Hiiii guys,
I’m finally coming out of the hole I’ve been in. Not much has changed circumstantially but I feel better. I got a sweet dinner at Mother India with my flatmates and I keep running into people I know and I’ve realized that even though I thought I was failing to ‘make a life’ for myself here I’ve actually done pretty well. Spring is helping too. Getting to sit in the sun and watch the cherry blossoms fall… cinamatique…
I want to talk about art and content.
My senior year of high school, my English Lit teacher taught us about the difference between art and entertainment. He did not teach in a way that resembled any conventional form of public high school education, but rather in a pace around the square-shaped socratic ring of desks we all sat in. The nature of Art was one of his more frequent digressions. He would hold up Huxley’s Brave New World and loudly announce ‘THIS is ART’ and then he would point to an Avengers poster he had pulled up on the projector and announce ‘THIS is ENTERTAINMENT.’ He had criteria to determine which group a piece of media would fall into, which I don’t remember. I do, however, still think about the divide between art and entertainment.
In this dichotomy, art is any piece of media that challenges or changes you. It values craft and is created with intention. Entertainment is pacifying but hollow. As I’ve used these categories, I’ve come to prefer the term content over entertainment. Where entertainment implies amusement, content is just stuff. Void filler, packing peanuts. I also feel content is a broader category, encompassing both conventional entertainment and internet-age media. So my contrast is now art versus content.
Not everything is either art or content, I would add ‘information’ as a third category. And at times there is overlap between art and information (like in Joan Didion’s work) and between content and information (like in a good podcast). I’m not sure if there is an overlap between art and content or if there is a line in the sand.
Blogging comes to mind. Is the writing a literary style? Is it an act of artistic creation? Or is it just sharing information? The Alt-Lit and autofiction movements suggest the former. But many people do not intend for their blog to be a means of artistic expression,,, and I think intention is important. In her LiveBlog project* writer Megan Boyle blogged incessantly on Tumblr from March to September of 2013. The blog was published and printed into a 700 page work of autofiction, documenting an individual’s intimate thoughts and life for seven months. I would call that art. She used the medium of blogging to create art.
I don’t think the division between these categories is always clear, nor does it need to be. But I do value purity in artistic expression. There are countless examples of this, but I first think of Charles Bukowski writing poems every night after his job at the post office, not commercially successful until he was in his fifties. That is a very pure form of artistic expression. Not that people shouldn’t make money off their art, but having financial independency from your art does free it from the pressures of commercialization. Of needing to make something that is ‘likeable’ enough to gain popularity.
I want to make art like that—with no goal other than expression.
I’ve been interested in poetry lately (This is a digression away from the main topic.) because I’ve come to understand it as language in art form. This is not a new way of understanding poetry but it was new to me. I was against it for awhile because it all felt very pretentious but since I’ve embraced how vast the medium can be, I’ve liked it much more.
I will inevitably return to this topic but my closing thoughts for now are…
—Social media is and always will be a hub of content.
—There is more to be said about intimate self-documentation/ using the self as character.
—This Tumblr blog is called the Alt-Lit Library and it is/was a place for sharing Alt-Lit work… most of the links to the pieces don’t work anymore but it’s still cool.
TTYMon,
Jill
*thank you kirra for sharing… u always know