Karl: Who do you want to see your drawings?

Fran: All the people from the whole world, and also grandma and grandpa.

Karl: What is this?

Fran: A pig, a green pig with gold and gray.

Karl: Why did you make this?

Fran: For you, papa.

Karl: But why?

Fran: Because.

Karl: What is this?

Fran: That is a little heart.

Karl: Why did you make this?

Fran: Also for you.

Karl: But why?

Fran: I just did it, I don’t know why. There is also brown in it. It’s not so easy to see.

Karl: What is this?

Fran: I don’t know.

Karl: Why did you make it?

Fran: What? Don’t speak in English.

Karl: Sorry, why did you make this?

Fran: I made it for you.

Karl: What is this?

Fran: Funny. That is a little man named Nino.

Karl: Is that your brother?

Fran: Yeah, my little baby brother.

Karl: Why did you make this?

Fran: Because.

Karl: What is the other stuff?

Fran: Flowers.

Karl: And?

Fran: A hat. And a little man, and a butterfly and hearts.

Not long ago, Françesca enjoyed typing random letters into a text editor for about ten minutes a day. Now that she is nearing five years old, that doesn’t satisfy her any longer. She learned how to use the mouse, and she’s beginning to understand how to use the Safari web browser. She can spend an hour on-line without a break.What to do? This is the point where Hanneke and I have a choice. We can take the computer away and have our kids grow up in a “traditional” pre-internet household. Or we can let them go online and accept the consequences.

I am of two minds about this. One view is that the kids should be able to grow up in an internet-free home, the way we grew up. The opposing view is that the kids should go online because the internet is part of the world we live in — keeping the kids away from it would be like refusing to let them learn to read or write.

I am torn between these two views, but I am leaning toward letting her go online because:

1. Our kids will come into contact with the internet no matter what we do.
2. By guiding her internet use at home, we can help Fran find and be involved in the positive things on the internet; for example, looking at artwork by other children her age.
3. The internet is intensely stimulating, of course. My response is that we need to make our “off-line” home environment even more fun, more stimulating, so that the internet is not such a magnet for the kids.

Anyone else out there with similar problems / opportunities?

Tracy’s blog raises interesting questions about what it means to be an artist today. In the past, artists liked to cloak themselves and their work in mystery. Tracy is open about her work (good, bad, unfinished) and her difficulties in the process of creating and selling. There is a refreshing and direct quality to her writing style that makes mysterious 20th century artists seem a bit comic in comparison. Is Tracy a good example of what 21th century artists will be doing, or should she hide her unfinished work and cultivate a more refined public image?

Journalist and critic Nancy Geyer made this comment on The Thinking Eye:

. . . it seems to me that too many blogs, even the best of them, are falling into the trap of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” — they become mutually self-promotional, as if the bloggers don’t have to “earn” the right to be read. When I read a blog I’m looking for a thoughtful, informative, critical discourse without the distraction of all the networking that is going on.

Here is a professional giving free advice. Is Nancy Geyer on the mark?

Journalist and critic Nancy Geyer made this comment on The Thinking Eye:

. . . it seems to me that too many blogs, even the best of them, are falling into the trap of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” — they become mutually self-promotional, as if the bloggers don’t have to “earn” the right to be read. When I read a blog I’m looking for a thoughtful, informative, critical discourse without the distraction of all the networking that is going on.

Here is a professional giving free advice. Is Nancy Geyer on the mark?

Fall of the Art World
The art world as we know it is the product of the historical era between the invention of photography and the development of the internet.

Photography took away the artist’s monopoly on creating images of reality. Art survived this challenge because, as Cennino Cennini wrote several hundred years ago, art is about more than merely depicting that which exists.

But the challenge of photography led to a crisis: it became difficult to answer the question, “What is art?” In this context, control of public exhibition space became key. The answer to the question “What is art?” became by default, “That which is in museums and galleries.”

In this context, art is created not in the studio, but in the gallery or museum itself. Art is created not with the paintbrush, but with the wire that attaches the work to the museum or gallery wall. The curator and dealer become the creators of art; the artist’s productions are merely their raw materials.

The internet changes the equation; it allows for the juxtaposition of all art, removed from the bounds of physical space. The museum or gallery art-object, stripped of its mystic surroundings and exposed in the harsh light of the computer monitor, must compete on the basis of its own merit with every other artwork.

By diminishing the importance of the physical exhibition space, the internet strikes at the core of the dealer’s and curator’s power. The answer to the question, “What is art?” will no longer be “That which is in museums and galleries”, but, “That which looks good on the internet.”

