The Self in the 21st Century...3rd section.

...Section 1&2 may be read on Facebook if you are a friend.

I wanted to move to Galisteo, New Mexico when I grew up and live the life of a recluse. Now it seems, this century makes a recluse of all of us as we no longer need to interface, literally, because we can intercyber instead. Alone with my gizmo’s I can relate when I want to. I hear when someone wants me but I don’t have to respond, the message will be waiting when I choose to view it. I can post a birthday greeting on YouTube for my best friend who will love it because it is so publicly declarative, and I didn’t have to leave my warm cup of coffee sitting on the dining room table to make and send it. I’ve connected and reclused myself simultaneously. 

This simultaneousness is the heart of living in this 21st Century, and its illusions are as solid as the little rectangular flat devices we carry in our pockets enabling us to access them. I don’t believe in accessibility, however it seems I rely on it around the clock and participate in its machinations just the same. As an artist I have made myself accessible in more ways than I care to intellectually or spiritually recognize, and as such have given way to faith over disbelief that the accessibility I invoke will be the same ones that enable a gallery to find and promote me and my ideas. Twittering like millions of other birds as we nest on invisible lines perched in our iPhones, we read and dismiss information that was carefully crafted in under 144 characters with speed freak like distraction. Distractions once reserved for the meth addicted or ritalin needing grade-schooler, now embody most of the people I know, myself included. Fed by a constant need to know what is happening in the world around us, I’m certain however I know less about the world than I did in the previous century even as news sources and their reports are IV fed into my devices. 

I no longer feel as if I inhabit a world, taking up my little space in it, but that I am inhabited and what space I did have is no longer filled by me, as I seem to exist less and less. 

I think this feeling starts with my work and awareness as an artist. As more and more people move into the realm of being 'artists,' regardless of creative ability, understanding, or thought, my art world and its space diminishes. I may be a part of the generation possessing its last artists, as actual art making has been dissolved and replaced by the idea of art. Even the idea is appropriated so no longer is an idea required to produce. The artist will no longer be necessary and the world will have digitized all of it. Printing an oil painting, xeroxing a sculpture, and gif’ing a moving image from several still ones; all amateur crafted through technology. Even Garageband makes music for you and Soundcloud publishes it, and that feeds into Twitter and gets shared on a blog that hundreds of followers reblog. A regular blogjam of regurgitated regurgitation. RT’ing has become the last bastion of individual thought. You no longer have to have a thought, just RT one. Worst of all the creation of Rap, as it proves to be the final sound of music made. There was a time when artists wrote songs, and a generation later that song was re-recorded by another artist. Royalties were paid, as was homage to the original source, and a new artists’ insight through their era’s eyes was shared. Now a rap artist writes and records a rap, but who is going to re-record Bitch N****z by Snoop Dog? No one. Once artists like Joni Mitchell could think of the royalties coming in from re-records, but Snoop can’t imagine this kind of financial dividend as his work begins and ends with his own efforts. And efforts that may have been lifted in a riff written by Miles Davis, or a loop digitized on GarageBand, anyway. 

This is what it means to be living in the 21st Century. The previous century’s beginnings was an open field of artistic and industrial innovations and progress. Diseases were eliminated or contained. Methodology was crafted and educationally implemented. Real estate was ergonomically planned and cities grew enriching their space as the inhabitants filled them.

The beginning’s of this century were birthed out of the Y2K scare, which proved to be unfound. Yet a few years later as planes flew into towers in Manhattan, we were forced to re-boot in a new era we may not have been psychologically ready for and the shock of that crash was much the same kind of shock re-booting implements. Anti-terrorism tactics of searching the elderly in airports before plane boarding, and reporting suspicious persons and activity vetted anyone in their biases toward those unlike, birthing internet bullying their ugly offspring.  Welcome, 2013.