afterthought

actually, thinking about it, a website like tumblr (blogs entirely composed of reposts of thoughts, poems, excerpts from articles, quotes, photos, newspaper clippings etc etc etc) is the perfect format for late-capitalist culture to be expressed;

"everything is a copy of a copy of a copy."; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto; "Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."; "I am a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes. I am all random."

Actually, I would be quite content to live a life of retro-pastiche - in a society like our own which is so prone to conspicuous consumption and the ever-expanding cycle of creation/destruction which necessarily accompanies this, the sheer volume of creative output renders any complete innovation more or less totally obsolete. IF everything has been done before then it's impossible to do something new, isn't it? Or that's the general idea anyway. We can all just look to the mountain of culture that has come before us, and cut-and-paste to our own specification - doctoring glorious frankensteins of art and literature. So the artist becomes like a scientist, or a dedicated jigsawl-puzzler; but then, I think the implication is sort of, that is what the artist ALWAYS was, it's more that the plane of engagement between artist/output/external world has shifted from within the artist's own mind to a slightly more accessible space. Which I suppose makes sense considering how many hours a day we spend staring at our own reflections in the form of words on a screen or photographs; the self is rapidly becoming defined by the external in a different way to in the past and the plethora of cultural input (some worthy, some perhaps not so..[dangerous implication I know but lets leave that aside for the moment]) that screams at us from every angle can only serve to force that most personal and intimate of experiences, the creation of a self-defined identity, out of the mind and into a more public arena.

So whereas there may seem to be a world of difference between the 19th century watercolour painter, who sat before a vast expanse of blank white canvas and painted blue skies and tepid mountains, and the 20th century neo-dadaist exhibiting 11 identical canvases of the colour blue, and the 21st century engineer of cultural pastiche who constructs a collage of pictures from beauty magazines; the fact of the matter is that all are equally a response to the world in which they exist. All could equally claim themselves to be "the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."

It is simply that the post-modern artist, rather than accumulating all snippets of information and art and life and absorbing them through the act of experience, and then translating them in their own mind and into their own artistic vision, which can then be distributed back into the physical world in the form of their artistic output, has streamlined the production process.
So now, rather than having to face the troubling (impossible?) process of absorbing and rearrannging all the various raw creative building blocks of a society in which more information has been stored since 1997 than in the whole of recorded history up to that point, the artist can skip that step out and engage with this influence physically. A cut and paste approach, literally, where, using scissors and glue and intertextual reference one can create a picture far more descriptive of a reality which served as an ingredient rather than an influence. Does that render everything derivative? I don't know, honestly. I don't even know if I agree with everything I just wrote, but it was interesting thinking about it. But we are bombarded with life, with information, at every turn and so it is little wonder that so many choose to respond to it by switching off, and becoming numb, and refusing to engage. "It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves."

I have no conclusions to draw from this and I've just spent half an hour writing it when I should be essaying so I'm going to stop now. :) xo