Blogging as an Art Form

I was interviewed yesterday by Gloria Goodale of the Christian Science Monitor. Firstly it is always interesting to be ‘on the other side’ of these conversations. To be the interviewee and not the PR guy is a bit surreal, but I think it allows you to be a bit more relaxed and have a better understanding of the process. Gloria is a pro and made the interview very conversational and fun. I’m not going to post everything about the upcoming article because I know Gloria is still working on interviews, but one themes the conversation centered around was blogging as a form of art.

To be honest I had never thought of blogging as an art form, it was always a communications and interaction platform. Blogs serve as a terrific resource in the quest to better engage with communities; they are a quintessential foundation to the idea and definition of Social Media. Perhaps this was me putting on blinders, since blogging as communication was what I did every day. But is blogging an art form? Yes I know, “Art is in the eye of the beholder”, but that’s too easy to say. I did a bit of digging and wanted to share some thoughts on this topic.

Sweet Briar College’s Art History Department had some really good info online, but this struck me as apt to the conversation:

Art has not always been what we think it is today. An object regarded as Art today may not have been perceived as such when it was first made, nor was the person who made it necessarily regarded as an artist. Both the notion of “art” and the idea of the “artist” are relatively modern terms.

Many of the objects we identify as art today — Greek painted pottery, medieval manuscript illuminations, and so on — were made in times and places when people had no concept of “art” as we understand the term. These objects may have been appreciated in various ways and often admired, but not as “art” in the current sense.

Art lacks a satisfactory definition. It is easier to describe it as the way something is done — “the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others” — rather than what it is.

If you simply take the definition of art than blogging certainly fits into the categorization; what I’m doing right now is certainly using “skill and imagination in the creation of…environments…that can be shared with others”. And in fact when I read the pure definition of art I must say that the last three words stick out above all others:

“…shared with others…”

So let’s take the definition of art and shape it a bit differently, infusing it with some of the terms we have used in our definition of social media. Here is what I’ve got:

Therefore is social media as a whole an art form; blogging just one movement such as impressionism? Are we artists in all that we do, all that we create? And in thinking of ourselves as artists would we push ourselves to be more creative, take greater chances, be more personal?

I say, emphatically, yes. What I am creating here, here, here and here is my art. Some people like it, others have hated it, some don’t understand it…but I do it because it is part of who I am and I want to share it with others. That IS art.

/kff