Also, about ten nights back, I spent some hours browsing beyond my customary blog/web route. I went further than intended and became quite lost in the myriad gorgeous mini-worlds that the internet sustains. I remember, a decade or more ago, when online content was generally ugly; now there is so much that is genuinely beautiful - I wasn't overwhelmed so much by quantity as by quality.
The experience was akin to shopping but even though I was naturally selective I didn't exactly choose or buy anything, and was thoroughly sated. It's not new to recognise that the image is the commodity (rather than the object) - but more and more I sense that the image replaces the object, and that contemporary marketing/product presentation (and proliferation) has the potential to defeat itself, when objects/products are so cleverly and potently contextualized that they can be absorbed and possessed and experienced thoroughly in this alternate realm, such that their tangible existence in RL is (perversely) less vivid and becomes obsolete. An argument, anyway.
And although my average pictures of some very abundant banksias, encountered on the one street in Brunswick yesterday, would seem to suggest that the opposite will always be true - ie. that the image cannot possibly replace the thing and the real experience of being brought to a halt by bright laden trees is more than the camera can capture (and it was, and there was a particularly lovely tree with pink flowers that first made me take note, which I wish I'd had the wits to photograph) - I could also argue that being presented with such a picture allows you to build freely upon the image and imagine a kind of sublimeness and infinity that can be difficult to grasp or feel in the present/presence.
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