Alright, so ive never really been down with blogging and all, but it's for the class ya know, so im going to get to business in typing up my thoughts on this article, and who knows... maybe i'll love blogging so much ill do it more often..... so here i go.
This guy, James Clifford, is discussing collecting art, Art, artifacts, whatever it happens to be and people taking it for thier own by purchasing it and placing it in there home. He says it gives them a sense of power, for other people to admire or be jealous of, or whatever someone may do when viewing something that they might like or hate in someone elses possession. But basically what he's saying is people collecting things to show other people at some point and be like "wow, look at this really nice thing i have, isn't it so nice!" And how owning all these things molds someone it to their "selves", which with all these sociology courses i took here, ive been taught there is no self, and that we are all just giant tools in a big machine, so owning different artifacts, art, Art... those are all just cultures way of shaping us into something. But, thats basically what he is talking about. The different cultures of art that shape us, the collections we have that make us. If we collect Fine Art, folk-art, any of the different types of crafts or trincits that we pick up along the way, they make people the people that they are. They make you into yourself.
I keep everything myself, if you were to go into my room at my house there is a big shelf running around the top of the room with all of the stuffs i have saved from when i was alittle kid... toys... bottles... masks i made in 2nd grade art class, i have everything up there. It kind of is the definition of me, everything that i have been is running along that shelf, the time line of Michael Villata. And now that im not there, i keep all these new things i collect in boxes here. Basically im like a packrat, and i also very much like to keep things. I mean, i isnt really art, but is there such a gigantic difference in the different cultures that shape you than all of the sentimental things that you've gathered through your life that have probably shaped the person that you are more than those random cultures?
I think the whole online music scene relates to this too. The feeling that owning something is sort of powerful, and gives the owner of it something. People download things weeks before they come out, i know i do, and are like "oh man, i have the new Kanye West CD 2 week early, its soooo good" and other people beg for it. Or you search high and low through google and forums to find rare b-sides and demos that no one knew about from your favorite band, so everyone can come to you looking for them. You have that seat of power, you have collected your big 80 GB music library on iTunes, you scrobble it all out on Last.FM, so people are aware that you are listening to the music they dont have, and you wait for all of your friends to be like "wow, i want it too!" Now this isnt the art he's talking about exactly, but i feel that its something we can more relate to here rather than people owning alittle piece of culture from New Guinea in our dorms and apartments. Not everyone has artifacts and foriegn culture all about, but it'd be a pretty safe bet to assume everyone has an iTunes music library.
I kind of went off from the main idea of the article, but this is just the direction that the article got me thinking in after reading it. How it could relate to me, how i personally could connect more with what James Clifford was talking about. I dont own anything extravagant from other cultures, but i do collect things, music.... random stuff, so this is how i related it to my life, and there are probably things that other people could think of in their lifes to make the big ideas of James Clifford more relavent (unless you are an art collector). The article really talked about how culture is shapped by how people take in parts of other cultures, how slowly the world is becoming one community through the collection and viewing of different arts from around the world. i may have shrunk down the scope a bit, but thats how i think. It was a very good article to get me to think about culture, about how its shared, and about the world wide sharing community of culture helps people become more unified in ways.
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I like what you said about music being a collection. You can look at someone older than us and they like to point out and brag about their extensive record collection and you can see what they're collected over the years. But when you get to our generation its, "Oh, check out my 10,000 songs I have catalogued in my I-Tunes." Collections are subjective to who has what and what exactly is in that collection. It can and will change all the time and that just makes the specific collections more special to everyone who has it.
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