February 17, 2013

No app for that


There's not enough value on the web for the artist to spend much precious time there. Information is useful in context, interpreted, magnified by understanding. Wouldn't a writer be better off in a wireless cottage, sequencing ideas dug out of mad interior play?

The web stream is a dungeon ride through future world, suspended by servers and developers who offer the public a glimpse of life to come. Can the artist find sustenance, strapped into the little car, gaping at the blinking lights of silhouetted rights and wrongs? For this, one needs to do the work of genius, the dangerous non-linear delving into past shadows, present tension, future truth.

Granted, there are facts alluded to by characters of make believe. Otherwise the amorphous yearning of a poet would loll in the womb, generative and warm, unborn. But the web and the world of art are separated by vast and useless corridors of magnitude inhabited by hapless creatures of curiosity in a land of factoid feasting and unsubstantiated conjecture.

Had there been Web 2.0 in Socrates' day, the App Store would lose him in endless choice of chiclets, abandoning his voice. Internet is wide and small, infinity in thrall to scant attention span, while art is time and space and silent breath and confidence to muse them.