I grew up in a small town. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was hang out with artists. All I wanted to do was get the heck out of southern Ohio and get someplace where something was happening.

Now I live in Austin, Texas. A pretty hip place. Tons of artists and creative types everywhere.

And you know what? I’d say that 90% of my mentors and peers don’t live here. They live on the internet. Which is to say, most of my thinking and talking and art-related fellowship is online.

Instead of a geographical art scene, I have Twitter buddies and Google Reader.

Life is weird.

from The New Yorker’s profile of Wes Anderson

New word (for me) via Wikipedia:

Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as “quoting out of context”. The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter’s decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become “context” by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, historian Milton Mayer coined the term “contextomy” to describe its use by Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous Nazi broadsheet Der Stürmer in Weimar-era Germany. To arouse anti-semitic sentiments among the weekly’s working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder. Although rarely employed to this malicious extreme, contextomy is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and studies have demonstrated that the effects of this misrepresentation can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, quote.

In other words, how I make all my art.

See also: “How To Look At Art:”

Don’t worry about unity from piece to piece. What unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.

I tweeted this a few days ago, and my Twitter friend John T. Unger (@johntunger) replied,

Keep making things. Don’t worry about how it all fits together right now.

An important question. Your input is needed, dear readers.

see it bigger

Fantastic book based on the 1972 BBC miniseries, which someone has uploaded to Youtube, and I’ve assembled into one handy playlist for your viewing pleasure. Amazing how much the contents remain valid in the age of the internet.

The first essay is about art in the age of photography and reproduction, and is based on Walter Benjamin‘s essay, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s idea was that in an era where an image can be easily reproduced, art might be “freed up” and become available to a mass audience.

I’ve recently been going back and forth with an artist friend of mine about his fine-arts-based world (where his collectors value the original, one-of-a-kind) and mine (where there is no original, only reproductions, on the blog, in the book, etc). Our ideas about making art are very similar, but our business models couldn’t be more different!

I was with him and our wives at an opening in an art gallery in town last night and couldn’t get over how uncomfortable I felt about the whole thing. There was free beer, sure, but no artist’s statement, no postcards, nothing. There was only a photocopy of the price list, along with some goofy map of the exhibit that related “culture vs. nature” or something cliched along those lines…

Why so uncomfortable?

First, the idea that anyone has $10,000 to spend on a piece of art boggles my mind. Second, I find it alienating, as someone without the $10,000 to spend on art, to not be able to “own” or “buy into” or “take home” some part of the work. Regardless of how much you love the art, there’s nothing he can sell to you, there’s nothing you can buy into, no way for you to show your support or love for the work. All you can do is snap a bootleg shot on your camera phone. You feel like a f*&%ing second-class citizen: You can look, but don’t touch. It’s worse than a museum: at least in a museum you can buy a postcard or a book in the gift shop.

Contrast this with my experience at Maker Faire earlier in the day, where the idea was: come make things with us. Everyone is encouraged to join in.

Take our friends Bleep Labs. They had:

• Robots on sale for $125
• T-shirts on sale for $20
• Stickers for free

Art in the age of mechanical reproduction, indeed! Every level of merchandising was covered.

More thoughts on this to come.

• Buy the book on Amazon
• Watch the whole BBC miniseries on YouTube