Archiving Is The New Folk Art:
From the moment we used the “save as” command when composing electronic documents, our archival impulses began. “Save as” is a command that implies replication; and replication requires more complex archival considerations: where do I store the copy? Where is the original saved? What is the relationship between the two? Do I archive them both or do I delete the original?
I spend much more time acquiring, cataloging and archiving my artifacts these days than I do actually engaging with them. The ways in which culture is distributed and archived has become profoundly more intriguing than the cultural artifact itself. What we’ve experienced is a inversion of consumption, one in which we’ve come to engage in a more profound way with the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring; we’ve come to prefer the bottles to the wine.