The Passionate Many Many Many
The Big Guys noticed that in every age and in every culture only a wee tiny percentage of people ("people" meaning humans with phalloi) had 1) the means and 2) the interest to keep old Art and old Culture alive while at the same time encouraging and supporting new Art and new Culture. One-tenth of one percent, maybe? A small number, in any case. But this recurring handful really, really cared about Art. So the Big Guys came up with a phrase for them: "The Passionate Few." Condescending? Yes. Elitist? Yes. Accurate? Unfortunately, probably. But such was the way of that old, hierarchical, jungle-like world. In every generation, by the time the fighting was over and the spoils were divided among the so-called winners, there just never were many left standing. So you got a system of patronage, with aristocratic or religious or political control of all the arts, generation after generation. Before the rise of the middle-class (when the spoils slowly began to be dispersed among a larger number of males), there were no museums. Art was kept in the Rich Guys' very large houses (they were large, of course, to match the size of their private parts) or in the churches of the prevailing religion approved and supported by the Big, Rich Guys. There followed several recent centuries of social turmoil (which we don't need to go into again) and quite a bit of technological development (which we're still so caught up in ourselves that there's no way we can begin to understand What It All Means). An early hint that things were about to change in a big way was the rise of The Sports Statistic, followed quickly by The Sports Page, and finally, The Sports Call-in Radio Show. More and more people had more and more leisure to pay attention to what they like and not what they were paid to pay attention to. It should come as no surprise that men, in the manner of their penis-bearing ancestors, paid more and more attention to sports. One day everybody woke up and lo! There was the Internet. Suddenly we were wired together. All of us. Rich, middle-class, poor, educated, uneducated. It didn't matter. Why, it didn't even matter how big your penis was! That's not all: It didn't even matter if you had a penis at all!!! And one of the things the Rich Old Guys had to notice eventually was: They weren't they only ones who were passionate about Art and Culture. Worse yet, they had to see that there were other things worth being passionate about besides the Art and Culture which they had such a vested interest in. Where lies the proof behind such a radical, esthetic- apple- cart- upsetting statement? Why, the answer litters the Internet itself. In addition to all the Mcluhanesque, and post-McLuhanesque remarks about what the Internet Really Means, we have the simple fact that it has unleashed the human ability to be publicly, globally passionate about anything that strikes your fancy. It don't matter no more if the Esthetic Powers That Be do not approve of that which makes you passionate. You can construct a web site that is just as accessible and just as passionate as that of any Museum of Modern Art in the world. The first signs that this flowering of passionate interest was coming were discernible in the newsgroups, which quickly grew in number from hundreds to thousands to now uncounted tens of thousands. But those were just people talking about their passions. Only with the germination of the Web did all six billion of us finally have the place to put our passions on display. We're now all aware of this seeming clutter. You can hardly do a search without stumbling across page after page of highly focused stuff that you could care less about. Indeed, a lot of it is clutter. But amidst the vast desert of clutter, you can find true gems of passion. How can you distinguish a diamond of real passion from just another quick paste-job of a web site? As ever, God is in the details. One mark of the truly passionate is an obsessive attention to details concerning the object of one's passion. Is it perhaps electric trains? OK, then no detail of electric trains is too small for you to pay a lot of attention to. The web sites of the truly passionate are notable for page after page of details which, if you do not share the passion, are just so much pixelized white noise. But if you share the passion, these pages are food for your spirit, they make your heart sing, and cause you to lift your eyes unto the heavens and praise All That Is. We're talking far, far more than the mere Democratization of Art. That hackneyed phrase just means you see school busloads of public school children daily trucked to the local Big Guys' Museums so the hapless children can be forced to parade past stuff they couldn't care less about and simultaneously they can contemplate what they're missing by not being Rich and Powerful. No, that's not what's happening on the Internet. What we're seeing is the unfettered flowering of human curiosity. Since there is no end to our curiosity, there is no end to our passion. Finally, with the Internet, we have a place to share our passion and show others where it takes us. Which leads us to Diebold's Rule: Given
the time and the means, The kooks we shall always have with us. Now they're just a lot more visible. No longer are they confined to spending their retirement years creating the World's Largest Ball of Twine and displaying it beside Farm Road 1435 outside Scrimpnsave, North Dakota. Now they can put their ball of twine right out there on the Net where the whole world can come and admire, or ridicule, or whatever. So, not the mere Democratization of Art. Rather: the Humanization of Culture. For the first time, culture begins to represent us all, not just a small fraction of us who happened to be rich or educated or lucky. The payoff? Go to our page of passionate sites. END |
Once upon a time, in what the lit crit people call the hegemony of
the patriarchal elite and the rest of us call the good old days, the Big Guys looked down
on the panoply of phallic history and noticed a repeating tendency among rich penises
throughout history and across all cultures. Well, actually, they noticed a lot of
tendencies. Here, let's confine ourselves just to the one concerning Art and Culture (the
capital "A" and capital "C" are important).