4 thoughts on “Version 1.0 of Art and Pop”

1. lichanos April 3, 2008 at 4:37 pm

   I guess I fit the USA demographic…how old is older?

   Entertaining – I see my birth date is the death date of:

   1940 – Paul Klee: LOVE him!
   1967 – Jayne Mansfield: I remember that! Poor girl. Lost her head…
   1991 – Henri Lefebvre: La Vie Quotidienne, where would I be without it?

   Now, tell me. This has obviously taken you a lot of effort and time – clearly a labor of love…or is somebody paying you? Why have you done it? Simply to amuse yourself, and intellectual nosepickers like me, or is there a deeper rationale?

   I’ve never quite gotten the point of timelines, such as the ones that appear in the frontmatter of Everyman editions of literary classics. I just find them difficult to absorb – I get no context from it. Your project seems vaguely medieval to me, but I’m suspect you lack the confidence that you are somehow producing a summa of all human knowledge and culture. I have a creepy feeling that this is the demon of the information age rearing its head again…
2. jahsonic April 3, 2008 at 7:31 pm

   Dear Lichanos,

   Older is 65+, I don’t think your there yet.

   Why am I doing this. Several answers are possible and equally valid. It is a labor of love, yes; it is a good way to learn, I’m an obsessive learner. Which brings us to a next possible answer, it is an OCD, an addiction. But the learner thing is also about meeting people like you, intellectual nosepickers.

   I love the timeline thing, the dates are as far that is concerned much less interesting than the years, I concede. But I needed the dates, because else the database would be full of “holes.” And the dates also enabled me to build a corpus of about 4 to 5,000 people relevant to my subject, to record a certain sensibility which is my own and can be summarized by the following keywords:

   absurd – alternative – anti – avant-garde – banned – bizarre – clandestine – controversial – counterculture – cult – eccentric – elitist – esoteric – excessive – extravagance – exotic – experimental – forbidden – gratuitous – grotesque – hermetic – hidden – horror – illegal – incongruous – independent – intellectual – irrational – kinky – kitsch – libertine – macabre – modern – monstrous – non-mainstream – obscure – occult – offbeat – offensive – original – outsider – perverse – postmodern – queer – radical – rare – revolutionary – scatological – sensational – strange – subculture – subversive – supernatural – surreal – taboo – transgressive – travesty – ugly – uncanny – unconventional – underground – unusual – weird – wild

   The timelines become more interesting when years are concerned. Take for example 2003, a rough draft, but telling of what I mean by history: “that which we would rather remember than forget,” so the publication bias becomes apparent.

   Also, Wikipedia is very American-centric, a situation I would like to redress. Part of the problem is of course that the language used is English, I ‘d like to present an European-centric of “world culture”, but still use the English language to present it.

   I take as a compliment that you mention that my project seems medieval, and while I am not sure as to what exactly you mean by “I’m suspect”, my aim – in my wildest dreams – is a “Renaissance man”-project; the new Encyclopédie; to present world culture (as it arose after the advent of the internet, cfr. demon of the information age) from what Bloom would describe as the “school of resentment” perspective.

   So far the only one pulling this project has been myself, but the reason of course for starting the wiki-thing is that other people can write with me. What I particularly have in mind are translation histories from writer such as Sade (who translated Sade in Arabic, Chinese and Dutch), as well as other local avant-garde, countercultural and underground histories.
3. lichanos April 3, 2008 at 10:22 pm

   Thanks. I mean to say:

   …but I suspect that you lack the confidence that you are somehow producing a summa of all human knowledge and culture.

   What I meant was that I don’t think you are under the same cultural illusions as those medieval encyclopedasts, lovable though they may be.
4. jahsonic April 3, 2008 at 10:29 pm

   I like that last bit lovable though they may be.

   I suppose any encyclopédiste hopes to produce the summa of knowledge in his particular field, so the answer would be … yes … but it’s hard to limit my field.

   In the meanwhile I’m happy when people are just looking up their birthdays.

   Jan

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