Blogs qua Art; Media and Messages

OK - let's start with this. This is a work that makes use of the medium by commenting upon it - and upon the nature of representation. And there is text in a painting (!). In the original, wasn't the frame painted onto the canvass, too? 

Also, think of those paintings in the 70s that consisted of a single color applied to a huge canvass in such an even layer that one could hardly tell the paint apart from the flat surface (and that was, of course, the point - the rejection of mimesis and the foregrounding of the physical medium). Again, the "content" of the work commented upon the physical/social nature of the work of art.

As I've said before, the only analog that I've been able to think of in the blog world is Susan M. Schultz' Dementia Blog (Singing Horse). The backwards chronology backs us into the corner of the post-9/11 imperial overstretch and collective amnesia, but it begins with the personal and the quotidian. Likewise, it seems to me that transferring the contents of a blog to a printed book does much the same thing as the revolutionary visual art works I've been talking about - questioning the framing, both textual and social, of the work of art. And raising the question of whether or not web works are backwards-compatible with print works - which may be the most important question of our day, as far as literature is concerned.

So, I'm thinking that a blog as work of art either does one of two things: either it serves as a platform or medium for a work of art that might just as well exist in print form or in a museum, OR it does unexpected, original, imaginative, and subversive things with the structure of the medium itself. Those things might begin as simple parody, but it might spread - or link - from there.

But either way, it has to look radically, fundamentally, structurally different than your mom's blog about her cats.