But think of all the *good* work that has been written in the shorter modern vein. Many of Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s or Woolf’s books would have been seen as less than full-length to the Victorians, but so what? And this whole movement hasn’t prevented the emergence of good longer works, too.

If your printmaking friend doesn’t want to make art driven by the Internet, that’s great – for him. If you want to post sketchpad pages but also do mural-sized canvases, you can do that, too. And there’s nothing to keep you from posting a page per week (or whatever) of a 900-page graphic novel onto your blog.

I’m a big believer that artists create art for any medium, whether they’re writing an epic or a haiku. The constraints can be liberating or they can be constraining – but all of that is in the mind of the creator, eh?

This might not be the place, but this post reminded me of something:

I met a printmaker a few weeks ago and he was going into his lengthy process, the many stages of sketches and drafts he goes through. He didn’t have a website, and I suggested that he should think about just starting a Flickr account and a blog to get himself out there, start a viewership, etc.

His response was, “I don’t want to start creating work for the internet.”

I asked him to explain.

He said, “A lot of the artists I know who start posting their stuff on the net…they start CREATING their work for the net.”

Now, as an artist who has embraced blogging and “Social Media” whole-heartedly, at first I found this to be really, well, kind of backwards. I mean, my kind of ideal business plan for young artists these days is: embrace the net, put yourself online, create a readership, find a way to sell your stuff directly to your readership. Forget galleries, forget publishing deals.

But I have to admit: since I started blogging, my art has changed–a lot of it is small– not bigger than a sketchbook page. It fits nicely on the computer screen. Instead of writing short stories, I do visual poems. I’ve gone from thinking about doing a graphic novel to thinking about doing a “webcomic.”

And I wonder: is the internet helping me to think “big” or think “small”? Is using my blog as my primary artistic outlet limiting my work?

Back to the printmaker: he makes these huge, colorful monoprints–stuff that you probably can’t process on a tiny screen. How can he harness “social media”? How can he use it to his benefit? How can it help him and not detract from his vision?

My answer is to document the process-side of the work: the sketches, photos of the in-progress prints, etc.

But I wonder: will being online create a temptation for him to think “smaller” not “bigger”?

Let’s hope not.

Another example: Jessica Hagy runs a great blog called Indexed where she’s also secured a book deal. Do want.
http://indexed.blogspot.com/