Creativity In An Age Of Imbecility
When I was a boy, I was often asked by adults and occasionally by other children what I wanted to be when I “grow up.” My answer shifted over the years. There was the fireman phase, the paramedic phase, the policeman phase, the pilot and astronaut phase. Among my playmates I knew kids who wanted to be mechanics, gas station attendants, doctors, veterinarians and aeronautical engineers. Now all anyone wants is to be famous.
Now there’s a collective mania about fame and the Internet. Build a blog, the thinking goes, and by self-indulgently examining the unremarkable minutiae of daily life or creating contrived situations in order to document them for the imagined amusement of others, and you too can be famous.
By one estimate, the number of people writing blogs, sharing photos and video streams, and producing other forms of so-called user-generated content was 77 million in the U.S. last year and will grow to 108 million by 2012 or roughly a third of the population. That’s a lot of useless junk that any ignorant wretch can push out to the Web with minimal effort.
Contrast this with Maggie’s experience in producing Maggie’s Place during 2004. (Images that link to her section of this site are sprinkled throughout this post.) Blogging itself was still new. Blogging with video and audio was all but unheard of. When the conventional wisdom on the Web said that one doesn’t make the user scroll, she wanted one long scroll, not unlike what you find on the pages of certain popular social networking sites these days. Before video was freely and easily embeddable (YouTube and the like didn’t exist yet) she wanted video directly on the page. Hence the embedded Quicktime files. When she wanted not only embedded audio, but user-controllable audio embedded in specific places throughout the page, we lucked into Hipcast, and I learned about the IFRAME tag. Her artistic vision for what she wanted to execute predated much of what is now de rigeur on the Web.
Digital cameras that use computer chips to produce a perfect picture with every click of the shutter have turned day-to-day photography on its ear, turning anyone who in the age of film would take the occasional red-eyed ill-focused snapshot into people who not only take lots pictures, but who are willing to publish them for all the world to see on services like Flickr and Picasa. The removal film and paper from the photographic paradigm has had an unintended effect: There are no limits to how many pictures you can take, and few limits on how many you can store. All the more to share photographic evidence of every vulgar waking moment within a Flickr stream.
This rise of the faux-creative class is cultural catastrophe that is cheapening the value of the truly creative. The barriers to entry are as low as they’ve ever been. Anyone with a Wordpress account can be a “writer.” Anyone with a Lulu account can become a “published author.” Substitute camera and Photoshop seat and you have “photographer.” A Flip video camera and a Vimeo account makes you a “filmmaker.”
How might Picasso, Jackson Pollack, or Richard Avedon or Miles Davis have fared in this age where every child is told by their parents that they’re talented, and every high school stoner who picks up a guitar is instantly branded a musician? I fear that today they’d be drowned out by the rabble of the faux-creatives, the cultural curse of the imbecilic, fame-obsessed, Internet age.
I say this all having watched my own in-house artistic genius (pictured) energetically create an enormous and brilliant body of work. A year before widely available Flash tools permitted anyone to embed video and audio within a blog post, she innovated her own multi-element approach to the blogging medium, forsaking text that at the time of its conception in late 2003 and early 2004, when blogging was largely experimental and text-driven with some photos, she pioneered an approach what would in time become the norm, well before the means were widely available to the masses.
The result is a series of intensely personal essays that combine photographs, video and music in a manner that today would be expected on any one of billions of sites, but in 2004 was both technically difficult for a Web layperson like myself to carry out, but also in its conception fundamentally different from what was being done at the time. In essence she envisioned then what everyone else is doing now. Her motivation was neither fame nor money, but to give people a chance to enjoy her art. Fame found her.
