A Frank Interview With Ashok Karra

I finally got a chance to interview Ashok Karra this week; I linked to his blog last week, and told you to read it, and that I would interview him, and contrary to my typical lackadaisical attitude about following up on posts (which is something I’m working on, I swear), I actually did it this time! We talked about the art department, about his blog, and about the difficulties he’s experienced with establishing a successful blog (he gets 20,000 site visits a month; for comparison, I think we get like, 12). Because the conversation was long, meandering, honest, productive and fascinating, the interview begins somewhere in the middle, and he’s agreed to do a follow up interview next week. And so:

WJ: But it’s your contention that visual art at UD is alive and well?

AK: Absolutely. Julie Richey, you know, her mosaics are up in the Cap Bar. Her biggest project is at the international wing at DFW.

Where does Julie Richey work?

She’s in the area.

Oh, she’s a graduate?

Yes.

So a lot of graduates are doing things in the area.       

Yes! In fact one of them was involved in some sort of little commune, I don’t remember her name. She was interviewed on NPR, she was in charge of this place in Dallas where artists would come and work for like a week and collaborate. Big people.

UD produces a lot of artists. UD does a lot of navel gazing. It isn’t clear to me that UD really cares what graduates are producing.

And you think that’s a weakness of the school?

We’ll talk about that later.

Okay; then how did you start blogging?

I started blogging in December 2005, with a more or less spam site. You know, I’m going to put up content, you’re going to advertise, Google ad-sense, that sort of thing. I didn’t care about the money, I just wanted to write. My first project was going through Shakespeare’s sonnets one by one and analyzing them. The main impulse was that I was getting a lot of things in class that could translate into short lectures, short projects, get people to read better books.

That’s the interesting thing to me about your blog; it seems unusual that your blog is a presentation of your thoughts and interpretations about what you’ve been reading. Or at least it seems non-conventional.

Yeah, what I put on my blog is my notes. Slightly more polished notes, but just notes. I’m trying to help people read, really. I’m surprised at what a success it’s been. The older posts don’t get much attention, you need to write more to be relevant online, to compete with all the content out there; but even when I had just started, I was getting 100 hits for each update; now I’m at 20,000 visitors a month, which I take as evidence that there’s a demand for this stuff.

Do you think that’s a limitation of the blog as a publishing platform? That is, because nobody reads the old content, do you feel less of a compulsion to be careful about what you do publish?

Every minute, every second, some ridiculous number of new blogs go up; something like sixty. You’re always up against new content. And you’re competing for a very specific audience that may not be growing. As someone who publishes , to get the attention of people on the internet, you need quantity more than quality. And for every story you hear about someone achieving success with their blog, there are hundreds that burn out. If you had asked me five years ago how long this was going to take, would have said maybe three years at most.

Is volume of content something you can train yourself to do?

You can, and in very cynical ways the internet encourages you to do that. For those of us who aim for something a little higher, there’s something to be said for being forced to publish sooner than we’d like. It means we’ll be making more drafts of things, even if those drafts are more public. We’re revising our ideas. We’re sharing more links, we’re bringing more attention to other less well known artists that are out there. And we’re being more thoughtful at the same time.

Do you think the comments section, which in general has a pretty bad reputation, has a place in the process you just described? Do comments make you a better writer?

They give me a thicker skin. I have a community now that is responsive and gives me great feedback. They’ve been following me for a long time, they can fill in the gaps in my reasoning, and they’re friendly. With me and with each other. Most of the viciousness I get come from would-be intellectuals who encounter the blog for the first time and immediately feel the need to show me up.

What you just said seems like a version of the notion that anonymity on the internet allows people to indulge antisocial behaviors that are otherwise unacceptable. That’s always struck me the wrong way; I find that text based communication deprives me of crucial keys for evaluating a conversation, and I usually wind up being more reserved. So based on your experience, do you think that the anonymity of the internet influences people’s online behavior or not?

You’re right that it’s not exactly clear how anonymity influences behavior. What is clear is that there’s a lot of hostility on the net. And forcing users to…not forcing users, but more civil environments are created when users have to come clean about their identity. That doesn’t mean that you’re wrong. What it means that better users are empowered. There are incentives in the system now. You can be seen as social and graceful. And once you achieve a certain level of popularity, there’s some social capital there.

There’s a man, Theodore Dalrymple, who accused academics of being especially hostile on the internet. He said they would put things in comments and e-mails they would never put in letters. There’s this pride in the academy of being a big fish in a small pond which is destroyed by the internet. You can’t really maintain any control, especially in the face of something like RateMyProfessors. So if there’s anyone who’s going to complain about the internet, it will be the academics, it will be faculty. But administrators too, because they have a brand to protect. And that brings our conversation full circle, because if we’re wondering about the arts at UD, and you know, if we know that we have a very contemporary art program and a very conservative student base, how much can you really promote the arts? That isn’t to say that the art program is treated badly or the students are treated badly, but there is a conflict. Because you know, if you look at a piece of art and take it seriously, you’re going to have to invest in creating a lot of criticism. A lot of reviews. There’s not much of an incentive to do that, everyone has other things to do. There’s an incentive to host studios, and to host shows in the gallery, but not to really go “all out” for art.

But don’t you think that’s a more general problem about the University’s support for alumni? Everyone complains about career services.

I don’t think anyone really has any ideological agendas. There’s just a confluence of factors. There’s the general makeup of the student body; there’s the contemporary style of the Art department. I think all of that leads to the arts being kind of downplayed at UD. It’s really strange at a university where we have a bunch of English majors who will devote a whole semester to the canon of one poet, a bunch of amateur musicians, we have a lot of people reading these difficult philosophical texts, and yet we’re not more artsy.

Right, and that leads to a more general question about the Arts at UD. But I feel like I should save that for another interview. Agreed?

Sure thing. I know that discussion is going to center more about where we are as a school than on any particular artist or their work. There’s something about the way we approach knowledge here which should lend itself to new ideas, but doesn’t.

As you can see, there’s still a lot more ground to cover. I hope to have the second interview up either late this week or early next.