That isn’t to say it can’t be resurrected. Art can and will be lifted from the grave like a Lazarus at the hands of the Almighty. But it will take someone powerful, god-like. How did impressionism trump academic art? On the shoulders of geniuses.

Speaking of the visual arts, which I have studied for two decades, there is a pattern that repeats itself every hundred years or so. We’re in that pattern now, at the tail-end, waiting for the greatness to show itself again, ready for the cycle to start anew. Put another way, the art of the 20th Century, whatever the -ism, has been burned up, sapped of all its energy, used, the smoldering remains of a forest after a forest fire.

But what grows out of that desolate but strangely fertile landscape? New growth, new trees, freshness. New life!

Take a look at 19th Cen. French art. Neo-Classicism was a great style until it became officially accepted and marketed (for lack of a better word) through official salons and exhibitions to the middle class. I think what the salons were doing then is analogous to what corporations are doing now. Corporate art is, practically by definition, exempt of any value, at least to anyone with real taste in art. Corporate art is singed and burned, it’s for the soulless, for the ignorant, for those that find value in the superficiality rather than value in the inherently valuable; corporate art is the charred remains of redwood trees teetering in burnt-out rows across a scorched earth, the soul obliterated, ready to collapse under the pressure of new life germinating under the bleak surface.

When content marries new technology, we will see the resurrection we anticipate.

Oh, and by the way, helping writers scale the peak from the Internet is exactly what I think Novelr’s new focus should be. But let’s keep that quiet for a little while, now, eh? ;-)

Seen this one yet?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28selfpub.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

For me, one of the funnest parts of contemplating the future of digital fiction (aside from daydreaming the success of my own stories, of course) is speculating on the changes in form and genre that will inevitably take place. A huge growth in serialized fiction is an easy bet, and I think it’s safe to say that both “niche” fiction and fiction that blurs genre lines will grow, but what other changes might we see?

And now let me share an experience . . . My girlfriend bought an Iphone the other day and while she was upstairs watching a movie I started using it. I had never used an Iphone before, and never used the Internet on a phone. (Go ahead tell me I’m living in the dark ages). I just never liked the idea of a “small screen”.

Surprisingly, however, reading on these screens is not too bad. It’s actually fun and even restful to have the little thing in your palm as you lie back on the couch.

This experience really changes how I look at publishing on the Net. When a large portion of our audience may not even be reading from a conventional computer screen (with the rise of the Kindle and Internet Phones), just think. Reading on the Web can occur anywhere and everywhere and clearly this is already happening to some degree.

I just have to break out of my conventional ideas that people are reading my novel solely in front of a computer screen or solely in a room by themselves. Hell, they might be in the bus or on a train. With the increase in sales of these devices, I believe online fiction will easily be able to claim more readers.

I’ll let you in on something, though – the Shelves Project, while still largely in proposal form, aims to get these independent works out to the mainstream … and the mainstream here would be the major publishers looking for the next big thing on the web. The potential value we can create with such an effort should be well worth the time and money I’ll be putting in. =)

It fits my biases at any rate. I have a hard time believing traditional publishers are just going to die. It seems more likely to me that they’ll adapt.

Oddly enough, the picture the article creates reminds me of the open source software model. Specifically, it reminds me of how some companies repackage open source software (freely created and distributed software) and sell it with extensions and/or with a particular configuration. The big difference being that in this case the writers (of the stories) will get paid.

Well, one hopes.