Paddy Johnson at the airport.
I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it here but one of my favorite television shows is Art 21. As such you can imagine how thrilled I was when Hrag Vartanian asked me to do an interview with him over IM to post on their blog. A clip from that discussion below.
[According to Paddy, the soundtrack for this chat is: Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal” (video)]
Hrag Vartanian: So I saw your tweet today: “Embracing my Maximum Sorrow. I am mediocre. Mediocrity is in me.” I figured you were writing….do you feel mediocre whenever you write even if it’s not true?
Paddy Johnson: To make a short story long, my desk is a TOTAL DISASTER so I was looking at these flyers from Kevin Bewerdorf’s show I saw close to three weeks ago now and the pamphlets, which have this kind of weird corporate/web look to them, ask you to embrace your mediocrity. So I was doing that by twittering mediocrity (Paddy’s recent review of the show is here).
HV: So was that why you were feeling mediocre? They suggested you feel mediocre or you interpreted them that way?
PJ: Well the mantra the PDF asks you to repeat is “I am mediocre, mediocrity is in me…so I did it.”
HV: Wow…that’s kind of deep, or wait…maybe it’s shallow.
PJ: But to answer your question, I think there are times when we all feel mediocre for some reason or another…so I struggle with that sometimes.
HV: Do you ever feel that about art blogging?
PJ: Sometimes, but usually I cure myself of that by rereading posts I’ve forgotten about.
HV: I know you write about new media a lot. Do you consider your blog a form of new media?
PJ: Only in the sense that the Internet is still relatively new and evolving. People are already getting fairly used to using the Internet—it feels increasingly inaccurate to describe publishing that way. To be honest, I think comment moderation (as aspect of blogging that can reasonably be described as new media) is trickier than blogging itself, should a blogger really invest in that aspect of it.
Link to the full interview here.
