life is art and art is life

Jaron Lanier is ‘rethinking the web’: “The basic idea of [our social] contract is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”

It’s a narrow, yet all too common view of our new cultural fabric. (And one that will be repeated more and more in the coming months as the media gets us ready for the news that the internet had to be changed.)

The basic premise of our new social ‘contract’ is not that artists should give away their goods for free, but that in a networked culture we are all artists, we are all journalists, we are all authors.

Instant information has erased the distinction between experts and amateurs. The artist and the journalist are no longer fringe or rare members of society but roles each of us need to play in order to sustain our electronic culture.

We are all contributing to this new “hive mind’ and *very* few of us have any fantasies of being paid. Should we mourn the loss of a handful of very lucrative business models or celebrate a new social fabric that is encouraging us to recognize our interdependence?

“In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. … The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.“ - Glenn Gould