I am very pleased about this detachment from art captured as material goods. A lot. I have this other post about music “wanting to get out” and acting like a memetic force…. and commodifying it (albeit a business model and necessity for many, among other people, artists). It was an idea that music is art that wants to be autonomous… and move freely. It stunts and limits the power of that art to control it through sales, etc. I am not saying it’s bad, I am just saying it is the nature of art…. and proven with massive piracy and dowloading of music without paying, as well as corporate music and the RIAA being incapable of stopping it, that music is going to be listened to… no matter what.
I sold off my CD collection in 2005. My DVD collection has dimished to about 1/10 it’s size. No more photo albums cluttering up the apartment… I have everything digitally stored. (and soon will upload 20GB or so to picasa, even tho I assume that will suck)
Doting on collections now seems archaic, and almost barbarian. Sort of… I half joke, but it seems really outdated. I do have a huge record collection of a couple thousand…. but it seems now even books can be cataloged, stored, documented in the cloud, and Shakespeare to Sagan to Adams…. accessed in the blink of an eye. I can’t find a book that fast on my bookshelf.
So… do you still have a collection? Or do you feel the freedom that technology is starting to offer, and create? I adore not being bound by these things… I carry nothing but I can access them from almost anywhere in the world.
Ownership is ending. Soon it will simply be accessing.
Anyone having a hard time wrapping their head around that? Thanks Marc… you melted my head today. I knew I had drifted into this world where technological achievement is less superficial, and more pragmatic….
but ouch.