From:  James Elkins
Date:  Thursday, 17 October 2013 00:54
To:  Charlotte Frost <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:  Re: October's theme: Art History Online, an introduction

Charlotte,
 
My pleasure. 
 
Hi everyone. I'm glad to report on my efforts to write art history online. I
started this in an informal way a couple of years ago -- I used to post
questions to Facebook, collect the answers, and thank people in the text. I
did that with this book:
 
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Critiques-Guide-Second-Edition/dp/098602161X
 
It's full of footnotes thanking people on Facebook. (A third edition is in
preparation, so if anyone has stories or ideas about critiques that aren't
in the book, please send them to me!)
 
But I really started writing art history online earlier in 2013. I have two
book projects that are currently being written live. I'll summarize them and
then say something about how it's going.
 
1. "North Atlantic Art History and Worldwide Art" is being written on Google
Drive. Most Drive pages are embedded, live, in my website
 
http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/251-north-atlantic
-art-history
 
and I continuously post new additions to Facebook. Here for example is a
post on the worldwide spread of art criticism, one of the topics in the
book:
 
https://www.facebook.com/james.elkins1/posts/10201173872961275
 
2. "Writing with Images" is a book on experimental writing in art history,
theory, and criticism, and more generally all writing that uses images,
including fiction. It is being written on two blogs, and they are both
linked to my own website:
 
http://www.jameselkins.com/index.php/experimental-writing/256-writing-with-i
mages
 
Here is one of the two:
 
http://305737.blogspot.com/
 
And here is a typical Facebook post that started a big discussion. The topic
was why Derrida, Foucault, and others don't count as art history:
 
https://www.facebook.com/james.elkins1/posts/10201243699906905
 
I have plans to write one other book live, in addition to the "Art
Critiques" book. Everything I write is posted to Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, and most are also posted on my Academia.edu site:
 
http://saic.academia.edu/JElkins
 
The idea of writing online, for me, is to acknowledge the fact that these
subjects are open-ended, and that there is no single authority. I also like
the idea of exposing unfinished things to immediate critique: it avoids the
appearance of the polished text -- sometimes I don't even wait for "rough
drafts," but write live online, so people might see the text at any stage.
 
Most of the discussions and suggestions happen on Facebook. I find LinkedIn
completely moribund and uninteresting. I also use Scribd and Researchgate,
and I find no real community on either site. Academia is a very active site
for me (lots of visitors and downloads) but no community. Twitter just
hasn't developed much use for me simply because comments are so short. There
is such a thing as a complex idea!
 
Facebook works fine. There is a fair amount of TL;DR ("too long; didn't
read") -- that is, people make comments based on the lines introducing the
post, without having read the text. But even that can be useful. If I
summarize a chapter in a sentence or two in order to post it on Facebook,
then I am in effect sending the same message a reader gets when she thumbs
through a book before she buys it. The title and abstract do count, so even
off-topic comments based on the title and abstract can be useful.
 
When I get specific comments, criticism, suggestions, etc., I incorporate
them immediately into the text and thank the people who posted. So my books
will have lots of passages like this:
 
"Reading an early version of this chapter, Colleen Anderson remarked that
this subject connects to Cixous's works on.." etc.
 
All those references will make for an unusual reading experience, but I
think it will feel, and be, more participatory.
 
I don't think this crowd sourcing would make sense for all of art history,
theory, or criticism. These subjects I'm working on have two characteristics
that make them especially well suited. (1) These books are about very
undecided, contentious subjects, where even fundamental terms are undecided;
and (2) they are about general topics, not specialized ones.
 
Regarding the supposed wildness of the internet: I had a "fan" page, with
16,000 "fans," but most were inactive. I shut it down, and my current page
is a personal page, limited to 5,000. Of those, about 300 are active, and
only about 20 or 30 are spammers (I shut them down whenever I see them).
Less than 10, I think, are crazy in an unproductive sense: that is, there
are many people whose opinions are wild in relation to academia, or in
relation to the art market, or in relation to modernism or postmodernism --
but less than 10 or so who are non-social, solipsistic, fanatical,
fundamentalist, or otherwise unproductive.
 
On the other hand there may be 100 or more who are art historians, and
"lurk" on the site. I hear about them in different places, and in different
ways; some are friends.  But they have strong disciplinary allegiances, and
they don't like to post, or be "seen," on unserious sites like Facebook.
Those users, I have to say, do bother me, because they are timid.
 
Hope this helps; feel free as always to write me, here or elsewhere; and
please do have a look at the many posts and see if there's anything you'd
like to add. So far, everything I'm doing online is intended for eventual
print publication: the reason is simply that it yields a different
distribution, different readers. It isn't better or worse, or the past or
the future: it's just another medium.
 
Best,
 
Jim