Glimpsed through a veil of fusty empiricism • 20 November 2011 • The SnowBlog
Glimpsed through a veil of fusty empiricism
Goodness me, I'm such a philistine. Half the time when I see an artistic creation, sitting there in its cloud of poignant symbolism and chin-strokey challenged-assumptions, I am as likely to tut as nod. I don't know much about art, but I know what I don't like... and it's a long list. I don't like art that's too smug or too openly manipulative. I don't like simplistically shocking art that treats me as though I'm just a moral-panic button to be jabbed at according to the artist's whim. But every now and again I, you know, sort of see what someone is getting at. Or I think I do (which, as all you post-modernists know, is just as good). I happened by ex-Snowbooker, James Bridle's web-site and saw his Iraq War Wikihistoriography. It's a chronological compendium of all the edits on the Wikipedia page for The Iraq War done up like traditional, multi-volume, bound history books. It makes me think about how news becomes history, about how sometimes history is what's happening right now and about how crowd-sourced information, with all those vying viewpoints, is changing the way historical texts will be laid done for posterity. Plus it's a cool idea which looks neat. Nice one, James.
Rob
Goodness me, I'm such a philistine. Half the time when I see an artistic creation, sitting there in its cloud of poignant symbolism and chin-strokey challenged-assumptions, I am as likely to tut as nod. I don't know much about art, but I know what I don't like... and it's a long list. I don't like art that's too smug or too openly manipulative. I don't like simplistically shocking art that treats me as though I'm just a moral-panic button to be jabbed at according to the artist's whim. But every now and again I, you know, sort of see what someone is getting at. Or I think I do (which, as all you post-modernists know, is just as good). I happened by ex-Snowbooker, James Bridle's web-site and saw his Iraq War Wikihistoriography. It's a chronological compendium of all the edits on the Wikipedia page for The Iraq War done up like traditional, multi-volume, bound history books. It makes me think about how news becomes history, about how sometimes history is what's happening right now and about how crowd-sourced information, with all those vying viewpoints, is changing the way historical texts will be laid done for posterity. Plus it's a cool idea which looks neat. Nice one, James.