IS CONTEXT THE NEW CONTENT?

The title above is a quote by Kenneth Goldsmith in his collection of essays titled “Uncreative Writing.”    Goldsmith is a conceptual poet. Yet his ideas regarding the provenance of our ideas, specifically within our Googleized creative culture, informs our actions.

As recently reported in “The New Yorker”  (5 Oct 2015, p 29), much of Goldsmith’s ideas descend, from who else, Duschamp. Is the information presented via Google a readymade? Goldsmith tends to think so.

His thesis is that given the Googlized ubiquity of nearly every creative work, he finds it useful to simply reframe, or put into a different context, the work of others. He does not wish to make further creative content.  Thus his term, context is the new content.

Duschamp and his readymades, started all of this, of course.  The simple act of taking a urinal and putting it on a museum wall, thus putting it into a different context, is an act that we are still trying to understand.

What Duschamp proved with his readymades was that no idea is created in a vacuum. While obvious, I think that we all tend to forget this in our culture. We have this annoying tendency to want to see creative works as sui generis. And I think that this tendency ultimately clouds the workings of our culture;  authenticity is muddled.

All of this leads to what I think is looming as one of the central cultural questions of our age; what is the provenance of your design? What is the authenticity?  And I think that how the provenance / authenticity question is answered is going to provide the true value of what any of us does.

Goldsmith:

“How I make my way through this thicket of information – how I manage it, how I parse, it, how I organize and distribute it-is what distinguishes my writing from yours.”

Yet I would take this one step farther. In our Googlized age, there is still infinite creative potential. While managing, parsing and organizing the flood of information input is of course critical, the method that we use to assemble our creative solutions is really what will control the value of our work.

I selected the above transparent drawing for this post given that I appropriated the Mandarin character for Happiness as a form generator.