digital poetics

No art I am interested in demands passive consumption. All art worth reading indicates possibilities. Aesthetics are changing all the time. I think we can exaggerate the degree to which the digital *alters things aesthetically except to the degree that, clearly, it expands the range of possibilities.

Of course The Digital alters The Social & that has its effects, but that's a separate causal effect

The curation of art always has been of paramount importance. There always has been bad curation ("I'm talking to you; shut up") but it is no more appropriate to the non-digital than the digital

I'd like to restate as best I can an exchange which took place on a poetry discussion list some years ago.

A claim was made that web art is the most democratic art form because only web art can be received by everyone.

I'll spare you the responses regarding use / misuse of terms - many of us also sought to disabuse the person making the claim of their belief that everyone has routine access to the web

They made a subsidiary claim which illuminated some assumptions. It was that artists books are the least democratic art form because relatively few people can see the items

It was quite an interesting debate, though I believe the original post may have been mischievous. We considered the difference between reproduction and original, and live presence and recording

Some of us sought to isolate and analyse the assumptions being made, particularly the apparent assumption that a work is in part aesthetically validated by its distribution.

I do not assume that a work of art ever was inspired; and I resist statements including "the artist must", certainly if there were no conditional - e.g. "If a writer would be read, then she must make her work available" is obvious and incontestable whereas "The artist must write in such a way as to be easily understood" is highly contestable

A common assumption is that there is a tech fix for every identified problem. It aint necessarily so. Just as one hopes that others will ask permission or offer a download url rather than just sending large files, so there is a responsibility on the artist to make their digital work as widely loadable as possible. But some processes will just consume huge resources.