I’ve been so defensive of blogging recently. (What a sad sentence.) I’m noticing small disses everywhere: in the movie Contagion, the hero claims that “blogs are graffiti with punctuation.” Also, Jude Law plays a nutcase blogger who is obsessed with conspiracy theories. (Of course he is! Bloggers are wacky!) The New Yorker had a cartoon in its Fashion Week issue poking fun at blogs. And in my own life, when I recently showed someone a post I’d written, his tone was sad: “Oh, you blog.”

And I get that the word blog is silly, and that silly blogs are everywhere. But in feeling defensive about how much I enjoy this humble form, I wondered if it could, in fact, be art. Do blogs achieve greatness? Are blogs like serials back in the day of Charles Dickens? No one thought those were art—they were entertainment for worker bees! But look at us now. 

So what, then, is art? 

When I was in high school, we read Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist,” to tackle this very question. It’s a short story about someone who starves himself in a cage in public spaces, because he believes it is his art. I remember our class discussed whether or not “starving yourself” could make you an artist.

I voted no on the Hunger Artist, because his point wasn’t to illuminate life, it was to shock and get attention for himself (much like most reality TV). But this class discussion shaped my views on what art is. Art: 

* Helps you understand humanity, or
* Helps you understand yourself, and
* Generally these feelings grow with time, as you reflect on the work. 

This works for most mediums—certainly film and literature. And I’ve noticed that some blogs create this payoff—in that I learn about life, and humanity and myself. A great example is Jen’s blog. [Note: she is actually super funny, so I don’t want her fun tone to be dragged into this bizarrely overthinky piece of mine (I blame it on the fact that I went to the New Yorker fest this Friday!)] Anyway, Jen has written incredibly profound posts in the past few months, delving honestly into loss, coping, and healing. From reading her blog, I not only understood these journeys better, but I also admired the way she described her healing. 

I’ve never met Jen. It’s conceivable that we will never meet. So reading her blog was more like reading a character I love in literature than hearing about a friend—even though I know she is a real person and we could theoretically meet. I’ve also observed this with Penelope Trunk, and HollyGoNightly and others who are bold enough to be real and raw in this space in a way that I am not.

And to use a flip example, I know the writer behind Tale of Two Babies in real life, but in her blog I see a new side of my friend. She blogs about serious issues we rarely have time to get into when we finally see each other in person and catch up on friends and family. So even though I know her, I don’t know her blogging persona and I learn about life through her. 

And then, just to end with a meta-bang, can’t you imagine reading blogs someday in the distant future, and trying to understand irony and POV and whether or not the narrator was reliable or unreliable? 

So yes, I think blogs can be art.

Has anyone else thought about this? I’d love to know.  Oh Roland Barthes, where are you when we need you???