HTMLGIANT: an appreciation

Gerhard Richter makes brutal fun of Arts Dispatch/HTMLGIANT

By Barry Johnson

Arts Dispatch didn't know about HTMLGIANT, "the internet literature magazine blog of the future," until Sean Lovelace linked to us in a post called 4 things that sorta suck. You wouldn't think that would generate a lot of clicks, but darn if it didn't. Thanks! I'm also getting into the persona of "1 thing that sorta sucks." I think there are real possibilities there.

Once we got over ourselves, we looked at the rest of the site. Let's see: There's painter Gerhard Richter talking about painting and writing; Nabakov on his loathing of collaboration; and a Q&A that served as an introduction for me to writer Matthew Simmons.  And those were just the posts that were proximal to 4 things that sorta suck. Cool.

For example, here's Richter: “Talk about painting: there’s no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can’t be said but are always the most important.”  Talk about 1 thing that sorta sucks -- we like to write about painting!

So, yeah, we bookmarked it; heck, we'd be fools not to.