Rejecting New Media as Art

Rejecting New Media as Art
So many recent poems are showing off how maleable language is, how much can be done with form, how well old notions of organization, intent and meaning can be rejected. Well, they’re all exactly the same, and we’ve got the message. They all are saying, look at me, I am art in a new medium, I don’t sound like what you’re used to. Well, I’ve heard enough that you do sound like what I’m used to. I’m used to your difference, and I’m bored of your same. Instead of making up a thousand new media for the sake of new media as art, why don’t you spend some time in one? Why don’t you pick one and grow something inside it? Or is it that your new medium is a topiary so small and so shaped that all the plants it contains look just the same? Maybe some of the old media of expression are vaster gardens than yours: Hypertext doesn’t make a good home for fiction, it’s good for news stories, and collections of hierarchical and cyclic information graphs. "Sound" poems, experimental poems, collage poems - they aren’t new colors, new light, new subjects. They’re canvases, paints or brushes.

So many recent poems are showing off how maleable language is, how much can be done with form, how well old notions of organization, intent and meaning can be rejected. Well, they’re all exactly the same, and we’ve got the message. They all are saying, look at me, I am art in a new medium, I don’t sound like what you’re used to. Well, I’ve heard enough that you do sound like what I’m used to.

I’m used to your difference, and I’m bored of your same. Instead of making up a thousand new media for the sake of new media as art, why don’t you spend some time in one? Why don’t you pick one and grow something inside it? Or is it that your new medium is a topiary so small and so shaped that all the plants it contains look just the same?

Maybe some of the old media of expression are vaster gardens than yours:

Hypertext doesn’t make a good home for fiction, it’s good for news stories, and collections of hierarchical and cyclic information graphs. "Sound" poems, experimental poems, collage poems - they aren’t new colors, new light, new subjects. They’re canvases, paints or brushes.