What Blog Is Art?

Many blogs (including this one) present themselves as commentaries upon. Upon books, farming, culture, what the kids are doing, etc. They use words to convey information or ideas.

But where are the blogs that are art? Or, said another way, are there blogs that are composed of art-writing (whether or not the author intends it)? And what is your criterion? How do you know?

I ask this question b/c I'm trying to advise an MFA thesis that is a blog. Can you tell which blog it is? Can you pick out the work of art from amongst the "blog[s] about x"?

Or maybe all blogs are art. Maybe we should send out a mass-mailing with MFA diplomas as PDF attachments, and see who clicks on the link. Or maybe we [the Experts] should have an MFA Patrol, like the Publishers Clearinghouse, only you don't get published. Surprise! We've decided your blog . . . is art!

Or one could do blog-sculpting - a mash-up of various elements of mere content-based blogs - a blog in which the blog form would itself be the content.

What if a web log were really a log? I mean a real, damn log!!! What do you think of that, Bucko?! I got yer art form - RIGHT HERE! Organic enough for you? Well, there's a lot more where this came from . . .

Seventeenth-Century Blogging, Part the Last

"I have not, as I said, that happy leisure . . . I have no such skill . . . I have no such authority . . . I must for that cause do my business myself, and was therefore enforced, as a bear doth her whelps, to bring forth this confused lump; I had not time to lick it into form as she doth her young ones, but even so to publish it as it was first written, quicquid in buccam venit [whatever came out], in an extemporanean style, as I do commonly all other exercises."

- Burtonis Blogistes

Burton as Blogger III

". . . I have assayed, put myself upon the stage; I must abide the censure, I may not escape it. It is most true, stilus virum arguit, our style bewrays [sic] us, and as hunters find their game by the trace, so is a man’s genius descried by his works; multo melius ex sermone quam lineamentis de moribus hominum judicamus [we judge a man’s character much better from his discourse than from his features], ‘twas old Cato’s rule. I have laid myself open (I know it) in this treatise, turned mine inside outward. I shall be censured, I doubt not; for to say truth with Erasmus, nihil morosius hominum judiciis, there’s naught so peevish as men’s judgments; yet this is some comfort, ut palata, sic judicia, our censures are as various as our palates."

Robert Burton as blogger, II (a propos Tan Lin)

"No news here; that which I have is stolen from others; Dicitque mihi mea pagina, fur es [my page tells me that I am a thief]."

- Burton, Anatomy of Blogancholy

Robert Burton as blogger

And for those other faults of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry, - I confess all (‘tis partly affected); thou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself. ‘Tis not worth the reading, I yield it; I desire thee not to lose time in perusing so vain a subject. I should be peradventure loath myself to read him or thee so writing; ‘tis not operae pretium [worth the trouble].

- Robert Burton, Anatomy of Blogology

The Case for Including Flarf and Conceptual Poetry in the Next Economic Stimulus Package

“Originality today has become the diminished function of lessening production costs (‘content scraping’) i.e. there is less and less incentive today to produce original works, especially in the arts, because everyone, particularly those outside the arts, are doing so. And this creates a considerable incentive, especially among artists, to plagiarize works by others, works that already exist and were produced by those formerly considered to be non-artists. Or to put it more simply, as the price of originality has gone way down (everyone an artist), the price of plagiarism has skyrocketed – even if, in the end, plagiarism has costs that are nominal, illusory, and often gratuitous when stacked against the no-less illusory concept of ‘originality.’ . . . Such activity [uncited circulation patterns, syndication across networks] should probably be regarded as value-adding rather than either theft (removal of value) or fraud (deception), the two crimes most closely associated with plagiarism.”

- Tan Lin (plagiarism/Notes/Heath, etc.)

_plagiarism/outsource, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, Untitled Heath Ledger Project, a history of the search engine, disco OS_, by Tan Lin, et al.

I seem to be drawn to generically ambiguous, uncut, reflexive, abecederian works. I've been reading Anatomy of Melancholy, for chrissakes.

But it was hard for me to get started on Tan Lin’s book plagiarism/outsource, &c.(zasterle) – I re-read the first few pages a few times before I had my sea-legs – but the farther I got into it, the smarter it seemed. Call it conceptual poetry or performance art, verily, it enacts the problems with “intellectual property” and the culture it creates. For starters, it’s really authored by Lin and eight other people (seven workshop participants and a graphic designer). Secondly, it’s copylefted, not copyrighted. Thirdly, it takes the liberty of reproducing large chunks of (theoretically) open-source text (about Samuel Pepys), along with chunks of (theoretically) copyrighted text and images (about Heath Ledger, amongst others).

