New Year

It's a beautiful 70 degrees Fahrenheit today in Richmond and I'm questioning reality.

Someone I have blogged about previously has e-mailed me to say that something I wrote about did not in fact happen. Which would be a big shame if true, because it is one of my best memories of 2004. I'm contacting others who were present to find out what they remember, and will definitely post a correction to my entry and apologize if I've made a mistake. Ugh. I hate this feeling. This is one of those "dangers of the blog" I've read about, with no editor or fact-checking system.

Last night 60 Minutes did a feature on Google, and one of the points touched on was the Google tendency to highlight the negative. Following is an excerpt from the 60 Minutes website on the feature.

'a big problem with Google: Its ranking system tends to put negative events or statements at the top of the list. And if you Google a person, Battelle says, the picture you'll get is, "an entirely skewed one, in my opinion. When anybody puts in a name, and that person has had a terrible event... that will become who she is in the world." "As hard as we try," Schmidt says, "we have not yet understood how to make value and moral judgments about information. And we can’t distinguish between hugely popular accurate information and hugely popular dated information."'

My blog post in question isn't exactly negative, but I would feel pretty bad/stupid if I am posting as fact a situation that never happened. I'm an artist sick of and very eager to post about all sorts of art-world bullshit - but I don't want to post untruths or simply bully.

Writing this blog has to a degree both inspired me and contributed to my sense of artistic frustration, confirming after only three months how much easier it is to do almost anything than be an artist. I'm all over the place on other people's art-blogs now, and very happy to be mentioned or linked to (please, don't stop!), but what I would really like is to hear that someone, anyone, has been to my current show in Philadelphia. Do other artist-bloggers feel the same way?

My resolution is to not post any hallucinations or delusions.