So I was sitting at my desk at Casa Zimbabwe last Monday night, thinking about what to write this column about, sipping alternately from an old jam jar full of ginger tea and a small shot glass of Bombay Sapphire, when I received a Facebook message from Theresa, one of my best friends and smartest person I know. It was a link to an idea.

I've spent the last two months carefully nurturing an argument in your collective brain; I've planted the seed, watered it and sprinkled plant food upon it. I've tended it, cooed it and kept it in just the right amount of sunlight. It'll be mature in a few more weeks, but it's sprouting quite nicely at the moment. I've been (hopefully) massaging your definition of art and helping you all to look at mundane things in a slightly different way.

The link that Theresa sent me was a combat boot stomping on my secret garden. It was a battle cry, not for the acceptance of the Internet as a legitimate platform of unique and innovative artistic endeavors but the absolute rejection of it as such. A quote: "If the Internet becomes one of your main sources of artistic nourishment, whether as a curator or a creator, you will starve some of the most pure and vital parts of yourself."

This fascinated me. I try to understand most things in terms of what they actually are (versus what I want them to be) and how they can actually be used (versus what I want them to be used for). It's a rather clean world view, and it helps me control my value judgments. So I never thought to think about this whole Internet-as-new-artistic-landscape business as good or bad for art. It's something new and interesting and full of potential uses. No moral judgment.

The link itself was to a Tumblr page (kungfugrippe.com), which itself was quoting another Tumblr page (this is common for Tumblr pages, I soon discovered), which I believed referenced a third Tumblr page in which the above quote was first written.

It was written as a response (surprised?) to a fourth Tumblr page, in which someone was defending himself against accusations of not giving credit to the Tumblr page he found something cool on. The author, screen name "Theremina," was exploring the distinction between creating and curating art online. She wrote: "Make something merely for the sake of making it. Make without any thought to an audience. Make without any anticipation of validation or gratification from an outside source. Make something beautiful by yourself, for yourself, and then, for fuck's sake, don't blog about it." She was decrying the endless "recycling" of art between blogs and constant passing back-and-forth of the same works without anyone ever creating something new.

She concluded by saying that the process of creating is a self-contained beauty, regardless (or in spite) of the intent for the final product. She suggested that this has been largely forgotten among the online art community, which is focused almost entirely on the distribution and the obsessive taking-credit-for of art.

I interpreted this as an implicit claim that distributing a work of art inherently detracts from the product by letting others into your process.

Touche, Miss Theremina-I've never thought about art as an independent entity. I'm all for nebulous, commutative creativity. I think it's art of a higher order, serving a community in the way art serves an individual. But it's interesting to think about how, maybe, too much sharing of the process can stifle something in the individuals who share it. Food for thought.