(Because one man’s Monster Truck Rally is another man’s Mona Lisa…)
There’s a saying (in England) that “There’s no accounting for taste”; a phrase normally used in conversation when one person tries to excuse somebody else’s unfashionable advocacy of a product or thing as being judged to be a little outside of conventional social mores. Usually it’s accompanied by a bemused shrug of the shoulders, and a covert rotating finger to the side of the head; suggesting that the person who dared to expound an interest in - fill in your own blank: Orcs, Elvira, post-mortem photographs, conceptual art, etc - is either a little simple or just…strange.
Welcome to the first of an ongoing weekly blog that will attempt to - if not actually account for taste - reflect a philosophy that the Internet allows for every person to now easily find their own community of convenience. Whether these so-called outsiders number in the millions (say, devotees of fantasy art), the hundreds of thousand (the world of commercial comics), the hundreds (the world of online comics) or the ten poor souls lost to some sad chat room somewhere the beyond the Crab Nebula of the Internet…
We now live by proxy in worlds where tribes of specificity can come together. Taste no longer - literally - has to be accounted for. It can be narrow-casted. Niche-mined.
We are safe.
We can all dance without fear now, in designer rags, in the caverns of The Matrix’s Zion; debate the aesthetics of Wally Wood inking the pencils of Jack Kirby against that of Al Williamson working on a Frank Frazetta lunarscape; choose our faeries to be ethereal creations or sexy urban Goths with killer gams.
Mona Lisa Monster Truck will attempt to link the perspectives of disparate digital art communities across the web in ways that will sometimes be respectful; other times inflammatory; usually arbitrary; and other times bone stupid in retrospect.
There’s an awful lot of material out there: chat rooms; blogs; Flashplayer images that take an eternity to load; dial-up sites of astonishing clarity; manifold iterations of the goddess Isis who rules divinely across multiverses of tempera, guache, Coreldraw and Photoshop; wolverines both comic book and animal; dragons of every color and fiery stripe; Penny Dreadfuls and Tijuana Bibles; the pixellated and the profane; the degraded and the Daguerreotype; the cheesecake and chutzpah; public domain material and trademarks fiercely protected.
Grazing through it, limited only by bandwidth, passwords and vestigal intestinal hunger pangs that pull me back to the physical world like the rope in Poltergeist, I sometimes feel as overwhelmed as the figure in artist Michel Bohbot’s The Visitor artwork standing on the edge of a new universe. Like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth (movies will, of course, impact like asteroids on the dusty airless surface of this blog) overloaded in front of multiple TV sets. Like Reed Richards - Marshall McLuhan in blue tights - approaching the negative zone.
This new multiplicity of communities - as amorphous and weird as they may be (but even that’s only a matter of perspective: Mormons started their own narrow-caste version of a chat room paradigm about 150 years before the invention of the modem…) - does not reflect a simple fragmentation of mainstream society. Despite the bleating of many conservative commentators who bemoan the Internet as a soporific bolt-hole for disenfranchised youth, an elephant’s graveyard of extinct ‘70s cartoon figurines clamoring to fill the shelves of thirty-to-forty-somethings unwilling to grow up, or a sexual aide to recently-widowed intimacy-averse septuagenarian masturbators, the Internet is not about hiding.
It’s about finding.
It’s wholly vibrant. Opinionated. Passionate. People are analyzing furiously even as they run with the ball.
As way of example, to quote PODgallery founder Kevin Mutch:
The truly vital forms of contemporary culture - film, recorded music, and literature - are rooted in older arts which they have largely replaced. In each case, the new form was distinguished from its precursor by being multiple and repeatable… Each of these evolutions was marked by anxiety about the fidelity of the new multiple form to the nuances of its “authentic” parent. Eventually, each new form developed formal techniques which compensated for any such lack.
It’s an iconoclastic observation (Kevin is an acknowledged devil’s advocate who has been exploring the evolution between the fine art and pop culture worlds for many years, not least with PODgallery) that announces the enormous fluidity of culture and aesthetics that we are faced with. The changes affect all artforms, all points in space and time.
To quote just a few other observers:
Bruno Maddox in Discover magazine on the devolution of sci-fi fiction:
It was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction - all fiction - finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Whatever the cause - dwindling attention spans, underfunded schools, something to do with the Internet… if one truly has something to say, seems to be the consensus, then why not just come out and say it?…
This trend in global epistemology would probably have made science fiction irrelevant all by itself… But the genre has an even bigger dragon to slay with its new profusion of cheesy, dwarf-wrought superswords: the scarcity of foreseeable future.
Chris Mautner in The Patriot News on the rise of comics as an educational tool:
Long regarded - even feared - as a hindrance to literacy, comics are now seen as not only worthy of inclusion in college classrooms but also as an excellent educational tool in K-12 classes and public libraries across the country. The notion that comics might have not only a literary but also educational value might be surprising to those whose knowledge of the medium is limited to the funny pages in their newspaper…
Seth Price’s website on public art:
Distributed media can be defined as social information circulating in theoretically unlimited quantities in the common market, stored or accessed via portable devices such as books and magazines, records and compact discs, videotapes and DVDs, personal computers and data diskettes. Duchamp’s question has new life in this space, which has greatly expanded during the last few decades of global corporate sprawl. It’s space into which the work of art must project itself lest it be outdistanced entirely by these corporate interests. New strategies are needed to keep up with commercial distribution, decentralization, and dispersion. You must fight something in order to understand it.
Mona Lisa Monster Truck will hurtle full-throttle onto the ramparts too, linking online comics to art biennales; CGI film production design to architectural debate; mondo art to talking ducks; reserving the right to be elitist and lowbrow, democratic in intent and fascistic in manifesto, both terrified and amazed that things have come to pass as they have.
It’s all great now. All terrible too. We will take some crumbs of solace…