Over at our art site, Art NYC, Marshall sponder has been reviewing and interviewing the artist Joe Coleman. Here are some extracts :

Coleman mentioned he does what he does because he has to - people can call it all kinds of things, he does not care, he still feels he does what he has to, and he has mentioned he did some crazy things as he had feelings he had to express. One of those “crazy” thing in was working on a corpse in Budapest, under the supervision of a doctor, to look for the soul in the corpse. He did not find the soul. Joe also talked about his movies and performances as being outreach work (and having done some crazy things on screen as well) while his paintings are more private, something you must enter into. …

I asked a question near the end of the talk, one that I also asked Amy Crehore, when I interviewed her, about how the Internet has influenced Joe Coleman’s art. I asked the one question he probably had not been asked before - most of the other stuff he talked about today you could have found in someone else’s write up if you searched on it. His answer: he is not affected much by the internet - it’s not part of his process (at this time). He does wonder if some of his work shows up on EBay, but he does not seek to use the internet, in a more active role. …

I don’t think Joe Coleman is alone in this, as many artists have not yet realized the potential of the internet has unlocked and that everything has changed in the last 5-10 years.

It’s almost as if Joe Coleman is operating in a world where the Internet does not exist - even though he has a website (which loads very slowly, by the way). Tina Shafer, a well known songwriter who I took an Art of Living course along with earlier this year, and many of the well known (in their own circles) songwriters had next to no internet visibility - nor any understanding of how much they could have had.

Fortunately for Coleman, he creates enough controversy to get written quite a bit - and that serves as his promotion. A search on Joe Coleman in Google produces 217,000 results. … That’s a lot of pages, the man is famous. Still, he left a lot on the table with the internet. Yet, at the end of the day, the internet is just a means to an end and it does not look like Joe needs any promotion - he’s already famous.

Read the whole two-part interview and review.