On 21/12/12 18:45, Edward Picot wrote: > > What's wrong with this is firstly the supposition that if everybody is > doing it then it can't be valuable. Secondly, the equally ill-considered > idea that everybody else must have the same "sense of being artists" - > as he puts it elsewhere in the article, "I realised that I was buying > into the same delusion of grandeur as everyone else". Actually, he's the > one with delusions of grandeur, and most of the other people using the > photo-sharing site, or snapping the water-lilies at Kew Gardens, > probably don't have them at all.
"When everyone's special, no-one is." - Dash (and, later, Syndrome), The Incredibles. Image sharing services and meme generators are that mid-20th-Century "everyone's an artist" ideal made real. Be careful what you wish for etc. There is something grand about them, although there is also more than something socially inauthentic about them. Jemima Puddleduck is the model for Web 2.0 and its successors. But however sharecropped the walled gardens of social media they are sites of production, and of participation in models or stories of creation and expression. > It's an inconvenient fact, for those of us with artistic pretensions, > that the digital revolution has allowed Joe and Jennifer Public to get > their stuff published online as easily as we can do it ourselves. If > they want to claim that their stuff is more articistically valuable than > ours - in fact if they want to claim that our stuff's just boring - then > there's very little we can do about it. We can't force them to go back High culture has always appropriated, intensified and ironised low cultural iconography and media. We shouldn't be like (semi-...)professional photographers panicking that flickr volunteers are eating their lunch. Rather we should look at what's qualitatively and quantitatively different and more valuable about what we do. > to school or college and learn some proper art appreciation until they > begin to understand that they've got it all wrong and our stuff is > actually better than theirs. We'd bloody well like to, but we can't. But > most of the time they don't claim to be better than us at all. In fact > most of the time they don't make any claims of any kind, and they're not > even aware of our existence. They just nark us by getting > viewing-figures a thousand times bigger than ours. They're not trying to do the same thing, though. > Some guy in a market sings "One pound fish", gets onto YouTube and > becomes a superstar (albeit only for a few weeks or months), while other "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." - Andy Warhol. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nExfwreAu-c > people with proper educations and proper sets of artistic credentials > and ideas will labour their whole lives to produce "worthwhile" stuff > and get nothing more than a few flickers of recognition now and again. > Well, that's just the way it goes. Personally I think it's a mistake to > conclude that there must be something wrong with the guy who sings "One > pound fish", or with the society that takes such a shine to him. It may Absolutely. This looks suspiciously like democratization of media, which was how artists getting access to computing machinery and video equipment happened. I don't see why the masses should have pictures of the king on their wall when they could have pictures on their phones of the people they love. > seem unfair that he should get such a lot of recognition by a kind of > freak of chance, whereas here we are expending blood, sweat, tears, > talent, time and brainpower on our work and most people aren't even > paying a blind bit of attention - but if you really believe in what > you're doing, if you really get some satisfaction out of it, or if you > just plain can't imagine life without it, then you'll keep doing it > anyhow, even if you never earn a penny or get a single thumbs-up. And if your "art" is using a digital image hosting sites... > If you don't have that belief, then like the Guardian's art-critic > you'll probably conclude, rather hysterically, that the whole thing must > be some kind of con-trick, and give it up in disgust. It's a weird mismatch between what must be a newspaper art critic's interests and the reality of popular aesthetic participation in and production of culture. - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