This will be the end of the art world as we know it. Decision-making about art will be widely distributed. The art world, as a closed and controlled system, will cease to exist. The creative power unleashed in the new era might astonish us.

_____

P.S. Thanks to Candy, David, Kris, Lisa and Tracy for valuable comments on the previous post. I will take your views into consideration when I do the rewrite.

How to write the perfect blog post? (+4 comments)
Easy: understand the medium, give key information first, and say something that inspires discussion. To do this, optimize key parts of the blog post . . .

“Blog” is not good enough (+15 comments)
Some of us have multiple blogs. We use blogs as building blocks for sometime larger than a blog. If you use bricks to build a house, then what is it that you build with blogs? We need a name for this thing . . .

Site feed and the art of web design (+9 comments)
What RSS lets readers do is to take the content out of your site and display it in a minimalist context. Every site has a different “look and feel” which the webmaster lovingly crafts. RSS let’s you bypass all of that and get the pure content . . . Which means, you should read your own blog in an RSS news reader to see how it looks. I got some surprises . . .

Do art and blogging mix? (+3 comments)
I asked Arthur Whitman about his secret for blogging success. He denied he has had much success, but his advice was interesting nonetheless . . .

Parallel blogs are more than a sum of the parts (as a house is more than a collection of bricks). But what should we call the new latent structure?

Arthur Whitman suggested “meta-blog”, which I find good, and “personal blog network”, which I find less good. C. Robin Janning suggested “book”, a bold proposition — it requires modifying the definition of this word.

In bookofjoe we see an alternative solution: combine several parallel blogs into one (with a separate archive file for each day). I can’t quite follow it, but I enjoy what I read.

John Foote writes parallel blogs (mm and mydr2) without using a blog at all.

Auspicious Dragon runs seven blogs in parallel (and confuses the heck out of my RSS reader [well, see the comments]).

Do you write parallel blogs? What are you creating between the lines?

. . .

What am I talking about with “understand the medium” of a blog post? Consider first the diary, an empty paper book, perhaps with a lock on it, which probably only you will write in and read. Now compare this to your blog, online, which you want everyone to read — and the smart ones to leave a comment. The difference could not be greater. That’s why I say that thinking of a blog in terms of a diary is a mistake.

A diary has one intended reader: the writer. The writer tends to be a sympathetic audience for his or her own work. The blog has millions of potential readers, almost all of whom will never meet the blogger in person, and, general considerations of humanity aside, would not care too much if the blogger dropped dead the next day.

The blog reader is not a sympathetic audience, in other words. The blog reader has many other blogs to look at. If your blog does not grab them directly, the reader will read somewhere else.

But wait. Blogging is not generally a paying job. We blog in our spare time, mostly. We cannot so easily invest the effort to be concise. Long-windedness is thus a typical feature of blogging. Just look at Ed’s blog.

How do we reconcile these two factors, the fickleness of the reader and the inherently unprofessional character of blog writing?

You could say, just write better. Well, we can try. But let me offer an alternative, an optimization strategy. Let’s look at the key aspects of a blog post:

1) The title. If this doesn’t attract attention, you have a problem. In an RSS newsreader, the human reader may only see your title, initially, among a list of other titles. If your title is not interesting, they will not read further.

2) The first sentence. When scanning blogs, I often drop off reading if the first sentence does tell me something. Nothing personal, it’s just that there are millions of blogs out there . . .

3) The break point. This is place in the blog post where the responsible reader feels they can stop reading, but still leave an intelligent comment. Most blog posts lack the break point. Everything before the break point should be easy to read quickly.

4) The question for the reader. This is where you cue the reader to make a comment, an essential part of successful blogging. The question does not need to be explicitly in the form of a question; it can be a statement designed to provoke response. It seems to me, though, that phrasing the question as a question is polite.

If we focus on these four points and optimize them, then we do not necessarily have to write the rest of the post perfectly. We can’t write the post perfectly — have to take the kids to school, go to work, etc… But optimization of the key points should go a long way in making the post successful, in the sense that people read at least part of it and join in the discussion with comments. Remember, once a reader commits to leaving a comment, or has joined in discussion, they will likely go back and read the post more carefully.

So the key to the perfect blog post is realizing that optimization, not perfection, is the goal.

Is this a reasonable approach to writing online, or only a way to justify lazy, opportunistic writing? Is there a difference?

Which means, you should read your own blog in an RSS news reader to see how it looks. I got some surprises.

As for the art of web design, site feed suggests that the minimalist approach is best. If readers can bypass your site’s style, then it makes sense to keep flourishes in web design to a minimum, and focus on the content itself.

Or do I have the conclusion backwards?