didn't think of anything as a "blog" at the time - I'd never heard the word). But I'd never heard of Justin Hall who, according to Rosen, was one of the earliest "bloggers."
What struck me about Hall isn't that he was putting his daily life on the Internet long before it was mildly hip, if not commonplace among certain societal sects. And I certainly wasn't struck by his capacity to post even the most embarassing and intimate details of his life (including a list of sexual encounters and their outcomes). What I did find interesting, though, was that he thinks of himself as an artiste.
Rosen writes, of Hall:
My reaction to this statement was to think, "Well, I guess that's one way to define art. But certainly not the way I'd define it." My own blog is not art - though I can't define art succinctly, I believe it involves a sort of creative output that doesn't necessarily jive with an extremely detailed accounting of daily events. I've kept a diary since I was a little girl; it's creative and interesting, but it's not art. The Diary of Ann Frank is a fantastic, moving book, but it's not art. It's something else, something closer to science in the way that history or anthropology is scientific.
In a way, I guess you could make the case that blogging is performance art both at its most personal and most removed. On one hand, bloggers (especially the online diarists) reveal such intimate personal and emotional details that it goes far beyond traditional performance art happenings. At the same time, the anonymity and physical separation afforded by the Internet allows bloggers a shield from the public that traditional performance artists didn't have (and didn't want). Receiving a scathing email is much different from dealing face-to-face with a hostile onlooker.
At any rate, I've always been on the fence about the true artistic value of much performance art. I studied art history, I support the NEA, and I believe that art has an important place in our society and in our schools. But something about performance art (or at least some performance artists) always struck me as a cop-out. Just because you're willing to do something ridiculous (and often dirty) in public doesn't mean that you're necessarily more creative or gifted than those around you (and worthy of a grant). It just means you lack shame.
I can't shake that feeling when I think of bloggers as artists. Just because you don't mind publishing your sexual history for thousands of strangers to peruse doesn't mean you deserve the title of artist. Create something really new, and then we'll talk.
Much of the article recounted stories that I'd heard somewhere else on the blogosphere, at some point during the past eight or so months. I realized, though, that I know very, very little about the true early days of blogs. Oh, I read Lileks two years ago, but at the time I didn't think of it as a "blog" (I didn't think of anything as a "blog" at the time - I'd never heard the word). But I'd never heard of Justin Hall who, according to Rosen, was one of the earliest "bloggers."
What struck me about Hall isn't that he was putting his daily life on the Internet long before it was mildly hip, if not commonplace among certain societal sects. And I certainly wasn't struck by his capacity to post even the most embarassing and intimate details of his life (including a list of sexual encounters and their outcomes). What I did find interesting, though, was that he thinks of himself as an artiste.
Rosen writes, of Hall:
When one former girlfriend, with whom he lived for four years, asked him to remove her from the site, he replied: ''This is my art. I'll remove specific things that bother you, but I can't go through the entire Web site and remove every mention of your name.''
My reaction to this statement was to think, "Well, I guess that's one way to define art. But certainly not the way I'd define it." My own blog is not art - though I can't define art succinctly, I believe it involves a sort of creative output that doesn't necessarily jive with an extremely detailed accounting of daily events. I've kept a diary since I was a little girl; it's creative and interesting, but it's not art. The Diary of Ann Frank is a fantastic, moving book, but it's not art. It's something else, something closer to science in the way that history or anthropology is scientific.
In a way, I guess you could make the case that blogging is performance art both at its most personal and most removed. On one hand, bloggers (especially the online diarists) reveal such intimate personal and emotional details that it goes far beyond traditional performance art happenings. At the same time, the anonymity and physical separation afforded by the Internet allows bloggers a shield from the public that traditional performance artists didn't have (and didn't want). Receiving a scathing email is much different from dealing face-to-face with a hostile onlooker.
At any rate, I've always been on the fence about the true artistic value of much performance art. I studied art history, I support the NEA, and I believe that art has an important place in our society and in our schools. But something about performance art (or at least some performance artists) always struck me as a cop-out. Just because you're willing to do something ridiculous (and often dirty) in public doesn't mean that you're necessarily more creative or gifted than those around you (and worthy of a grant). It just means you lack shame.
I can't shake that feeling when I think of bloggers as artists. Just because you don't mind publishing your sexual history for thousands of strangers to peruse doesn't mean you deserve the title of artist. Create something really new, and then we'll talk.
posted by Kit Pollard at
11:22 AM
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