Hey, take it to the Supreme Court . . .

There is also a fair amount of source code/html mark-up – and google search results, etc.

“As Pepys and Heath and Helena and Mike and Jean, and Ina, and Soo-Young and Jennifer, and Tamiko noted, because ‘anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely

“each morning at the Pickwick was narrowly descriptive and ‘as inert as possible,’ subject to erasure or re-distribution

“i.e. her feelings like his were hand-written or like everything else approximate or obstreperous and narrow like an itinerary post(ed) opposite the reception desk

"i.e. their (their) writing (writing) was like (like) an elevator opening

"as a result

"Heath: or Samuel: was not ‘ something inserted into the video: they were watching on You Tube ‘ ‘ (i.e. storage) but something taken away or outsourced (dissemination), i.e. the process was more like erasing each other (plagiarism) rather than viewing.”

This from section (?) 1, “unread novel.” The “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” part of the title of the book, is a sho-nuff treatise:

“likewise, with a book she was carrying around all that week Heath died,

“you shouldn’t have to read it because everything in it has already been read by her,

“in this sense, the death is what intellectual property lawyers term ‘derivative;’ [sic] it encourages no detrimental reliance i.e. it would not render or caused you not to read something else since it is, technically, ‘something else’ subject to non-writers who are readers and any future non-readers who are writers working in a domain of what relaxed copyright advocates call @copyleft and so they decided because everything is plainly beautiful and

“indiscriminately ugly in unlimited distribution,

“the non-logocentric, non-literary project shares much with what George C. Williams, the evolutionary biologist, describes as the principal functioning of the gene: ‘that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency’ . . .”

And the blocks of project Gutenberg text (not least the “small print” copyright instructions and disclaimers). And the “Entertainment Story” is a damn good imitation of an entertainment RSS feed, if it isn’t really one.

they or the texts they are writing can be [mythical] like a [tourist] destination

they can be [programmatic] without being confined to a single practice,

< XTRA GREEN Green Tea Beverage Mix >

notice the lack of quotation marks

This is a heady blurring of authorial authority and ownership. So when I say:

genre = brands,

you don’t know if Tan said it or Michael or Ina or Sooyoung or Jennifer or Helena or Tamiko or Jean or Danielle or Heath or Samuel or Joe. Or all or none.

[“I,” for one, definitely believe it to be true]

"In this system, creating content is less useful than passing on existing content or re-creating a context for re-use. Plagiarism, despite its 'contested normative significance' is one parameter to define this recontextualizing mode. Ditto with outsourcing or image defamiliarization. Having sex changes the group dynamic."

– “Emily,” from Historia de mi Vida Triste

I’m glad I wrote that in my blog, b/c what better place for matter of uncertain authorship. Yo, originality is the last remaining waste product of creative practices and remains to be eliminated within aesthetic production and/or distribution systems.

What he said.

Maybe there's something to this "collective action" thing after all . . .

FROM: Charles Kernaghan, National Labor Committee

RE: Under Pressure, Wal-Mart Changes Policy on Swine Flu

It is not enough, but it is a first step.
Last Friday, November 6, on Good Morning America, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman said no Wal-Mart employee would be fired for having swine flu. Still under pressure, on Monday (November 9), a senior vice president told the Washington Post that workers needing to stay home due to the flu will not receive a demerit or be docked their wages. Workers can use the sick leave they have accrued to pay for their first day out.
It is no small thing that popular pressure can force the largest employer in the U.S. to change its punitive policies.
Wal-Mart employees quickly point out that these policy changes should also cover workers who most stay home to take care of children or other family members who are sick with the flu.
This should be just the first step in ending Wal-Mart's punitive demerit system and the docking of wages when their employees are out sick, no matter if it is for swine flu or seasonal flu, strep throat, a 24-hour virus, conjunctivitis or taking care of a sick child. This would be the right thing to do. It would protect both Wal-Mart employees and customers from the spread of their illnesses.
Wal-Mart must now immediately review all cases where employees were fired, directly or indirectly because they contracted swine flu. We do not believe that the attached account of Tricia, a worker who was recently fired from the Wal-Mart supercenter in Nampa, Idaho for having swine flu, is an isolated case.
Wal-Mart employers who have been fired for having the swine flu should contact the NLC. We will help. Please spread the word.
Tricia worked 3 ½ years at Wal-Mart, Before being fired for having Swine flu.

Down with the fomenters of discord and divisiveness! Ostracise them at once!

[honestly, tho, R.D. Laing is much better at writing these things than I am - and he had more first-hand experience with them. See Knots (1970)]

Your insight is really blindness. That is my insight - which you can't see, b/c you're blind.