Quantcast
Channel: UnFolding » Sterling Lynch
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 6

Seeding Art’s New Memes

0
0
If you've read the play before going to the theatre, will it heighten your enjoyment or minimize the possibility of disappointment? Courtesy of the University of Ottawa.

If you’ve read the play before going to the theatre, will it heighten your enjoyment or minimize the possibility of disappointment? Courtesy of the University of Ottawa.

 

It’s obvious we’re getting a whole new set of criteria with which to judge art. The long-gone traditional icons are, well, long gone. Their influence is important, but I just don’t have time to look them up in Wikipedia.

Today art is something that’s done quickly to entertain, to experience fleeting moments of passionate connection and to ultimately sell. Which is why the creative process is going through the biggest renovation since the Impressionists. And boy did those guys rattle a lot of cages.

This weekend Ottawa has an exceptional example of how new models can play out, and why traditional artistic memes might need reviewing.

It’s called Art Battle Ottawa, a hideous (to traditionalists) mutation of art’s desperate need to find 21st Century relevance and pop culture’s obsession with attention deficits. In this battle, a bunch of painters will get on stage and create a work in three 20-minute sessions. The audience then chooses a winner. Speed painting meets Survivor. The purpose of the spectacle is to win; creation is simply scenery.

It will probably be fun to watch in a decontextualized, reality-TV type of way. What might be really fascinating is if the artists are willing to sell these paintings at the end of the show,  because then you’ll find out what they think an hour’s worth of their creative effort is worth.

Another example of meme seeding is taking place online before it is presented as a play at the Ottawa Fringe Festival. For months playwright Sterling Lynch has posted versions of Never Fall In Love With A Writer as a Google-doc-in-progress, although he swears it’s finished now.

The purpose was to show a potential audience how the play evolved, and it’s tough to tell whether he’s a real innovator or just a nebbish trying to take as much risk as possible out of the process. Director Wayne Current and actress Jennifer Capogreco are also blogging and posting videos about how the preparation is going, so it’s sort of like a taste test before deciding to order the meal.

No, says Lynch, it is like watching a chef prepare a recipe and being able to offer comments, even if not many of the suggestions are ever used. “We’re not crowd-sourcing a play,” Current adds. But they are crowd-sourcing the experience, something that only used to happen after the final draft was completed and performed onstage.

Maybe it’s not so strange, a connection-as-investment that consumption-savvy audiences are going to demand? Lynch says that when he first started writing in the Google frame, he saw someone was immediately linked in reading his words. At other times there were as many as 40 people watching him create. Something’s resonating.

This experiment is completely unique for Ottawa and perhaps for most other places as well. But the issue gets murky when Lynch explains that the main reason for the online preview is to make sure the audience knows, to some degree, what it is getting when it pays $10 for a ticket.

“I want 65 people who don’t feel trapped by obligation. Yeah, happier customers,” he says. So the apple people see online will be an apple on stage, not a durian.

Theatre, as well as all the arts, can use new ideas. But what Lynch and Current are doing is mitigating the risk of disapproval by taking a large part of the danger out of the process. Without danger there is no risk, and without risk there is no reward. Real rebels risk disapproval, and isn’t art supposed to represent cultural dissent?

Like Art Battle, the purpose of the pair’s exercise becomes economic. This changes the criteria used to judge art by cutting out the unknown via the uptake of technology and it’s current crack sales team of social media. Lynch is one of the most-enthusiastic purveyors of social media in Ottawa’s arts. He’s bought into it as a tool, and believes that a poor carpenter blames his tools.

I’ve talked to him about it for years, and he still gets that look of tolerant consternation when I describe social media as today’s response to the disillusionment of knowing there is no realistic way to control corporate power and climate change. Punk and alt music were the tools in the 1990s, as were pop (folk) and rock in the 1960s.

And just like the music of confused youth, social media is rapidly being castrated by corporate monetization. (The same companies that own and operate most social media also run major film production, music studios and hard-and-soft publications.) This is what happens when three successive generations refuse to pay for content; there’s no one to feed the machine. (Even the biggest pirate ship of all time, Bit Torrent, is now into legitimate film promotion.)

What’s missing is the irony that everything really is about economics, and that’s OK. Old-school styles of art are simply collateral damage (a complete dismantling of creative satire is all the proof you’ll ever need), and that’s OK too because new art consumers  are bored with experience and context in the same way Baby Boomers got bored with old people.

Lynch – a true post-ironist – disagrees, but the dialogue of his play is awash in trivializing romanticism: that a writer’s main priority is to write for herself and that writing can never be viewed objectively. Aren’t these the cliches of the starving artist and the twin mantras of social media – what’s good for me?

I asked Lynch how he’d feel if his online words repelled rather than attracted audiences. “It would be a major disappointment, but at least I’ll get a blog piece out of it.”

So he’s trying a new form of marketing called Seeding the Memes, which, as far as I can tell, is not yet patented but has produced dozens of Internet business models. If your meme doesn’t go viral this month, there’s an online generator that can produce a dozen new ones next month. And don’t forget to believe that other opinions and experiences aren’t usually relevant (thank you Oprah Winfrey).

If creativity doesn’t have the guard rail of the unknown to steady itself against, we’ll have to change completely the way we judge art’s value and its cost. If it is, like social media, all about economics, is Swamp-Mucking Surrealists just around the corner?

 


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 6

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images