Useful for BOW : Art/Writing – John Douglas Millar on why experimental writing thrives in the art world

From: Art Monthly is the UK’s leading contemporary art magazine.
— Read on www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/art-writing-by-john-douglas-millar-september-2011

“So what are the consequences of this for art? What trends or symptoms can we delineate? The most startling is the rise of so-called ‘art writing’, as both a recognised practice and an academic discipline, and with it the growth in the market for the quasi-literary journal. F.R.DAVID, Dot Dot Dot, 2HB, The Happy Hypocrite, Cabinet and a wealth of other eccentrically named journals/magazines/collections/ catalogues/zines reflect a burgeoning interest in the written word – and not just the written word, but the word transcribed in a perishable material object, a book. The rise of this bibliophile tendency has come hand-in-hand with an increased interest in archive studies and it reflects a renewed Foucauldian concern with how knowledge is produced and logged, who owns and interprets it, and who speaks and on behalf of whom. It has also paralleled the rise of the internet, the blog and the portable digital reading device. The relative safety of the paper-bound book within contemporary art circles may suggest a negative reaction to the digitising of artistic production, a skewed romanticism where books are the final ruins of modernity, a Tintern Abbey for the digital age.” (Douglas, 2011)

I found this article particularity interesting in relation to the experiments I have been doing – attempting to work as an interdisciplinary multi-media creator who uses images and text, along with digital processes – especially digital as I abhor the skewed romanticism we apply to older forms while denigrating newer forms. This is made even more unpalatable when you consider how accessible and potentially egalitarian the newer forms are. (See my DI&C essay).