The Myth of Content

In the six months since I started this site, several stories, not all, but several have come from a deeply personal, sometimes embarrassing, sometimes painful place. This is because I’ve found the ‘write what you know’ mantra to be true, however cliché. I say this simply to explain why I no longer can use the word ‘content’. These handful of stories, the ones that make me wince, are not ‘content’. The works of the people I admire most, Henry James, Tolstoy, Forster, Mahler, Tom Waits, those are not ‘content’ and, quite frankly, if you can refer to any of those people as ‘content creators’, I don’t think we can be friends. ‘Content’ is a soulless, formless, tasteless word which seems more apt to define furniture or building materials than great works of art. Can we really complain about Luddites being dismissive of online art when we ourselves don’t seem to take it seriously?But this isn’t just a semantic pet peeve. The elephant in the virtual room is that ‘Content’ is a word soon followed by another word: ‘Monetize’. After these two a litany of equally offensive terms are usually brought onto the stage: ‘Audience’, ‘Brand’, ‘Reach’. Have any group of people, who I dare call ‘artists’, ever been so compliant when their medium has been injected with business and money? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against business and, certainly, not against making money. Technology and it’s furtherance has always revolved around markets and business. The thing is though, Art hasn’t. Until recently Art has never been particularly profitable and, for the most part, no one became an artist for just money. No one looked at a canvas and thought about ‘Monetizing’ before even picking up a brush.The extent to which business and art have colluded recently, particularly online and in new-media, has rather shocked me, most of all because we don’t seem to realize that there’s any thing wrong with it or that they’re any other way to do things. An artist doesn’t have to read The Cluetrain Manifesto, an artist shouldn’t build his ‘Brand’. And while doing this all may seem benign, when work is created to fit into a ‘brand’ or ’strategy’ it usually ends up just as empty as most brands or strategies usually are. I’m not saying that these approaches can’t be financially successful, but in the end do you really want to create shit just to get paid? If you do, I understand, but just wish there were less of you.Dropping a stupid word is maybe an ineffectual way to stop the commoditization of art , but it’s a start.