Art has many purposes; one is to make us think. If the greatness of art is measured by how much we think about it, Whiskey Monday is a great artist. It is difficult for a virtual artist like Whiskey Monday to get first life recognition for Second Life® art, but it is not impossible. I certainly think her work merits exposure in the broader world beyond our pixel borders.
Meanwhile, it is good to know that the powers that be in our world recognize her importance and have granted her LEA10 – one of the Linden Endowment for the Arts sims, to create art for the coming month. She’s working away and generously allows people to go there and use her builds in their photos.
Where I first saw this build, I thought of “Things Fall Apart”, the title of the book by China Achebe that a lot of us read in high school. By the way, if you have not read it, you should. I thought of coming undone, falling apart, coming apart at the seams; metaphors for the fragility of life. I do get the sense that Monday is tackling the big questions with her work.
Then I thought of creative destruction and Karl Marx’s quote, “All that is solid melts into air.” Marx believed the cycle of innovation, recession, then innovation, the boom and bust, would lead to the eventual collapse of capitalism. Free market fundamentalists love creative destruction believing it always leads to innovation that will always lead to more productivity and more wealth and so on. The computer destroyed the typewriter industry, factories closed and people were laid off. That is creative destruction. All that was solid about the typewriter industry has certainly melted into air. Even on a massive corporate scale, there is fragility.
I wonder about creative destruction at the personal level. Is there something freeing about coming undone? Can losing it spark personal innovation, re-creation and growth? Probably, for some people. But not for all. Even the strongest person has points of fragility.