Anti-art
I just read ‘Sweating the Small Stuff’ on Connor Tomas O’Brien’s blog and had a moment of intellectual synchronicity about both typesetting as an anti-art and the concept of lock in, which is such a weird combination that I had to follow it up here.
I couldn’t figure out how to post the following comment on the post (and am not sure if that’s because I’m stupid or Connor doesn’t allow comments – Connor?):
Just today I tweeted to someone about how typesetters get upset when you don’t recognise their work as an anti-art. By ‘typesetters’ I meant ‘typesetter’, because I’ve only heard this actually uttered by one person, but I understand the feeling, because I’ve worked as a typesetter/editor/writer so I appreciate the importance of good typesetting in the same way your people appreciate that Mad Men or iPhone Mail ‘just work’. That is, I have a rudimentary appreciation of the art, but no longer any desire to practise it, for the same reason I don’t really want to learn the ins and outs of HTML: I figure I should leave that up to people who really enjoy it, and then trade my editorial/writing skills with them instead, as this saves EVERYONE from having to learn EVERYTHING. (#resourceandskillssharing)
Your blog does look nice. I had never even thought of ‘typesetting’ a blog. Well done!
As for the rest of this post – that is, the beginning – I was really chuffed to be reminded that there are people out there who are still committed to making systems that have that extra one percent. Because when I think about ‘lock in’ (which I wrote about here: http://ryan-paine.com/2011/02/01/but-not-in-the-cool-way-like-at-a-video-arcade/) I wonder if maybe we could avoid it by simply insisting that we slow down for long enough to get the systems perfect – or as near to one hundred percent perfect as possible.
Ryan, you’ve really been hitting it out of the ballpark (have been trying to get into baseball recently) with this blog recently! Thanks for linking through.
I don’t have much to add, except that I like this concept of ‘anti-art’: stuff that takes a huge amount of thought and care but whispers its virtues and doesn’t shout ‘em. (Or perhaps I’m totally misinterpreting the concept… in which case, sorry!)
And you’re totally right: I’ve disabled comments, but kept trackbacks. I’m trying to get people responding on their own terms: via Twitter, email, or their own blogs – for the community I’m hitting (mainly peeps who blog themselves, or tweet like mad), that seems to be the best way to open up the conversation to a wider audience instead of sequestering it in one spot. Also: THE SPAM, THE SPAM!
I didn’t get a chance to respond to this at the time, but I still think it’s quite noble to open up the dialogue that way. I’m a comment hoarder!
In a way this idea of yours fed into my recent attempt to get away from Facebook (http://ryan-paine.com/2011/03/12/paranoid-about-facebook/) and bring the dialogue back here because maybe if people can’t get away with just leaving a comment on Facebook they’ll either comment here (and at greater length) or they’ll post their response on their own blogs, or they’ll link to the post with an annotation on Twitter. I guess I’d just like to start experimenting with online dialogue as not defined by the Facebook interface.
Thanks for the kind words about SIB. How you are you going with getting into baseball? I used to play as a kid and used to watch games at (now) Coopers Stadium with my old man. Loved it. It’s such a strategic game and the stadium music is great!
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