The positive network effects continue unabated. Thanks to a happy pointer from Kes Woodward, a (very good) artist based here in Fairbanks, Len Edgerly added me as a Twitter contact and I have just finished watching video of a presentation on The Arts 2.0 given by Edgerly– a ‘technological evangelist to the arts’– at PodCamp Boston 2.

It was refreshing to see someone directly discussing the traditional ‘arts’ in relation to the participatory web. If you have any connection to an arts institution and are interested in some ideas about how you might use Web 2.0 technologies to enhance the conversation in and (most importantly) around that institution’s activities, Edgerly’s session is worth checking out.

My particular interest could be seen as extending from this domain to the culture of art itself, or Art Culture 2.0. Some of Edgerly’s presentation touches on this, such as artistic institutions resisting having an identity in social network sites because they don’t know how to handle the participation by users who they tend to think of as passive consumers rather than potential partners in conversation. But this goes beyond redefinition of the traditional relationships between providers and patrons of art in a way that makes the ambiguity of the word ‘patron’ quite apropos.

I’ve spent a lot of time with my feet in the multiple worlds that today’s artists inhabit. I work directly with emerging technology centered around people connecting and communicating with one another, I founded and worked for years editing one of the first substantial literary magazines on the web that wasn’t a feeble sibling to a print juggernaut, and I am at heart a traditional poet in the information age. I continue to believe that the world of poetry presents a clear, micro-cosmic view of the strange and sometimes fearsome currents at the intersections of technology and art.

What I see is an exhilarating world filled with dynamic tension, creative conflict and collaboration, and sometimes perverse contradictions. Anyone reading or writing poetry today who is not aware of the ‘online’ scene is missing out on the most vibrant and exciting poetic space there is. I put the word ‘online’ in quotes because the world of online publications, poetry archives, poetry podcasts and presentations, and the artifacts of technologically mediated poetic creation and collaboration– as large as it is– is only part of the story. Just as interesting is how offline publishing has been rehabilitated. As in the glory days of the ‘zine (and poetry has a long, reputable history of self-publication of various kinds) web tools have given poets a hand in the production of their art. Public broadside initiatives distribute free, electronic broadsides that teams of people across the globe print and post. I have on my shelves poetry micro-publications of every description that would never have found their way out of the city (or neighborhood) they were published in before.

And the culture of poetry, critics, academics– and all the variations and intersections of the three– has been deeply affected. The avant, the post avant, the quiet poets, the New Brutalists, the flarfists, the traditionalists– none have to stand alone and none have to suffer being quieted by the institutional leverage of the other. Some wouldn’t even exist were it not for the tools of the web: the blogs, forums and wikis. In some places the conversation is like that of a quiet corner in a coffee shop, in other places there is an all out poetic war being waged, producing victors, losers, dissidents and refugees.

I have no idea what it all means and I don’t want to choose sides. But I do know that if what one knows coming out of school– whether high school, MFA or PhD– is only the traditional world of gatekeeping editors at big publishing houses producing loss-leading poetry hardbacks of names familiar to our parents and grandparents, then they are not only at a serious disadvantage (imagine releasing a history professor onto the world today whose education included essentially no events beyond the Cold War), but they are also being deprived of a poetic inheritance that they, in every sense of the word, deserve.