I went to the Whitney on Friday to check out its new exhibit on Picasso's influence on American art. The walls were covered with lots of Big-Name Art Dudes (or "B-NADs," as insiders call them) like Pollock, Johns, de Kooning, Warhol, Man Ray, and Lichtenstein. They may have been blown away by synthetic cubism, or they might have just decided that the best way to become a rock-star art celebrity is to copy a rock-star art celebrity. Either way it's worth a visit, not least so you can see all the surreal depictions of guys with feet in their mouths and women with boobs growing out of their ears. Then you can go home and determine his influence on you.
As I browsed and learned about who knew whom, and where and when who said what, I got to thinking about an exhibit about bloggers and their influence on each other. Let's face it: There are a lot of museums in the world, and some insomniac pothead with rectangular glasses and a soul patch is bound to pitch the idea to a curator sooner or later.
The idea gets better the further into the future it occurs. Picture researchers 80 years from now poking through billions of posts and e-mails, trying to piece together the Intra-Blogger Relationships of the Early 21st Century. Picture the holographic displays of jpegs rescued and restored from long-dead Flickr accounts. Picture some ancient, wheezy voice in your headset saying something like, "We are reasonably certain that throughout their friendship Maggie greatly admired Heather's use of poop as leitmotif."
From there, it's not hard to envision a Blogger's Museum, full of permanent displays like the Hall of Emphasis. Who popularized the overuse of ALL CAPS? Who was the first to create the Three. Period. Sentence? When did the first <shriek>code geekery</shriek> surface? Who was the first hysteric to <gasp>COMBINE! ALL! THREE!</gasp>?
These are the juicy factoids that future generations will clamor to learn. (Probably.) Thus, we must all be aware of our place in history, as our words are quite likely to survive us. Perhaps, if you're like me, you greet this chance with open arms, if only to prove to your great-grandchildren what a complete dork you were.
If so, you might want to beef up your oeuvre and try to keep up with Eden's National Blog Writing Month (helpfully abbreviated to "NaBloWriMo"), during which participants will post something every day in November. It's an intriguing idea, because I don't think I have the slightest chance of pulling it off. But I'm going to give it a shot, just to see how badly I can gum up the Interwebs with unfiltered blather. Besides, anything that's a month long and has the word "blow" in it can't be all bad. *
* Another stellar insight for the grandkids to treasure! O!M!G!
[UPDATE: Mrs. K has changed the name to NaBloPoMo, which officially ruins the "blow" joke. But hey, a month of BloP might be interesting, too.]
