A quick note on blogging as it relates to the Comparative Blogging Foundation

Part of my focus as this Foundation develops will be to explore the blog as a medium of art. I have just successfully finished a thesis looking at critical approaches to the blog as a new medium. By new medium I mean to suggest that the blog is not a new form of literature and text but rather it represents a whole new form of art, something entirely separate. Thus once the final version is ready I will begin putting it up here to engage those interested in how the medium of the blog will interact with the world of art.

The basic idea is that the blog is, as is the internet at large, a multimodal communicative art form that can engage the creators and observers in a completely new way, one that makes them lose the uniqueness of their role in this equation, that as the creator or as the observer. But it may do much more than that; it can also connect all forms of art easily and fluidly. However, without any form of an authoritative principle to define this critically, it is hard to filter the genius from the everyday. But perhaps that requirement itself is outdated.

All of this will be engaged and explored. That is one of the tasks the Comparative Blogging Foundation will seek to investigate: Where is the art in this world?

-Huysmans

The Quixote by Pierre Menard

I have to agree with Jorge Luis Borges who so eloquently defended Menard’s Quixote. As Borges rights himself, “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (Borges 1938). As I just mentioned in introducing this wonderfully unique Quixote, there is something far more incredible about the text written in the 20th century. After all it would almost appear as if literature was demanding such a text at the time of Cervantes where as today that demand seems to have shifted. That shift has made it that much more impressive for one such as Menard to go against the grain in producing this unbelievably unique work of art.

This can be viewed more visually with the work of one Marcel Duchamp who took it upon himself to create Fountain 1917 in 1964. This example of sculptural genius proved far more ambiguous for its time than the original of 1917. An even better example of the same author is his famous LHOOQ. Which portrayed in much more eloquence the Mona Lisa than has ever been seen before.

 

It just goes to show that art is not concrete; at best it is transitory and unstable.

 

The Comparative Blogging Foundation has arisen to defend the instability and preserve chaos.

 

-Huysmans

Welcome to the Comparative Blogging Foundation

The Comparative Blogging Foundation is a project birthed from the former Literature’s Next Frontier as well as the evolution of the Avant-Garde based experimental art of the twentieth century. Today the Foundation acts as a repository for artistic experiments and discussions with a focus on exploring what art is today.

What is art? What role does it have in today’s world? What can be art? How does it exist in different facets of our lives? These are the questions we have started from and will use to explore the awesome potential of the contemporary scene.

The Foundation is just starting and was technically launched on March 20th, 2008. As this project develops we hope for the community of artists and art critics of the web to gather and engage the authors in the discussions established.

Thank you,

Huysmans,

Comparative Blogging Foundation