A Personal Blog is Art
It’s my turn to answer the question I posed, What is a personal blog?, and I doubt anyone will be surprised by my answer.
A personal blog is Art. And personal blogging is an artform.
Some people might have an immediate negative reaction to that statement: The idea “Art” has a lot of baggage. It might seem elitist, it might seem like hubris, it might even seem daunting, but for any of you struggling to make connections between some of the advice written for bloggers and the work (Yes, work!) you do, I think that you’ll come closer to something you can hold on to by considering yourself an artist. Or, at a minimum, an apprentice artist.
Reading through all the responses to my question, there were a number of common threads. One of the strongest was how indefinable a personal blog actually is, that it was unique to each individual, to each blog, subjective and without limitation. I agree.
The same can be said of Art.
Another idea was that it was a place of exploration, somewhere to express the things that are often left unsaid in life, somewhere you can develop your understanding of yourself and of the world.
The same can be said of Art.
Others thought that it was a way of communicating and connecting on a different level, one where you are able to both reveal and learn things you otherwise wouldn’t.
The same can be said of Art.
It doesn’t matter whether your definition of Art is the Sistine Chapel or Piss Christ, a ragged piece of embroidery or a cartoon. In fact, whatever your subjective definition is, that bias is probably present in your blog whether you are aware of it or not.
To be honest, I could write an entire book on all the comparisons that can (and in my opinon, should) be made, but I won’t belabour that point because I have a greater one.
Viewing personal blogging as an artform is functional.
It can help you develop as a blogger.
There is so much brilliant advice out there about blogging, and it does apply to personal blogs, but the majority of that advice is about understanding the medium, like learning the technical aspects of using water colours, or writing poetry. When it comes to purpose, however, a personal blog (whether comedic and light-hearted, or dark and philosophical) exists for the same reasons Art does so there are answers to be found there as well.
In many ways Art is about learning the rules and then breaking them in order to create something new; to make us experience the world in new ways, to stimulate our mind and our emotions, to comfort us or challenge us or inspire us. Personal blogs, even the ones that appear on the surface to be mundane, do all those things for all the same reasons.
So I want to examine both parts of the whole.
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18 Responses to “A Personal Blog is Art”
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Blogging Personal aims to open a dialogue about personal blogging, to provide a space where we can talk about about what we do, and how we can do it better. It is a place where we can ask questions and, together, find answers. [read more...]
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Well said Lani. I didn’t respond to your question because I’ve been thinking about it and haven’t been able to articulate my definative answer. But YES to what you say.
I see blogging as using the latest technology to journal, yet with a public, an audience thrown in to make it a little more contrived. I apply all the things I think about journaling to blogging. It is an art, a practise, a process and expression. When I introduce journaling to students I show them examples of the range of journals, notebooks and diaries that exist. There is a great body of work there. When I meet artists I ask them if I can see their journal or notebook and would rather own those, than their ‘art’.
Now I’ll go and read what everyone else said.
oh wow! I like your answer! It made perfect sense. thanks hon.
Excellent analogy! I find blogging to be a very creative outlet for me, and not just in the writing. I come close to obsessing over not just the content, but the aesthetics of my blog as well.
Yes! Suits me. In fact I am incapable of treating any piece of writing except maybe a shopping list any other way. (I doodle on my shopping lists anyhow … and you should see the creativity of my doodles, lol!)
Good answer to an intriguing question.
I like that, so much so that it sums up mostly what I feel about personal blogging so I don’t really have much of a comment to write.
[…] so, take a look at Blogging Personal. An interesting and uplifting read - especially A Personal Blog Is Art. The site’s aim is to provide a place for personal bloggers to interact, to give and receive […]
It looks like we’re all coming at it from the same angle, then! Seriously, I think that’s great. I wouldn’t mind getting the outside world to feel the same way about it of course.
Of course blogging is art. Well… most of the time. Some blogs I click on to, then after reading for a few moments, I go, never to return.
To me, art is intensely personal, yet at the same time has a sense of audience. There’s nothing worse than art that is so self absorbed that it disappears up the artist’s backside. There is a balance. Otherwise, why publish?
I rarely plan what goes on my blog. I tend to sit down, usually in the early morning before kids get up and I have to race off to work, and I open up my site. Then I blog about whatever. But I take great pride in what I put down on the page. I read and reread it before I hit publish. Blogger used to be a nightmare because it’d sometimes muck up my paragraphs. (I’m an English teacher. Paragraphs are very important to me. I start off each new year by telling each new class that paragraphs are their friends… probably the only friends they’ll ever have. My students are very unlikeable.)
Any creative endeavour, if done with care and pride in the work, is art in my book. Or should I have spelled that with a capital A?
I did waver on the capital A, but I decided to go full strength in the end. Because I completely agree with you about creative endeavours!
Absolutely it is art - its just a matter of some days being full murals with wonderful themes and other days when I am barely finger painting with me!!
[…] week, I’ll take a look at Blogging Personal, a blog by Lani Giesen, and her post A Personal Blog is Art – stay […]
Thanks for dropping your card at my site, you have a lovely blog here, very informative, and it shows you try really hard, and that’s good. keep it up.
Great to see a resource for personal blogs. Will come back when I am not so close to sleeping over my keyboard. Just realized it is suddenly 5:00am.
[…] week’s review is of Lani Giesen’s post: A personal blog is art, at Blogging […]
I couldn’t agree more with what you’ve said above, Lani. I think there’s more to examine within your definition of ‘blogging as art’ - take for example, those incredibly successul personal bloggers who draw us into their lives and become friends, confidants and totems. Are these the skilled artisans of the blog world? What makes their ‘art’ so much more appealing? Is it years of practice, or do they have some innate skill? Are they exploring new frontiers, just as the Impressionists did, or are they floating along with a trend?
A thought-provoking post, much appreciated! I’ll be thinking about it all day now!
Thank you, Amy. I knew once I started writing this article how much more there is to be explored and hopefully I’ll be able to do that through this blog. The ‘innate skill’ v. ‘practice’ is an interesting question, one I don’t think their is a perfect answer for anywhere in the art world. And I do think personal blogging is still a new frontier.
I have often felt that there was an abundance of guidance regarding how to write a blog but precious little about what to say and how to say it.
If content is king this is a little odd.
But folks with technical knowledge are often not the ones with artistic outlooks. I don’t want to generalize too much. But this is the first post that I have actually found that addresses the subject so clearly. Thanks.