Dru, in town all too briefly yesterday afternoon, asks me to imagine a world where content is free. What would it look like? Dru's answer: pluralistic, more performative, definitely outsider-artish. If there's no market for your creative work the only reason to make it is for deeply subjective personal reasons. I'd hope that the result wouldn't look like deviantART or Flickr or the Saatchi "people's" website, but the evidence to date doesn't support much optimism. Gorilla paintings, clown paintings and bondage photographs ad infinitum! Every town in North America has some chucklehead "rebelling" against art school by churning out huge acrylic-on-canvas portraits of mandrills clutching guns or electric guitars. I like monkeys too, but reflexively inversive aesthetics just seems blinkered from the get-go. "Don't become the thing you hated," says Mr. Bejar. Nor its shadow. There's a tradeoff between creative autonomy and a paycheque that isn't going away. Anyone who's ever written for a major newspaper or magazine dreads the call from the autistic fact-checker who can't parse even moderately complex sentences and wants all the polysyllables and jargon converted not to Hemingwayesque or Orwellian "just plain prose," but to Canwest Global 'graphs and snappy leads. Text should go down easy: a neck massage; a cool refreshing draught. Thinking feels too much like work; it makes the customer less happy. I quit writing art journalism on a regular basis after being assigned a seven-artist group show and a 400-word word count. Fifty-seven words per artist, forty to forty five if you subtract the participants' names and the works' titles. My friend Naeara used to write press releases twice as long. The editor, who will remain nameless here, found my incredulity bizarre. If you don't want to do the job-- Thanks anyway! A hundred or hundred and twenty-five dollar cheque isn't worth the lasting contempt of one's "peer group," their lingering suspicion that drugs or psychosis fuelled your text's creation. And it's not like a periodical's "targeted demographic" can't find you elsewhere. Google has erased the wall between writers and and audiences, a wall previously punctuated by periodicals' doors and windows. My former editor seemed to think that producing art criticism online was the equivalent of writing a manuscript by hand with a quill pen, walking down to Spanish Banks, and casting the ink-and-paper product into the waves sans bottle. To which I can only oppose my own experience and my stats counter. Lots of people found Exponential Future without any trouble, and the photographs too. So: optimism after all.
- posted by cjb @ 10:22 AM