[lbo-talk] spam poetry

Gar Lipow gar.lipow at gmail.com
Mon Mar 7 15:54:41 PST 2011


On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> Now I haven't read the spam that Doug & Catherine are  referring to, and I
> probably won't. I seldom read anything now unless there is a pressing need
> to: I read too slowly and painfully. But if it is a consciously constructed
> text, it has as much "right" to be called "art" as Lear or Dante's Comedy.
>

One of the points of the joke is that it is almost certainly computer generated word salad (constrained to certain rules) wrapped around an inserted commercial message. The word salad by looking "random" and "human" gets past spam filters better than purely human generated spam which has more of a tendency to fall into detectable patterns.

That this was mostly computer generated was one of the reason's Doug was intending to be funny in asking if it was art, and one of the reasons I was intending to be funny by suggesting that it was "found art" and that since Doug was the person who "found" it (identified it as art) he was the artist.

(When I was in first grade, my class was taken to an abstract art exhibit that including a display of "found" art. The guide explained to us that an old board that had weather into attractive patterns and had been framed on hung on the wall was found art, and the artistic act was the artist spotting the board, seeing it as art, and selecting it to frame and present to the world as art. Probably because it was the first time I was exposed to the idea of deciding what was art and what was not, that definition stuck with me.)
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