I've been thinking recently about different approaches that could be taken to creative writing utilizing blogs. I've had an idea for a while of writing a book or a collection of articles about spending every day of a year in an art museum. Every day go to an art museum and every day write an article or essay about it. Maybe one day it's a story about something interesting that happened, another could be a critique about one of the pieces there, another could be profile of one of the people that work or visit there daily.

I like to call this micro social commentary. It could be very interesting to view daily life in an institution like an art museum through a magnifying glass and see what goes on every day right under our noses. How do these little events translate into the daily events of our lives and how does it effect us? A meditation on life as seen through an art museum. A real look at the beauty and wonder that you walk by every day and never notice.

Anyway, I think as a book this doesn't work. As a newspaper article, it could work, but at most you're going to get that in weekly and not daily and there's no real conversation. I'm even wonder if this can be done daily in a newspaper. But as a blog, this would fit perfectly. Every day, a new post about a new day at the museum. I'd be interested in that.

The problem becomes, how do you support yourself? I think that business models of writing blogs are just now coming into being and none are "mature" enough to really work. I'm thinking of subscriptions, advertising or donations. I could see possibly getting a grant from the museum, or possibly going to work for the museum as a PR person, but I don't see that happening any time soon. If you already work at a place like this, it would be fairly simple to write an entry or two during the day, but then you have the whole "getting fired for blogging" issue. And, of course, I would like to do this and none of the above really help me.

My thought right now is to try it out on the weekends. I would love to go downtown every Saturday to the Akron Art Museum and write a weekly article on that day. Of course the Akron Art Museum is closed until 2006, but blogging about the new building could be pretty cool. But I may be getting ahead of myself; lot can happen in a year.

It's an idea I've been kicking around and I thought I would finally kick it out and see what happens. Any thoughts?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 20th, 2005 at 1:51 pm by Joe and is filed under General, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.