Of Art, Commerce, P.R., and Toasters (part 1)
by guest columnist Doug Anderson
DOUG ANDERSON IS a Seattle poet/salesman forced to read the Puget Sound Business Journal every week. Here is a record of the conversation he holds with himself as he peruses the PSBJ.
Poet: If art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight…
Salesman: You’ve just described a toaster.
P: You didn’t let me finish. As I was saying, if art is the hand-made assemblage of pre-determined elements that surprise and delight when conjoined with imagination, then I don’t see much art around here.
S: Hey, take it easy. I’m just a meat-and-potatoes man.
P: Yeah, right.
S: Besides, there’s plenty of art. We’ve got full theaters, crowded art galleries and bookstores are so hot the big ones act like Mafia families trying to rub each other out.
P: I disagree. Theater has devolved into solo performers debasing themselves before the bourgeoisie, painting is going nowhere and literature has become the billionth retelling of adolescence angst.
S: You intellectual snob, I notice you conveniently left out poetry.
P: Poetry, in English, especially in the Northwest, seems to be alive and kicking.
S: Stop pimping yourself and let me read the Puget Sound Business Journal. It’s what pays the rent. Remember?
I do business to business sales and this is where you find out which businesses are going under, which are suing or being sued, which are launching IPOs and which are flush and expanding into the Kent Valley. Your theories of art are not really helpful just now.
P: Well I’m reading right along with you and I don’t want you to get overly impressed by all the money that’s flying around.
Art has hung up its imaginative spurs and gone over to technology. Craft when divorced from the imagination becomes technology and that’s what we have a lot of now.
Toasters, like you said. In the absence of art we get lots of toasters.
S: You’re saying technology doesn’t demand imagination? That makes a whole lot of fuckin’ sense.
P: I’m saying that technology is the extension of what we already have. In our five senses. The stethoscope turns your ear into a hose, ultrasound lets your eyeballs roll around like a snake into a young mom’s womb, the web has turned us all into audio-visual spiders.
Technology works within a narrow mandate: demolish time and distance by extending our senses. We don’t need imagination to develop what we already have, therefore…
S: Do you mind? Can I get on with this?
P: Feel free. I’m not stopping you.
S: No but you’re trying to distract me.
TOMORROW: Some more of this.
ELSEWHERE:
