March 2004, 158 posts, 4598 lines
I wasn't sure if you were surveying about all solicitations or just art auctions. obviously there's a difference. thanks for your thanks. I hope my words prove helpful. Good luck with your projects!
B
Hi,
I'm a couple of weeks late, and I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I feel compelled to comment on how surprised I've been to encounter such hostility about Prisoner's Inventions. I loved it. It was one of the most interesting art projects I've come across in a long time, perhaps because it wasn't set up originally as an art project. I was delighted that Whitewalls was able to publish it so handsomely, and that it piqued the curiosity of so many folks in the general public and media, folks who usually don't give a damn about what most artists, whitewalls or temporary services are doing. I didn't find it clinical, but perhaps that is because I went to the event at Quimby's where TS explained the piece, demonstrated recreations of some of the inventions, after which some hilarious actor read excerpts. Furthermore, I understand and respect why Marc hasn't delved into Angelo's criminal record. I was curious too, for about ten seconds, before I realized that it doesn't really matter in this context. The project, the correspondence, is just about what prisoner's invent, how creative they are with extremely limited materials and the extent to which the life we take for granted is unavailable to people in prison. Seems pretty straightforward to me. And not exploitative at all. Not knowing Angelo's crime removes the potential for stereotype and stigma that could cloud the work.
Public funding problems? I can sure think of lots of other examples of horrendous waste of public funds than the paltry amount that Whitewalls receives. Please save your caps lock for tirades about Haliburton or city dump trucks. Or privatizing prisons and dismantling programs for rehabilitation. Although I suspect that very little public funds were actually used for this project, I think it is an excellent use of public funds.
Lastly, and again entering late into this conversation, self-awareness and consciousness do not mean the same thing. You are conscious, as evident in the email post. But if you were self-aware, at least in this context, you wouldn't have written what you did, using the tone you used.
Ah, Sunday nights!
regards, Barbara K.
As chair or committee member of numerous benefits that host art auction, let me add to Barbara's comments.
First, it is nice to hear some support for art auctions. They are the primary or secondary method of fund raising for many organizations and without them many things we consider essential would not be possible.
Still they are problematic. The people running the auctions are very conscious of this - perhaps more so than the artists. There is nothing worse than being unable to sell a piece from an established artist or one that you love. The reasons it happens are varied; the crowds not rich enough, the works difficult, it's a B piece, etc. But it doesn't matter - it's the benefit committee's worst nightmare.
Next, every organization would love to invite all contributing artists. It seems fair and they tend to be good party guests, but it's not possible. The cost per guest runs 75-200 dollars. And since seating is generally limited, you can add lost revenue to that. And then don't forget about the galleries. They are giving something away too. So do the math and you can see that that is a huge amount of money - as much or more than the event makes.
What I like to do instead is have patrons sponsor artists to the event. I bet we have 20 sponsored artists coming to the SCA benefit on Saturday. The way this works is you suggest to anyone buying a table that they sponsor an artist who is then seated at that table. The organization keeps a list of artists they want sponsored and helps with the matching. Not all organizations do this but I generally recommend it.
Finally, what I am concerned with is the increasing number of art auctions. Artists get tired of being asked to donate but also collectors get tired of being asked to buy. I mean how many mismatched Marcel Dzamas does one person need?! You may or may not appreciate that example, but the point should not be lost. Newer organizations considering art auctions need to realize that they are cannibalizing the pool of donating patrons as much as they are they are cannibalizing the pool of donating artists.
Curt
Curt and Barbara,
You bring up good points, thank you for the posts.
I do think the lavish nature of the benefit is a sad cultural phenomena. There was a summit on world hunger and the dinners cost $200 a plate.
My larger issue is the desire for financial disclosure. Mission statements, smission smatements, I want to know the salaries, the budgets, the expenses.
There are good charities and organizations that really need money, they are on the brink of collapse. There are fat cat organizations that constantly gain in wealth and use that money to fund their quest for more money. And when I hear about a benefit, I don't know which category the organization falls under.
The Salvation Army received the largest private donation in the history of charitable organizations. The guy is still out there ringing the bell. Quit it with the damn bell, and let another organization have that spot on the sidewalk. And now that SA has all that money, what do they do next? Have they set new goals as to how they can help more people? Create nicer facilities, provide free counseling to the people they help? Or does everything stay exactly the same for the people who need help? Have they looked at hungry and homeless demographics and made a commitment to changing those numbers, or did all the internal staff just get a raise, and the chairman a huge bonus?
I don't have the answer to that, but those are my questions. And I don't mean to pick on CAC, because they are very nice and friendly people, and they seem like a good group, but I would like to know the size of the Sara Lee contribution, and where that money will go. At what point, in their financial plan, do they lower the membership fees for artists (it's currently $50 a year), or is that a number that will never change, regardless of their finances?
Kathryn
OG's I had said goodbye to the topic, until...
BK: re: tolerance The total lack of introspection is mystifying. As artists and supporters of the arts we are very familiar with leniency in conduct. In fact, membership to the club is free as long as you go with the flow. The history is ridden with alcoholics, drug abusers, or both, spouse abusers, misogynists, frauds (pick your specialty), and ego-maniacs, to mention only a few vices. But if they can produce something that is considered important or worthwhile also, then we all let it slide. Been happening since before the Medici's.
I see this book of inventions as being fairly interesting in content. The capacity for creativity, necessity as the mother of invention; both are important tenets that go largely without thinking.
It is irresponsible in this case, however, to completely ignore the entire circumstance of its inception. Some are clearly able to do so. I would be so much more interested to read about inmates that spent their time getting a high school/bachelors degree, then went back into their communities and started art programs ( or got their lives on track in any way). Otherwise I can just see you all saying, "oh, look at what the little inmates do while they are locked down for huge chunks of their life, possibly for reasons no one would agree with if any one actually took the time to look a little deeper into this important subject". In this sense, it was not the prisoner that is being exploited, but instead it is "art" and the audience that is being taken. Maybe I can't call it exploitation since everyone is so willing and easily fooled. What you are enjoying, Ms. Koenen, when you are tickled by funny actors portraying people who are sleeping in a cement and steel box right now, is called escapism. Making the decision to not think about what is obviously the entire impetus of the Inventions book itself.
This seems very close to the twisted yet predictable excitement over an auction of Gacy's clown self-portrait, and I view the general interest in this book as being the same. Again, Gacy wasn't exploited here, but art was. If anyone read my review in Gravy of Henry Darger's show at Carl Hammer this will sound familiar.
I think there can be great value for all involved when working with people who are incarcerated. I have mentioned The Beat Within a half dozen times by now. Most people know or have a friend that did a stretch at one time or another. However, this situation requires a different protocol and not identifying that is a mistake.
re: use of funds Comparing the whitewalls budget to Haliburton is ridiculous. Just because it is not on the same scale doesn't mean it isn't the same issue. The point of bringing up the public nature of a not-for-profit was really just to illustrate the irony of this particular publication, detailing the activities of persons incarcerated and cared for by public money, being aided or encouraged or promoted (to any degree) by a group that is also afforded public capital/special permissions. That's all. Just made me laugh. I am not trying to impugn the character of those involved with the publication, WW has been around for longer than most people in OG, myself included, and respect is due.
re: my tone Is awareness based on who agrees with what you are saying? That could lead to mass unconsciousness.
If nothing else, I ask that you please understand that my views are not in opposition to the inmate, or the organizations involved in the publication (maybe a little bit), but to the complacency and mindlessness of the audience. Perhaps there is little depth in modern art because there is little depth in the viewing audience.
Oh Adam,
Angelo knew he was making material that would be displayed in a museum, and that would be printed in a book. By someone who prints books by artists. he may not think of this work as his primary art, but, if it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck... he knew he was writing text, he knew he was drawing pictures. It was not art-ified in error.
First, it takes a lot of guts to slander the wide bredth of audience for art, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say there isn't a fact or statistic, or even a philosophy in the world you could use to back that claim.
Also, you may find it interesting that many people find out about art, and many people come to art, and that....gasp...not just the art world views art. Some of the people who have bought the book have been defense lawyers, prisoners' rights advocates, basment tinkerers (sp?), people with relatives in jail (who have written they are going to try and sneak the book into jail...), and others who know much more about the ethics of working with the incarcerated than you. They aren't being hoodwinked out of a lack of depth. They may not even know it is art. But many do. They also know the topic. They also just plain like the drawings. (I know these things because, for some reason, people who buy books from ww insist on usually writing notes as well.)
But why is it exploitive of art to enjoy one project, because the maker happens to be in jail, and not when the enjoyment is based in the "personal vision" (whatever the hell that is) of the maker ?
A review of your emails shows you keep throwing around this term exploitive in a variety of manners, with little to know consistency, shifting the meaning and angle so as not to have to really explain what you are saying.
Boy, I hope at some point you guys get tired of arguing about that book. Let's talk about something new:
Have y'all seen the Coterie? The art criticism rag put together by Gregg Perkins, Lorelei Stewart, Sarah Conaway and Terence Hannum? The newspaper that has Michael Workman threatening lawsuits? It's the hottest slab of opinion since FGA.
Many kudos to Perkins, Stewart et al. For a first issue, it's pretty damn good. And it's dense. There's lots to read, lots of opinion. Not many images and no fashion ads, if you can believe it. Perhaps a bit too many top ten lists. I love lists and I appreciate some of these folks (Elms, Fischer, Nudd) dropping their faves on us, but I hope they don't make these lists a habit. They can be cheap and convenient filler. And even if you give full disclosure, I think it's uncool to mention your own projects in a top ten list. I know Marc once claimed in this forum that there are no rules, but when you mention your own project in a best-of list, you do not have any critical distance. But that's just me. I could (may, probably am) be wrong. And anyway, I'm just nitpicking. Overall, I think they did a great job.
I do hope they keep the mean and nasty. Oh the joys of negative criticism! Since Artforum, Frieze and Art in America have completely sanitized their reviews into either dreadfully boring descriptions or shameless boosterism, Coterie's embrace of "criticism" i.e. "The act of criticizing, especially adversely" (Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language) is a refreshing change. Michelle Grabner thoughtfully picks apart Mark Manders, and Sarah Conaway, WOW, drops some bombs! It's delicious, like an awakening of Pedro's ghost. We need more of this stuff. Shame on you Artforum, et al. Hooray for Coterie. I look forward to issue 2.
Cheers, Scott
What's the story with bridge wanting to sue coterie?
Workman threatened Terence Hannum with a libel lawsuit when Terence was dropping off a stack of issues at 1R....I won't give anymore away. You'll have to read it.
At 10:19 AM 3/3/04 -0600, you wrote:
Scott and all others:
Not to worry that we'll be overwhelming Coterie readers with top-ten lists. It was just an easy, nice way to get a lot of people involved in the first issue. Too, there is something to looking backward when you first start a venture.
Thanks for bringing up the topic to the othergroup. For those of you haven't seen it, you can find it free at area galleries, museum bookstores and for now probably mostly at wicker park coffee shops, bars and stores.
One other thing, we're hoping to get people together saturday night at innjoy (on Division, near Oakley) later in the evening, after 10 for drinks (on you, not us), copies of the newspaper and a bit of celebration. Come and check it out.
Lorelei
>that has Michael Workman threatening lawsuits? It's the hottest slab of opinion since FGA.
That's hilarious. Just to nip this before the rumor mill gets running full speed: Conaway's piece read so close to libel, I decided to run it past a lawyer, for my edification. I'm not filing any lawsuits. Despite any misperceptions, I'm supportive of any new publication that anybody takes the time to the print culture in this city. I think there should be much, much more.
Kind Regards,
Michael Workman Editor-in-chief, Bridge 119 N Peoria, #3D Chicago, IL 60607 Ph: 312-421-2227 Fax: 312-421-2228 www.bridgemagazine.org
Ah, the rumor mills already started. I don't even want to write what I heard. Especially now that I know workman's suing everyone.
Curt
I didn't know coterie existed, but I agree that we can only benefit from having more discussions within our community. is this the same thing siebren has been working on the website for ages? anyway, I'm glad it's finaly out and will come out and drink to that. Somewhat related, I've been coming across a small journal alot called Perforations, which I think only operates out of Atlanta intermittantly, but some of the content is phenomenal, particularly consideing the microscopic resources of the venture. Robert Cheatham, the editor, i think is known by some for interviews with French philosophers Lyotard and Derrida, but there are also some other really informed and thoughtfull essays burried within... If Robert Cheatham sounds familiar to some of you it may be because of his work in the 1986? issue of ArtPapers on postmodernity, that was when they were still on newsprint and not yet watered down to what it is today. He is also quite an interesting artist, why more people haven't talked about him I have no idea. Anyway, it seems for my part, that there is alot to be learned from something like perforations, despite the fact they nearly went under due to a server crash. Ginger
--
Ginger Wolfe, Editor
p. 312 491 9553
e. editor at interreview.org
[http://www.interreview.org]
--
Scott pleads: "Boy, I hope at some point you guys get tired of arguing about that book."
Well, I'm tired of talking about it (I have worked to print other titles you know...) But I must admit I never tire of countering dilettantism that pretends to be criticism.
Which leads me to second Scott's "...Coterie... it's pretty damn good. And it's dense..."
Of course I wrote for it, so I don't know if I'm allowed to like it. But really Scott, "Perhaps a bit too many top ten lists. I love lists" Don't you constantly work on your own lists? Is the trick they are only good one at a time?
Yes, I'm somewhat guilty there, but I kept it out of the list proper. And just wanted Mindy to get credit for going above and beyond the call of duty. Also, didn't you once put Stan Shellaberger in a "top shows" list? Or am I mistaken?
Well, to counter it to so many others in print: negative or positive, the joy of ANY criticism at all.
Oh, and Michael, "Conaway's piece read so close to libel, I decided to run it past a lawyer, for my edification. I'm not filing any lawsuits. "
To think she even came close to libel shows your lack of time with any British tabloids. Libel: To publish false and malicious statements to have the result of bringing its subject into disrepute.
Now if instead of as printed she'd rewritten the beginning: "...IS far more interested in having his name in print than actually having something to say. A cursory reading of his writing for New City ALWAYS turns up factual errors that WOULD be corrected with a well-placed phone call, and in most cases he IS quoting verbatim from a gallery press release." then added: "... and he kidnaps small unsuspecting children in the dead of night." You probably would have had a stronger case.
And because I love quoting vaguely related Bob Nickas nuggets: "Objective journalism and petty retaliation are not entirely incompatible." a
I really like the idea of Coterie, and I understand the writers will change, but I noticed a certain attitude permeated a few of the articles. Pessimism towards society and the pomposity of authentic education lead me to believe there is a certain intellectual haughtiness the art scene needs less of. Showing disdain for the pervasiveness of media darlings, then following suit, albeit in a local publication, seems hypocritical and disingenuous; even more-so it negatively affects the rest of the article. Finally, publicly slamming individuals for wanting their name in print reduces the quality of any publication when the authors names are printed.
Chicago needs authentic criticism that isn t self-congratulatory or cynical.
I look forward to future issues with articles by the other writers, great job on the publication and I wish it well!
Anthony wrote: you constantly work on your own lists? Is the trick they are only good one at a time? Also, didn't you once put Stan Shellaberger in a "top shows" list? Or am I mistaken?
-------------- Fair enough on Anthony's first point. I do compile my own personal year-end list and do not begrudge others from doing the same. I was looking for something negative to say about Coterie to couch my boosterism (perhaps I should have said I have no idea what that Suburban piece was all about). I can't be all sweetness and light. Nothing if not critical, eh mate? And didn't I say "perhaps"? I wasn't opposed to all the lists, just maybe the amount. Ok, the lists were fine and fun. I apologize.
Point two: Sorry Anthony, you are mistaken on that one. Conaway listed Shellabarger on her top 10, not me. I did put Neff and Velez on my 2002 top ten, but for shows that occurred before the inception of Western Exhibitions, which started in December 2002. I might have blurred the line with that one, but I did give that precious "full disclosure" at the bottom of the column. But one might argue, ok, I might argue that those shows spurred the impetus of WX.
And c'mon Workman. That wasn't a rumor I was spreading. Did you not in fact threaten Terence with a lawsuit? A rumor is, to quote The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, "A piece of unverified information of uncertain origin usually spread by word of mouth." My information was verified, by the threatenee.
And by the way, Velez is quite tickled with all this lawsuit nonsense. Quoth Pedro: "I used to bash so many people, no one ever even tried to sue...I call it respect!" He also wishes for a Coterie website. Is there one in the works, Ms. Stewart?
Ms. Stewart replies, Coterie's editors are considering a possible web version but we have no concrete plans.
...It was enough just to get it in print. A web version might not be too hard to make. Maybe we'll use that format that Siebren was working on that someone mentioned earlier.
Cheers, LS
Hey everybody
I've been following the whole is-or-isnt-Chicago-great discussion, and with more interest, the prisoners inventions discussion, but couldn't think of anything to offer - not sure I've seen a substantive critique of the book yet, so I couldn't really think of a response.
In the current Artforum there's a letter from Rennie Young Miller, of the Quilters of Gee's Bend. It's a smart and informative response to Harlem Museum curator Thelma Golden's recent critique of the quilt show in Artforum's year-end review. I don't really know Golden's work, nor was her critique of the show given much space (prompting my interest in discussing the show on this list.) But quilter Rennie Miller's response rings true to me. It also made me think of the questions about Angelo's role in the Inventions book.
Rennie Miller writes about Golden-
There's also some good information per our earlier discussion about some of the details of the project, how since the exhibition they have formed a collective for purchase of materials, etc. Check it out.
From what I can see, I'm pretty interested in this and other projects Larry Rinder has done at the Whitney, projects that have been mostly bemoaned. As far as contemporary art museums go, I'd take these projects (the last biennial, gee's bend, Teresa Cha) over most I see. Perhaps if the New Whitney gets unsupportive we can woo Rinder Chicago-wards...
Kevin Hamilton UIUC
To add to Kevin's list of successful shows curated by Larry Rinder, I'd put the American Effect in my top ten list of 2003 shows. With the American Effect, Rinder proposed a totalizing paradigm (including fine art and visual culture) in a way which resisted binary logic and collapsed boundaries. At the same time, the objects in the show acknowledged our global and provincial times.
Also, one of the reasons I love Chicago is because of the art that I see here- like the Art Institute's Manet and the Sea, and the Mark Manders' shows at the Ren and AIC.
Finally, on the subject of top-ten lists, I always wonder top ten out of how many.
I finally got a copy of Coterie and have some suggestions.
This first problem though, is that there is nowhere to send them. There should be at least a published email of someone willing to be an official contact, or, better, something like a temporary hotmail account that all the involved people can access.
Sure, since nothing is anonymous, I could track down an individual contributor; for systemic things I could look up and then bulk mail all four founders and "editors". I'm far too lazy to do that, and what I want to say (like the email contact) is really a question for the publication, not any particular individual.
This is the other option. Most of the Coterie folk probably read othergroup. But . . . while I don't mind having a discussion in this relatively friendly, relatively public forum, I'd like to give Coterie the option of taking it private, lest anything I say be misinterpreted as bad publicity or pissing on the spark.
And what about the other readers? Not everyone knows about othergroup. I assume the paper is intended to be distributed beyond the circles of the contributors' personal contacts. Is the communication meant to be one-way?
Of corse, there's more, but later.
bulka
charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
questions, criticism, suggestions and submissions can be sent to coterie4art at yahoo.com. We didn't print it in the paper but I did tell Deanna Isaacs from the Reader when she interviewed me. She didn't print the email address.
On Sunday, March 7, 2004, at 02:37 PM, bulka wrote:
Lorelei Stewart Director, Gallery 400
University of Illinois at Chicago 1240 West Harrison Street (MC034) Chicago, IL 60607 312-996-6114 tel 312-355-3444 fax [http://gallery400.aa.uic.edu]
Thanks Lorelei, but
Dang. I was hoping this wouldn't happen, so I'd have an excuse to do it in public. That's what I get for trying to be polite or politic or whatever.
Who reads the yahoo address?
bulka
I liked Coterie. And I thought the party was neat.
The only comment I have about the magazine was that it says it's about Chicago, but then the top 10 lists weren't restricted to the Chicago area. So it that way there were a lot of eerie overlaps between the Artforum top 10 of 2003 lists.
It will also be interesting to see where the paper goes. As it's done quarterly, will they talk about shows from a couple months ago? What will the content be like?
I would also gently say that I encourage all art writing, and especially about Chicago. I know paper publishing is tough, but it's always key to remember that you can get a Website for $5 a month and avoid all printing and distribution costs. So if ever things fall apart, but they can still create content, they can always keep publishing and keep up the following for their work until they acquire additional funding or revenue. Websites can have good content, even when they are uploaded by an amateur non-web designer and have nothing in the way of web aesthetics.
But in the larger sense of art writing, I think writing about art exhibits, even though it is the main fodder of art magazines, is only a small part of the discussion about art and artists. Kudos to the untroubled artist, but for most of the artists I know, they struggle with economic hardships, made only more painful that it's a choice to be a second-rate employee because their art is a priority. Lots of artists have lost their funding and have had to rethink their survival as an artist. Many live troubled lives, make business plans, have mental health issues, are political activists, speak gossip, become disillusioned, drop out, sleep with fans, get screwed over by gallery owners, screw over gallery owners, decide not to have children, can't meet deadlines, drink too much, have no insurance, negotiate prices, have spouses and lovers that get jealous of the time spent making art, have moments of euphoria, get lovers they wouldn't get if they didn't have appeal of talent. There's just a whole story of the artist life that just doesn't get told. And the story of what happened during showtime gets told over and over.
The idea is to perform some analysis and criticism of the work, not to tell a story. And I think that pretty much everyone agrees there is not enough of this. As for the story of the artist's life, the image of the struggling artist has to be among the most annoying, rehashed, obese stereotypes in pop culture. Basquiat, those van Gogh movies, that Ed Harris movie, any tv show with an artist...this crap is all over the palce, it is not what needs to be proliferated and published. Everybody struggles with money, addiction, and realtionships. For the artworld to make any claim over these struggles would really confirm the stereotype that artists are all very pretentious and self-absorbed.
Speaking of which, what the hell is the point of talking about a private wedding in Coterie?
Mike Wolf
Hi everyone,
This is a non-sequiter, but: has anyone seen any good multiples lately? I'm starting a new website for selling multiples and editions, and I'm trying to assemble a large roster of top-notch work. Any input would be highly valued.
xoxo Gabe
I just opened a show with Micki Tschur's collection of (guadalupe)Madonna-vagina salt/pepper shakers, which folks seemed to like. Also, Chris Uphues did a goofy little comic book (sorta resembling the Little Prince) - but I'd imagine that you're looking more for works that wouldn't already be handled by the comic/zine realm. Anyway, it's viewable at www.kittyspit.net/dfp/exhibit.htm
Also, talk with Tony Wight at Bodybuilder. I believe he has put together two multiples exhibits, and could suggest names.
Erik b
group at othergroup.net wrote:
you wrote: Also, talk with Tony Wight at Bodybuilder. I believe he has put together two multiples exhibits, and could suggest names.
ummm, Gabe organized one of those shows.
Gabe -- check out: [http://booklyn.org/] [http://www.slopart.com/catalogsimulator.html]
And mega-dittos to Mike Wolf: enough with the whiny artist shit. Just quit making art if it's too hard. I did. It's very liberating.
Wapke Feenstra at Klein Art works
Isaac Julien at Renaissance Society
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Mike Wolf wrote:
But the question remains, "how to do so?" Way too much "critical analysis" is as dull as mashed potatoes without the gravy. Writers seem to vie for prizes for name dropping and analogical references, "the work is like {big name artist here}". I fail to see what that accomplishes except that the simile will become fact for a later writer, "and {critic name here} compares her work to {same previous big artist name here}."
Chattopadhyay's review of Lee Bontecou's work in Sculpture (March) is a case in point, presenting, interspersed with descriptions, a list of cross references to other artists and movements, invoking names like Johns, Rauschenberg, and even Picasso (and French philosophers). The essay is enlivened only with a single line from Bontecou's artist's statement.
This last (Bontecou's statement) is a lot more interesting, although also not informative in an analytical sense, opening with...
[http://www.ereleases.com/pr/2003] -bontecou.html
That is not the line quoted in the Chattopadhyay review. I think Artner (Tribune last week) and Smith (Reader two issues ago) were more honest: both resorted to interviews, a sure sign that the reviewers had no clue on how to approach Bontecou's work or what to say about it. And if we should ban artist 'life stories' then we should extend the ban to interviews.
That doesn't answer the question "how to do so?" Much more effective than the texts were the colored images of her work featured in the Trib.
I wonder if any OG people saw this show, and what the reaction is.
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004, Mike Wolf wrote:
Agreed. Yet to bring in from the artist's life whatever bears on the work to contextualize the work might help. After all, these critical essays are not about art; the best only use the art as a nominal subject.
BTW, Chattopadhyay review is on line at some horrendously long URL which will not fit in this email without breaking.. but here it is anyway:
[http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag04/march04/bontecou/bontecou.htm]
/jno
jno: "Way too much "critical analysis" is as dull as mashed potatoes without the gravy."
Watch what you say about mashed potatoes. Maybe your problem is not making them with a hint of broth, butter, and roasted garlic. Maybe even a hint of cayenne pepper. Then you don't need the gravy. You can also add some sweet potatoes to the deal. Then instead of cayenne and garlic, cinnamon and roasted pecans.
The point being potatoes, like many other things, don't need gravy. a
No here is a review worth reading...
(there is more)
/(name withheld)
Regarding the thrill of living in Chicago without gravy on your mashed potatoes, I'd recommend the University of Chicago's Critical Inquiry, Winter 2004 "The Future of Criticism- A Critical Inquiry Symposium"; and, if you like gravy, James Elkins' "What Happened to Art Criticism" distributed for Prickly Paradigm Press by the University of Chicago Press.
On Mon, 8 Mar 2004 Aeelms at aol.com wrote:
You people are _so_ contentious; but yr good cooks, though.
/jno
"Why did she decide to show this work at last, after so many years? One reason was that Bontecou,... came down with a rare blood disease... "I thought I was a goner. And then poor Val and Billy would have been left to deal with all this work."
Vogue Magazine, March 2004
It's funny, I was just reading this while Simon stands on his footstool and plays with the water in the sink. Then I checked my email and saw the post.
I have lived to see the day where Vogue was the voice of fine journalism.
On another note:
Openly discussing weakness is not whining, it is freedom. Keeping up appearances is anatomy of the zombie yuppie American.
Working as an artist is similar to working as an athlete. To constantly improve, you must push yourself until it becomes painful. And like athletes, we risk injury. For athletes it's a sprain, for us it's temporary insanity. But that's not a reason to quit. You work through it, you find your friends.
Then you get back in the ring and wrestle with the angels until they bless you.
K
I don't know if you consider this top-notch, but slopart.com is terrifically amusing.
On Monday, March 8, 2004, at 12:21 PM, Gabriel Fowler wrote:
Though I cannot pretend to know her true motives, one thought that the Lee Bontecou exhibit brings to my mind is the effect that doing the work ostensibly for oneself in virtual isolation (vs. with an eye to pleasing the art world) might have upon the work and similarly inform the nature of the criticism it receives, as Jno has pointed out.
Of course, Lee Bontecou did not come out of nowhere, exactly, having been very successful in the seventies and having taught in New York for the last thirty years; however, her choice to remove herself from the gallery system and therefore from the vissitudes of art market fashion, is intriguing in a time in which it seems that a lot of work is built precisely to ingratiate itself to the art world "machine". Although knowing the circumstances surrounding Lee B.'s production may indeed merely be "gravy", I can't help but believe that her self-inflicted isolation had a profound effect upon the work and that it would hardly be what it is had she not done this.
The critic is free to interpret the work however he/she desires. Whether or not they deserve to be published is something else. I guess I don't have a problem with the style so much as with the substance. It does get tiresome wending one's way through the endless name-dropping and opining when I'm often not sure why their opinion is more valid than mine.
I do find it fascinating when a critic is able to place an artist's work in some type of context, be it philosophical, post-structural, psycho-analytical or even personal, especially when it brings an interpretation to the work that perhaps even the artist is unaware of, but conveys through his/her work, nonetheless. Often this is how we are able to understand it within the context of ideas, of which art is a part. We can't always expect the artist to have the ultimate read on his or her own work. If so that would be boring indeed.
Katherine Drake Chial
On Mar 8, 2004, at 2:56 PM, jno wrote:
Despite the far fetched possibility of a devilish conspiracy perpetrated by mad members of a left leaning intelligentsia to bore to tears an unsuspecting public then steal its pants and quickly position themselves in the most advantageous place to gawk, jeer or otherwise hold as spectacle this publics unwitting misfortune, I would like to think that the criticism and analysis of art works is a rational and beneficial thing to culture and individual alike. I would also like to argue that criticism and analysis isn't typically found in art magazines, weekly or daily news offerings which to greater or lesser extent are confined to the development and the dispersion of blurbs, factoids and fluff. Blurbs, factoids and fluff are not inherently bad though. With enough distance and a large enough range of these materials assembled for study, incongruences can manifest that will suggest a larger frame for a given artists work or a specefic timeline. Thus making Alan Artner a useful contributer to Chicago's cultural development in about twenties years time. Or at least as useful as anyone else attempting to write meaningfully about art in a thousand words or less.
Now does Chicago have structures such as journals or publishing houses that engage in a critical or analytic dialogue in forms greater than 1000 words? Are they investigating works that are being seen and developed locally? Do these structures then offer their voice to a national or international audience with any effect? Is any of this nessasary or act as a replacement to the development of collectors who can offer stability and long term growth for artists both inside and outside of this city? All of this is up for debate. Also up for debate is the question of Coteries willingness to adopt a truly critical stance at the possible expense of distancing themselves from more casual art readers, scenesters and hangers-on. Its just a first issue, most of which is confined to factoid, blurb and fluff stuff, but to qoute Ms. Stewart from an earlier post, " It was just an easy, nice way to get a lot of people involved in the first issue. Too, there is something to looking backward when you first start a venture. " To her credit I think that this statement is honest and well composed. Until a second issue of Coterie is at hand, those of you looking for a critical look at good, great or sometimes marginalized works should visit InterReviews site. I should think that we will also continue to support Corterie as much as possible simply for the good that its potential offers us. To loose anything that requires less energy to support than it did to develop is just plain ignorant.
As for potatoes: Red Potatoes, boiled with the skin on then mashed with cream, corn, scallions a dollop or two of horseradish add salt and pepper to taste. Gravy is useless. (sorry Adam).
MT/DB
First
Anthony - I'm surprised we haven't heard from Mikos, but some of us got the Gravy joke.
Then, Kathryn wrote:
Out of context, yes, of course. But in the context of whining about the hardship of an artist's life, I have to agree with the other respondents (is it a coincidence that they are all men?). Life sucks; get over it. Or get a real job and it will still suck, but in a different way.
I am uncomfortable with the athletics/art analogy (though I use it talking to rubes). There are and have been people acknowledged as tremendous athletes or brilliant artists who have had all kinds of lives - assholes, saints, and a lot of regular folks. As for resources - everything from the gutter to silver spoons.
Who cares?
Unless it affects the performance. For an athlete it is all irrelevant; the only thing that matters is the time clock, the scorecard, the batting average.
Trying to continue the analogy - in art, even the most savage critique is a sparring match. A worthy opponent striving to get one to top performance. Or, at worst, straining the analogy, an elimination round, clearing the field for better players.
Until the artist makes it personal - exhibiting a diary or home-made sociology labeled as art. Then, commentary on a bad presentation is read as condemnation of a life or a lifestyle and we are all so polite that we shut up.
And art becomes cute, inoffensive knickknacks.
Potatoes and gravy, indeed. I miss the meat.
bulka
Now usually I'm the first to say Dave Hickey has the critical faculty of a parsnip. (To keep the metaphors in the root vegetable family.) But recently in an article my attention was brought to the following quote by him. It relates to the troubling arts/sports simile, and despite my distaste for a lot of his writing, and my suspicions of the notion of "civil society" I think this statement is pretty good.
see art as "an intermediate institution of civil society, like that of professional sports, within which issues of private desire and public virtue are negotiated and occasionally resolved. Because the art world is no more about art than the sports world is about sport. The sports world conducts an ongoing referendum on the manner in which we should cooperate and compete. The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look. And the way we should look at things--or would, if art were regarded as sports are, as a wasteful, privileged endeavor through which very serious issues are sorted out."
a
On Monday, March 8, 2004, at 11:32 PM, bulka wrote:
I didn't think Anthony was looking to trade barbs again already. Besides, the first step to quality mash is some milk or sour cream as you're mashing.
There are few exceptions to the gravy/mashed equation; with fish or steak. The other being a new one to me, but I've been trying to crack the code of Indian spices and recently made a version of mash with mint, coriander, mango powder, and chilli's. It offends almost all my Midwestern and Polish sensibilities concerning correct potato use, but it was mighty tasty. Keep in mind, gravy is usually made from the juices, the essence if you will, and may be too concentrated for certain palettes. That's as far as I am going Adam
Does anyone remember the restaurant "The Mashed Potato Club"? I confronted the chef about how they make the potatoes taste like that, and after many drinks, he relented. "We use a stick of butter for every 8 potatoes."
I recoiled in horror.
I took the little guy to Lee Bontecou today and we were just blown away. The old stuff is awesome, my son kept saying "mouth". You felt like sticking your head into the pieces just to know what it would feel like to get chewed by one of those things. But the arial things, the ones that look like abstracted dust particles, I was really overwhelmed. I got that feeling of disbelief I get when I see something amazing.
But seeing the show does answer the question of where Bontecou has been. She said she really couldn't put out a show every 2 years, and because she dropped out and had no timelines, she was totally free to work on her craft. She is a great artist, but also a master craftsman. She uses little wires to stitch it all together, and lots of the little spokes you see sticking out of things, have a damn near microscopic coil and then a soldered bulb that just adds this little, tiny, extra bit of detail. And it's awesome that she taught ceramics and then could suddenly add porcelain to her palette of materials she worked with.
This is a case where the artists' history is relevant, because the lesson for me is: this is where doing what you want, undisturbed, uncritiqued, focusing on your craft takes you. It's where it took her. It's the joy of spending time in your studio building shit that makes you happy.
The whole experience has also been extremely helpful in my own way of thinking about things. People can give me all the advice they want, but her outlook, her priorities as a mother, and the ultimate results of her life work is an answer. It's not the only answer, but it's one that could work.
And to go to Jno's quote, what does it mean to the critic, and the critic-reading audience, when the artist them self says they can't make heads or tails of the writing surrounding their work? For her work, I can honestly say that I don't need to read anything to better understand the work. I saw the work, I had strong feeling and a connection to the work that I don't feel the need to articulate. The only thing I need to do is go back there and look at it again. And based on her quote, I think she would be supportive of a viewer with that attitude. Criticism is fine, for some people, in some circumstances. But it's not the right answer for every viewer of every artist.
K
I'm opening a show of inkjet prints (not altered photos but works constructed on the computer) at Flatfilephotography on March 26th. Let me know if that interests you.
Claire Krantz
I've been following the Coterie discussions but haven't had much time to participate. A few comments about Coterie, the usefulness of criticism, and, for those who don't mind having sticky hands early in the morning, a bit on the concept of mutual masturbation and the circle jerk as it relates to arts publications. Sorry in advance for the epic length of this post.
Re: Top Ten Lists True, this kind of short-format criticism is much easier to write than long intensive reviews. It would have probably taken me 10 times longer to write a serious essay on one project as it did to write short blurbs about ten different things. I enjoyed that Terrence Hannum complains about "...'top ten' lists currently disguising themselves as criticism" - but still writes a top ten list anyway!! With no explication about his choices either! That was funny. For my own part, I made a point to list website URLs wherever possible with my top 10 in Coterie. Lorelei Stewart and Lisa Williamson did this too. The hope being that if what I wrote made anything on my list sound interesting, readers would have a way to learn more. This is a way to make even the shortest bits of critical writing potentially useful to people who aren't already in the know (or even those who are).
Re: private weddings in public publications, mutual masturbation, and circle jerks
Clearly there is a kind of unspoken phobia in Chicago among artists, exhibition spaces, and curators that you if organize something and it isn't written about or acknowledged in print, it will pass off into the dark cob-web filled forgotten corners of local history and no one will ever know it happened soon after it is over. Because Coterie is published by people who either exhibit their work, organize exhibits, or both, it seems to both suffer from this phobia, while also trying to conquer it. To me, that is kind of fun.
Various OG comments seem to be dancing around the issue of the insider nature of a fair amount of what is in Coterie. Certainly Mike's comments about a wedding reception being listed on a Top Ten list speak to this. Right now, with just one issue out - it strikes me that Coterie inhabits a space somewhere in between Chicago publications like FGA or Gravy, and what New Art Examiner was around the time of its demise, while sharing a bunch of the problems of all.
To me, FGA and Gravy were essentially local art 'zines with the expected qualities that come with this kind of informality: free distribution in local venues (but also with Web presence), sloppy (or if you want to be more generous: 'casual') writing style, indifference to the formalities of spell-checking and grammar, occasional uses of publishing as a transparent attempt to prop up friends' work or exercise petty grudges, simple straightforward design, etc.). None of these qualities kept me from reading these things, but I think they did tend to - for me - lessen their use value as critical or historical records, or even as vehicles for writings that might be persuasive enough to change my opinion on much of anything. The writings sometimes caused an emotional reaction, gave me something to think or talk about for a day or so, and then generally faded from memory and function. If anything I was a part of was reviewed in FGA or Gravy, I probably wouldn't bother to cite it on my CV because I don't think much of the writing would be of long-term use to anyone. If I didn't see a show that was written about in those publications, I probably had little use for the reviews. They were often minimally descriptive or informative.
For me, New Art Examiner, in its last few years, often read like a 'zine but with the design, print job, longer pieces of writing, and circulation numbers of the nationally (and perhaps internationally) distributed magazine that it was. Paraphrasing Sara Conway's criticisms of Workman's writings in New City, factual errors in writings about local work in NAE that could have easily been resolved with a phone call, were quite abundant. To me, the magazine often - one would hope not deliberately - looked like a transparent exchange of favors. It became common to see an article by one writer, and then that same writer's artwork reviewed (or otherwise mentioned) elsewhere in the same issue - sometimes written about by a person that was closely involved with the artist on some other project. Living in this town and knowing a lot of the players, this kind of thing became an annoying distraction when reading NAE. To me, it seriously compromised the integrity of the magazine - which I felt was dressed up to look like serious journalism or criticism, but often just came off looking like 'zine writing printed on better paper. Of course not everything printed in NAE had these problems, but the prevalence of the circle jerk insider writings, when mixed amongst more serious journalism and criticism, gave the mag a schizophrenic quality.
So with a circulation of 1,500, Coterie seems somewhere in the middle. The mutual masturbation sub-theme that I found annoying in NAE, is widely present in Coterie - again, perhaps not deliberately but it sure makes the thing look suspicious to those in the know. Examples of probably unknowing mutual-congratulating are all over Coterie. Michelle Grabner writes a review. Elsewhere, a review of a show at Suburban - which she co-runs - appears. Lorelei co-publishes Coterie and directs Gallery 400; elsewhere props are given to numerous things that happened at G400. Lisa Williamson, a contributing writer for Coterie, gives props to a show co-curated by Kristen VanDeventer. Elsewhere, a show co-curated by Lisa Williamson is among the items on Kristen VanDeventer's top ten list. Not to exclude myself, I have shown at Gallery 400 in the past and I listed a recent show at G400 on my top ten list. To me that didn't feel like a conflict of interest (I genuinely liked the show I listed) but to anyone who knew that I showed there, it could easily look like I was kissing ass. POST had a show at Gallery 400 at the time of Coterie's publication. I mentioned one of the projects from POST on my top ten (POST is co-organized by Lisa Williamson - who again, both wrote for Coterie and is praised for her work elsewhere in the same issue). And elsewhere Paul Nudd cites Prisoners' Inventions - a book I worked on, on his top 10. Anthony Elms also contributes writing for Coterie and is likewise honored by this mention of the PI book since he is the editor of White Walls - PI's publisher. I could bore the shit out of everyone and go on and on about examples of this kind of thing in Coterie. It's all over the place. Lorelei states in her intro that she directs G400 - but still this doesn't quite address this phenomena enough for me, as it occurs throughout the entire publication.
So - a couple thoughts about this. The obvious one is that it is quite clear that Coterie lacks the editorial standards of say... the New York Times - or even Frieze. Unless this has changed recently, people who write for Frieze cannot write about venues that they have worked with. Temporary Services once invited Carol Jackson to do a project in our old office space around the time that she wanted to write a review of one of our shows for Frieze. In order to stay on Frieze's good side and keep writing for them, she made the decision to pass on doing a project with us.
That Coterie is not the New York Times or Frieze is no big deal to me. What I think is missing however, is an open and honest discussion about all of these overlaps. Terrence uses the word "overlap" in his essay "Different Route" in Coterie and it seemed like he was gonna divulge the predicament we have, but he didn't quite go there. In a time when lots of people simultaneously make art, write, curate, and publish, these overlaps are inevitable. I don't think it is impossible to write a good instructive essay about someone you have worked with in some capacity, or to direct an exhibition space and then also publish something which may feature writing about something shown in that space. But I don't think simply saying "Full disclosure" is an adequate way of acknowledging that this situation exists or that this kind phenomena is prevalent. I feel a bit guilty that my own contributions to Coterie share some of these problems without also including this longer analysis, but of course, I was invited to write a top 10, not a diagnosis - and since it was the first issue, I had no idea what the rest of the issue would be like.
Certainly I didn't consult with any of the other writers in Coterie when I wrote my Top Ten of 2003 to see what they were gonna write. I just wrote about the things that stuck out in my memory. I assume that the other writers didn't conspire with each other either. But still, there is this printed result which often looks like a big local circle jerk. So then the question becomes, who is Coterie for? Is it mainly for the people who write about each other's work and those who know and love them? How much are the info and opinions in Coterie intended to be of interest or concern to a broader audience? If this is just to stimulate some local dialogue and debate, it seems like things are off to a good start; but if there is an interest in the potential for Coterie to have a broader reach - or perhaps reach audiences that care about art but are unfamiliar with the artists and venues described, I think it has a long way to go.
Marc
P.S. Please don't sue me.
Mike Wolf wrote:
Marc , your analysis is thoughtful and cogent. You guys don't know me from a hole in the ground and I'm sure my opinion counts for little here, (and perhaps I'm being obtuse.) However, the publication's very title suggests that it's mission is to do just exactly what he criticizes it for above. After all, Merriam - Webster cites the definition of coterie below as:
Entry Word: coterie Function: noun Synonyms: clique, cabal, camarilla, camp, circle, clan, in-group, mafia, mob, ring K
Katherine Chial wrote: "However, the publication's very title suggests that it's mission is to do just exactly what he criticizes it for above. After all, Merriam - Webster cites the definition of coterie below as: Times Entry Word: coterie Function: noun Synonyms: clique, cabal, camarilla, camp, circle, clan, in-group, mafia, mob, ring "
Katherin, You are absolutely correct that I failed acknowledge the very thing that probably should have been most obvious! My American Heritage dictionary defines Coterie as "A small, often select group of persons who associate with one another frequently."
I hope it was at somewhat implicit in my post (explicit in many other OG posts) that I think that to write and make art for just a small, often select group of persons who associate with one another frequently is too easy - or at least, that I find it personally unsatisfying and boring. Keeping things within a clique makes everything easier - less explanation and context is required. You can include in jokes and short hand ("The Ren" etc.) and many readers will know what you are talking about. But I think art and criticism can do more and be for more people. I realize that contributing a top ten list - where I didn't really have the space to both describe something too fully AND offer some insights about it - probably doesn't help too much in this regard. But I think, in spite of its name, that the idea of a select audience is probably inadequate to a lot of the other people who published and contributed to Coterie - and certainly to many of the artists whose work is written about. Who honestly wants their work to be relevant to just a small often select group of people?
Having more critical dialogue within a small select group is fine. The Chicago art world could definitely benefit from that. But making art and writing that can be meaningful to a larger and more diverse range of people is to me, a much more compelling (and harder) goal. Marc
I'd also add to what I just wrote that, while I have no major regrets, I think I would have taken a slightly different approach to my writing had I known the publication would have a circulation of 1,500. I never asked, but my assumption was that the print run would be much smaller. 1,500 readers is a pretty big coterie! I was thinking more in terms of a 250 person coterie.
Marc
On Wed, 10 Mar 2004, Marc Fischer wrote:
Some taken out of context above.. but I really appreciate Marc's (what he calls, 'verbose') overview. A post like that makes history, it will contextualize the discussion so that the future can make sense of our currrent efforts. And he rightdully addresses the 'in-group' issues inherent in art publications.
So, is there an 'editorial policy'? Or will the title 'Coterie' suffice to define it as something somewhat less than a clique?
/jno
On Tue, 9 Mar 2004, Kathryn Born wrote:
Sans descriptions, sans isms, sans other artists, sans periods. I have the same reaction as Kathryn's Simon, "Mouth, Eye, Yes."
True in literature is the fact that a classic is recognized in its own time. And it doesn't matter much if anyone 'understands' it.
I cant tell an inning from a quarter, but part of what Elms quoted struck me, "The art world conducts an ongoing referendum on how things should look." I'll vote for that.
/jno
Yeah, nice goddamn post Marc! You can be so sharp and pointed, but still have a good balanced view of things. I bitch about art writing, but yours is very good. It's very spirited, you don't sugar-coat anything, but you're not trying to reduce anyone to tears, either.
And to the Coterie folks, I would say that although you are getting some tough feedback, you are lucky to get this much of it. I work at a company that makes an MP3 player, and moderate the forums there. At first I found all the knocks about our product heartwrenching, but 2 years later I have emerged with a better sense of EVERYTHING surrounding those users, their priorities, how they think, what they need from us. We live in an era of unprecedented instant feedback. People pay big bucks to get focus groups just for the honor of receiving this kind of beating.
It is, as the hip hops say, all good.
K
This is an article that came to me at work, but I think it's really fascinating.
By day, I'm very involved with the whole discussion about music and copyright, and spent months doing research on this issue. I have strong feelings that I won't get into, but I will say one thing for sure, my artist friends. ART IS NEXT. This is going to happen to us, for better or worse, in less than 10 years. Even for those of us who don't work digitally, this borrow/steal phenomena I believe will spread throughout the whole culture.
The was a post a while back about technology and commoditizing and dehumanizing art. None of that will happen, it's distopian. But this... no one saw this coming.
The Artists Formerly Known As Fans By Eliot Van Buskirk Senior editor (4/12/02)
Christina Aguilera and The Strokes are probably the least likely collaborators you could find in today's music world. Christina dishes out the shiny bubblegum pop, while the Strokes mine rock's past to create tunes that sound like they were recorded 20 years ago. But while Aguilera and The Strokes will probably never share a stage or a studio, you can hear them perform together, thanks to the heady mix of the Internet, computers, and clever pranksters with too much time on their hands. In fact, Christina and The Strokes play together perfectly, in total sync--she's singing "Genie in the Bottle" while they back her with "Hard to Explain"--on a bootleg remix by an entity who calls himself The Freelance Hellraiser. Just search for Aguilera Strokes on KaZaa or Google, and you'll see what I mean (or enter A Stroke of Genius, the absolutely perfect title). If the labels need further proof of who now holds the reins of the music industry, this should probably seal the deal: The Artists Formerly Known As Fans.
What is this six-stringed object? It's no accident that these remixes coincide with the fact that the Guitar Center, which sells more guitars, amps, drums, keyboards, and pro-audio equipment than any other retailer in the country, is seeing DJ turntables and multitracking software fly out the door. Meanwhile, the guitars gently weep, waiting for someone to pick them up and fill the store with wretched-to-everyone-within-earshot noodling. People are really getting into music. They're taking it apart, bending it around, scrambling it mercilessly, and outputting material, which, despite comprising other people's work, is thoroughly original. Here in San Francisco, there are fewer venues for live rock bands than ever, while every other person you walk past on the street seems to be DJ-ing or spinning at one club or another.
These downloadable bootleg remixes are a manifestation of that same development, taken online and to the extreme. People are pairing Eminem with AC/DC for weird results and coming up with clever titles such as "Smells Like Missy Elliott," which matches Nirvana with Ms. Elliott (who, incidentally, spells her name wrong--see the byline above).
Of course, the entire enterprise makes a mockery of sample clearance, copyright law, and the fleeting notion that artists have any measure of control over their own work. So what? The Internet is filled with data, and some of that information is music that can be manipulated by anyone with a computer and some imagination. I'm sure the record companies are going ballistic about this development but only because their blinkered view prevents them from seeing this trend for what it really is: a twisted form of tribute.....
(You can find the rest of the article on cnet.com) K
Kathryn Born wrote: "And to the Coterie folks, I would say that although you are getting some tough feedback, you are lucky to get this much of it. "
Perhaps I should have foregrounded all that I wrote by saying that I actually did enjoy reading Coterie and think it has a lot of great things going for it, and even that I'd probably like to write something for it again (assuming I haven't completely pissed off all of the publishers). Despite wanting to deal, head on, with some of the things I find nagging in art writing that are rarely addressed, there are many things about Coterie that I think are terrific - like the lack of advertising, the fact that it is free, the no-frills/all-content design, and that the publishers took it upon themselves to reach into their own pockets to print something energetic as an attempt to fill what they perceived as a void in certain types of critical writing. All this stuff is good good good. And I wouldn't have written about Coterie at such length if I wasn't interested and didn't care. And besides, they care enough about what they are doing to use spell-checker! Gotta admire that. Marc
On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Marc Fischer wrote:
A silence speaks to that. :)
Spell check! Mary Schmich, 2/25 (after one Susan Mason):
Steward: Send me a plain text email version (somewhere there must have been a plain text version) and I'll have it archived by Monday (I hate to OCR under Fischer's (sp?) watchful eyes). Get a domain name registered, and you can transfer the page structure and contents.
It's an offer.
(I can already hear someone say, "but we have such big plans, it will be in mauve on a black background with a special font and have javascript mouseovers and will have frames and tables and be exactly 640 pixels wide so it looks like it just came off an offset press and anyone with a T-1 line will be able to access it if they use Explorer 8.842.14")
/jno (plain ASCII text, Steward)
jno wrote:
Marc Fischer wrote:
. . . (assuming I haven't completely pissed off all of the publishers).
A silence speaks to that. :)
As to silence. Earlier, I offered to make my suggestions privately to the principals of Coterie, rather than air my objections here. I used the address Lorelei offered us all (coterie4art at yahoo.com), and she assured me that "we all read the yahoo email."
Those six were the only words I've had in reply. Not exactly the dialogue I had in mind.
Coterie seems still to be the OG topic, and I have no ethical qualms about re-posting my own words. So, in the spirit of supportive critique of an effort and in the interest of continuing the discussion, this is my 3/7/04 note to coterie4art:
OK, we'll do it this way. I'll try to remember not to repeat in public anything intended as private. On the other hand, anything I say, here or in other contexts, is fair game for public re-posting, quotation, response, chastisement, ridicule or whatever seems appropriate to you at the moment.
Who reads this address? Is Lorelei secretly the brains of the outfit?
Some notes:
First, somebody does need to be in charge. Adam Mikos's Gravy and the CACA Newsletter were both officially unedited, and both quickly devolved into drivel. Not that is was easy to tell, but FGA was a little tighter (maybe just because there were fewer people involved), and it was a little better thing.
I'm sure someone made lots of choices - who to invite, the theme of lists, format and distribution . . ., but the paper doesn't have a clear voice, and some of the entries are barely intelligible, either due to excessive art-speak or to too short, cryptic references. A good editor could fix this.
Unless the writer is some sort of celebrity or noted authority, lists of favorites mean nothing. A list has to be able to stand alone, establishing a context and providing some meaningful content - an argument or significant observation or humor, or something. Liking or not liking is nothing.
CACANewsletter and FGA were, in different ways, conceived of as in-jokes. Maybe that's the case with Coterie, and I'm just not in. That's fair, but no way to build an audience.
The first number was impressive for the range of material covered, or at least mentioned. But, things seen only in reproduction or on a website, even with a URL provided (unless, of course, the site is the thing), trivialize the whole project. Might as well talk about that cool thing I heard about at the place whose name I can't remember. If seeing a photo of an artwork is the best thing to happen in a year, it sounds like a pretty sad year.
While it may have been a conscious effort to avoid "second city" categorization ("----- city"? Way too cute.), the number of references to out-of-town, out-of-country shows, especially whining that Chicago isn't on the tour, only reinforces the idea that there is nothing to see here. And, to foster a discussion, it's a good idea to have as a topic something most of the readership is likely to have seen. Again, maybe I am just not the target audience, but if I have to rack up the frequent flyer miles to follow the conversation, maybe the paper should be distributed at the airport.
I probably have things to way about individual pieces, but I'm not sure anyone wants to hear it.
bulka
Bulka wrote: "While it may have been a conscious effort to avoid "second city" categorization ("----- city"? Way too cute.), the number of references to out-of-town, out-of-country shows, especially whining that Chicago isn't on the tour, only reinforces the idea that there is nothing to see here."
When we focus primarily on Chicago s art scene, I find that the talk becomes dangerously close to being provincial. The in-jokes, re-circulating of artists and similar works become inane chatter to somebody on the outside. You do not have to be from another city to see this. Basically, people forget that Chicago is part of a larger global art community. I do agree that we should not ignore the local scene, but we should try to find a balance. I think it is great that Julia Friedman is hauling in international (sometimes local) artists. It helps to provide new perspectives in art making. However, if every gallery were to following her example it would have the reverse effect. The same can be said of art writing.
Balance is always important in every aspect of art and life. I think Coterie is trying to find that balance between being fun to read and providing serious dialogue. I am not saying the two can t exist together, but it is rare. In our thirst for art writing on a local level, we have gorged on the first new writing in a long time. The amount of othergroup postings have been great, but lets make sure we give Coterie some room to breathe. It is their first issue, and there is always a very large learning curve when exploring something new. Let s hope we don t have to wait to long for the next issue.
David
I think David is right. It's so easy to be a critic (especially of critic's) and hard to remember that it takes a lot to put something new out there. By the way I enjoyed the first issue and look forward to the next. And while I agree with a most of the criticism leveled at it; I admire the editors for undertaking the project.
When I posted my definition of "coterie" I was thinking at the time that there were portions of it that were attempting a Coagula-like art gossip rag. But Coterie seems to have a more serious purpose in mind as well. So like David I agree that it's a matter of balance and it will take time to get it right.
By the way, I'm curious as to how Othergroup got started? When, why and by whom?
K
On Mar 12, 2004, at 8:02 AM, David Roman wrote:
On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Katherine Chial wrote:
I'll let Keri, or others, answer the 'why' question.
[http://othergroup.net/about.php] -- Organized by Keri Butler in 2000, used to meet physically for a few months; began operating as a listserv in August 2000 (hosted by Topica.com in CA); migrated to Othergroup.net in December 2002 when Topica started adding ads to the outgoing email (hosted by Cpoint.net in Chicago), migrated to a server in CA in December 2003 (hosted by Outflux.net); and moving to a server in Dallas TX tonight, Friday (we will off line for 10 minutes).
Administered by Keri Butler (subscription list, removals, blacklist) (yes we have blacklist refusal list), tech stuff by Jno Cook (or backup to admin). Keri also broadcasts FYI from the same domain.
But OtherGroup is not run or monitored by anyone, open subscription, easy unsubscribe, no spam forwarding, 4 year archive of posts. Currently about 80 members (with a silent group of 'lurkers'). And 40,000 files were looked by others from the Archive last year.
HTH /j
Re Bulka: a disparaging remark
Is this (below) considered drivel?
Quandary, beauty's role in photography at the end of the century, part 2.
Employed to record the horrors of war, memorialize death, make statements both social and political, chronicle the ever changing landscape, assist in scientific discovery, and sell a product, photography's short life has remained rich. In contributions of less than 200 years to the artworld, photography paved roads through the many disparate movements which graced the 19th and 20th century, finding niches to call its own along the way. Continually tested, photography's beginnings of simple glass plates and daguerreotypes, made swift its adaptations to the emerging technologies of computer manipulation programs and digital cameras.
In its 172 years of existence, photography has developed qualities to acerbate and delight simultaneously, making almost impossible the quandary of defining beauty within the medium. The complexity of this makes it difficult to discuss the innuendoes and confrontations of beauty's role as this century comes to an end. We must turn to modernity to decipher how and if beauty plays a role in photography, beginning no earlier than the first photograph by Niepce in 1827, advancing onward to the millennium.
The success of Niepce's first photograph in France in 1827 quickly led to his partner Daguerre's persistent experimentation in the medium. By the 1830's, Daguerre, after Niepce's death, announced the discovery of his daguerreotype in France, with news quickly spreading throughout Europe.
At the same time in England, William Henry Fox Talbot, with the help of Herschel, created the first paper image. This "light writing" was changed from the term photogenic drawing to photography with urging from Herschel.
Back in France, without near the same success as Daguerre, Hippolyte Bayard discovered the first direct paper process. Marketed in the US by Morse, a painter and inventor of the telegraph, photography's potential quickly spread.
In an emerging industrialized nation, Daguerre appeared mostly interested in the visual information his images could record. William Henry Fox Talbot, on the other hand, whose work might be compared to 17th century Dutch genre painting, was interested predominately in the art of the everyday; beauty captured in the most mundane of subjects. This, however, did not make Daguerre's images any less beautiful. On the contrary, his daguerreotypes, with their shimmering metal plated fronts and decorative casings, became individualized icons, looked upon with the same seriousness as Thoreau's Walden or Manet's Luncheon in the Grass.
By the mid 1850's many of photography's technical difficulties were beginning to work themselves out, leaving room for expansion. In 1851 Queen Victoria made public the stereograph and stereoscope, producing an overnight success worldwide. Used in many of the same ways television is today, this invention, wherein two identical images are positioned side by side and viewed through a binocular type device producing a 3-D effect, entertained and educated. While doing both, the stereograph made accessible the beauty of worlds formerly unknown. Visions of faraway lands and culture's previously only read about, this tool was multi-layered.
Back in the United States the daguerreotype, stereo-view card, and silver plate were used for a variety of purposes. Most intriguing was their treatment of postmortem photography from photography's beginnings throughout the 20th century. In the monograph Sleeping Beauty, Memorial Photography in America, this obsession of memorializing the dead is clearly illustrated through Dr. Stanley B. Burns research.
Almost all anonymously photographed; these immortal images have preserved those who died quietly and by violent death, famous villains and Americans of varying social classes alike. Each time I sift through the pages with their accompanying stories, I am continually surprised, horrified, and in constant question of my reactions. Why would anyone record these private and painful moments? Why am I fascinated and engrossed by each image and story? The answers to these questions are not simple, just like the images themselves.
Almost all of the early daguerreotypes were displayed with elaborate gold leaf and velvet cases, making the memorialization of the people found within them heightened. The stereo-view cards had quite a different feel to them, voyeuristic and inquisitive in nature. The much late silver plates were more documentary, seeming to record an event instead of capture the essence of the once living. Although at times all of these images are difficult to look at, the common thread that connects them and keeps the viewer coming back for another glimpse, appears less to do with the subject matter and more to do with the beauty surrounding the images themselves and the emotions that this beauty brings forth.
Some images graphically illustrate the pain associated with an individual's passing, whether for the deceased themselves or the one's left behind. Some are morbid; exhibiting corpses kept in the home for more that seven days. Eerie was others, at first glance mistaken as still among the living. In addition there are images which seem too fantastic to be real, an entire family killed and brought back to their bed to lay together once more.
Whatever the driving force, the beauty behind postmortem photography,
within this book's pages or in carefully archived private collections,
cannot be mistaken for anything less than beautiful. No matter how
painful, these photographs allowed the audience of the day the first
step in their grieving process while having an everlasting remembrance
of their beloved.
----------
I personally do not think so.
Yes. No wait, uh.....I mean, no.
Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam
(administrative directive:)
First:
- We moved the OG site to Texas some time Saturday (I was out, as is
always a good thing to do when people move).
The older server location site (in CA) has had a 5 minute dns timeout for the last two days, so chances are that none of your emails bounced. If any did, contact _your_ Internet Service Provider, not us.
The new location is a box sitting on a shelf somewhere in Dallas, is a lot faster, and doesnt run 4 simultaneous operating systems. Might help serve web files, and turn email around un _under_ a second.
Second:
- A couple of days ago I installed a Perl script to extract text (or
html) inclusions from multipart email. The text extractor is followed by
a base64 decoder, a p-q decoder, and a html-parser. Between these four
that ought to take care of just about anything you might send.
But who knows. If you intend to include things like doc (Word) files, images, rtf, encrypted email, enhanced text, Ascii-enriched, tfnet files, or other weird stuff it will be lost or mauled.
The Perl script(s) were added because I couln't keep up with the bomblets included by those of you who use 'enhanced' email composers from certain suppliers known as "M......." and "M..".
OK, to continue with this:
Most OG people use plain text 7-bit ASCII, but because AOL does not allow 7-bit email on later versions, I added conversions of multipart email a few months ago. The point was to reduce email to plain text.
We reduce email to plain text to (1) save space on your hard drive, (2) be ecological about use of the internet (3) keep you from having to look through quoted drivel and (4) to keep our archives to reasonable sizes. I certainly didnt want to use Topica's solution of just driving BR tags in at the end of every line - it made their archives totally unreadable.
HTH /jno
Thanks!
Katherine
On Mar 12, 2004, at 7:35 PM, jno wrote:
I wanted to respond to Katheryn's post from last Thursday (or so) and haven't had time 'til now. She posted an article about music pirating and remixing and so on, which is a topic that I have a lot of interest in (it's below). Also a good source for more on this topic is Craig Baldwin's documentary, "Sonic Outlaws," highly recomended. I bet you can get it at earwax or someting.
Katheryn,
First, thanks for posting this. I think there is a lot to talk about here.
If I understand you correctly, I think you are saying that our art production will someday come under the same kind of regulation and control as the work of pop-musicians.
I don't think that you can draw perfect paralells between intellectual property issues in the artworld and the music industry. The music industry has a lot more clout with law makers and does a ton of lobbying to affect radical policy change, seemingly at a whim. This industry has spent tons of resources proliferating propaganda to frighten people out of pirating music and even started a campaign adressing pirates directly with the argument that pirating takes money out of the pockets of the music industry workers. Which is just bulshit! A general disregard for workers and corporate pressure for giant profits are what takes money and benefits away from workers. It's all about maintaining control for the sake of maintaing profits.
I would like anyone with more specific knowledge of the situation to pipe in here, but it seems to me there is no such machine at work to protect the intellectual property of art makers. Unless lawmakers have a special place in their heart for art, there is no reason for them to pay any attention to these issues, there is little or no political pressure.
There are many people doing cultural production who advocate an anti-copyright stance, they encourage the pirating and reuse of their images and ideas, seeing it as a viable way to affect cultural currents and build a vital gift-economy. This doesn't put money in the pockets of artists, but it builds strong social networks and proliferates ideas that would otherwise never find a venue in commercial media. I think in the long run, if there is a strong commitment to this kind of ecconomy it can reduce the need for artists to open their wallets in doing their work, with more open sharing of resources and skills. (I don't think what I'm talking about is utopian, but dudes, I would like to stipulate that if you are going to dismiss what I am talking about as developing some kind of utopian line of thought please explain to me exactly what the problems with that are.)
While I suspect that this kind of remixing and reusing of ideas has been the fuel for creative work since the begining of consciousness, I think that to some extent this recent trend of remixing and reusing music in absurd ways is a direct reaction to the culture of control that prevades the pop-music industry. I think that both the culture of control and the reactionary piracy are sort adolescent and puerile, but one is very creepy and reductive and one is very entertaining and creative. I'm rooting for the entertainment!
I don't think art is next. but I am curious to see what happens to music. Seems like a lot of record stores are going out of business, I am not sure if it is really related to pirating or what.
Okay then, Mike
Katheryn wrote--
This is an article that came to me at work, but I think it's really fascinating.
By day, I'm very involved with the whole discussion about music and copyright, and spent months doing research on this issue. I have strong feelings that I won't get into, but I will say one thing for sure, my artist friends. ART IS NEXT. This is going to happen to us, for better or worse, in less than 10 years. Even for those of us who don't work digitally, this borrow/steal phenomena I believe will spread throughout the whole culture.
The was a post a while back about technology and commoditizing and dehumanizing art. None of that will happen, it's distopian. But this... no one saw this coming.
The Artists Formerly Known As Fans By Eliot Van Buskirk Senior editor (4/12/02)
Christina Aguilera and The Strokes are probably the least likely collaborators you could find in today's music world. Christina dishes out the shiny bubblegum pop, while the Strokes mine rock's past to create tunes that sound like they were recorded 20 years ago. But while Aguilera and The Strokes will probably never share a stage or a studio, you can hear them perform together, thanks to the heady mix of the Internet, computers, and clever pranksters with too much time on their hands. In fact, Christina and The Strokes play together perfectly, in total sync--she's singing "Genie in the Bottle" while they back her with "Hard to Explain"--on a bootleg remix by an entity who calls himself The Freelance Hellraiser. Just search for Aguilera Strokes on KaZaa or Google, and you'll see what I mean (or enter A Stroke of Genius, the absolutely perfect title). If the labels need further proof of who now holds the reins of the music industry, this should probably seal the deal: The Artists Formerly Known As Fans.
What is this six-stringed object? It's no accident that these remixes coincide with the fact that the Guitar Center, which sells more guitars, amps, drums, keyboards, and pro-audio equipment than any other retailer in the country, is seeing DJ turntables and multitracking software fly out the door. Meanwhile, the guitars gently weep, waiting for someone to pick them up and fill the store with wretched-to-everyone-within-earshot noodling. People are really getting into music. They're taking it apart, bending it around, scrambling it mercilessly, and outputting material, which, despite comprising other people's work, is thoroughly original. Here in San Francisco, there are fewer venues for live rock bands than ever, while every other person you walk past on the street seems to be DJ-ing or spinning at one club or another.
These downloadable bootleg remixes are a manifestation of that same development, taken online and to the extreme. People are pairing Eminem with AC/DC for weird results and coming up with clever titles such as "Smells Like Missy Elliott," which matches Nirvana with Ms. Elliott (who, incidentally, spells her name wrong--see the byline above).
Of course, the entire enterprise makes a mockery of sample clearance, copyright law, and the fleeting notion that artists have any measure of control over their own work. So what? The Internet is filled with data, and some of that information is music that can be manipulated by anyone with a computer and some imagination. I'm sure the record companies are going ballistic about this development but only because their blinkered view prevents them from seeing this trend for what it really is: a twisted form of tribute.....
(You can find the rest of the article on cnet.com) K
In regards to the recents posts about music piracy and art being next. I just read an excerpt from the book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, by Lawrence Lessig. The excerpt appeared in Wired - Issue 12.03 - March 2004
[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/lessig.html?tw=wn_tophead_6]
The first paragraph is:
If piracy means using the creative property of others without their
permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of
piracy. Every important sector of big media today - film, music, radio,
and cable TV - was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how
each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation -
until now.
I found his supporting arguments to be a little off - thought I guess I should read the book before I judge. I do think that the more general premise is right on and applicable.
Mike,
It's more complicated than that. There are a few musical artists on the fan side of the copyright issue but in general they fall into two camps: the jam bands who want to see their concert tapes circulated because it leads to new music sales that exceed the lost revenue and bands that are not yet or no longer are popular who hope to gain some relevance through free distribution.
It can not be denied that for many years, the major labels imposed an oligopoly (similar to a monopoly but with several suppliers) and in doing so, restricted our access to new music, restricted many bands entry into record stores and onto the airwaves, and reaped gigantic and undeserved profits. For that they deserve what they get and get it they will.
But it also can not be denied that the likes of Napster and Kazaa are hurting the music distribution industry. Although that's Virgin and Coconuts, it is also Myopic, Reckless, Grammaphone and all the other independent stores that we love. One of my best friends owns Dustygroove and this is a conversation we have all the time. They will also bear the brunt of this punishment.
Furthermore it will hurt those same bands that it benefits. As music becomes more and more free the potential for bands to make a good living at it decreases. Now there's something to be said for the tour lifecycle with all its tight jeans, groupie girls, and MTV Video games, but at some point even rock stars need to settle down and *sell* records.
As it relates to art, it is one thing to say that you don't mind your work being appropriated but it is another to allow others to make money off your work or to change it in a way that you don't approve in order to make money off it. Would you be happy if an image you created was appropriated by Thomas Kincade who added custom sofa coloring and brush texturing and sold it to millions of tasteless housewives around the country? Of course this exercise requires us imagining that you actually make work, but still. Or what if the appropriator didn't make money off it? What if they used it to promote their cause - one you didn't agree with - or used it to promote their own careers (as DJ Dangermouse has undoubtedly although perhaps unwittingly done)?
As for the gift based economy, um, they don't work.
Curt
An exhibit (last summer?) at In These Times' offices was devoted to visual art (and music as well) that deals with copyright issues or that has come under fire for copyright violation (primarily artists who co-opted trademarked images such as cartoon characters). There was a good issue of the magazine devoted to copyright issues that came out for that well. Of course most lawsuits against artists (or cease and desist letters) are often about preventing any sort of critique - though this is disguised using blabber about trying to prevent "unfair competition". Some may recall recent articles in the Reader and other places about cartoonist King Velveeda's troubles with Kraft. He lost his case and had to stop using his monicker.
Artists have sued and been sued quite a bit - that has been going on probably longer than the more recent debates about sampling or piracy in music. Jeff Koons and Warhol have both been sued and lost in cases where they made works derived from the images of others without permission. I believe Richard Prince has been sued as well. And then there is the fascinating case of DeChirico making and selling forgeries of his own older paintings as a 'Fuck You' to people who didn't appreciate his later work.
As for "mash ups" - the kind of music Kathryn referenced, I admire any attempts to make the shittiest pop music enjoyable by mixing it up with better music to create hilarious juxtapositions and an interesting hybrid. Surely anyone who has ever heart Chuck D rapping over Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, John Oswald, or Negativeland's "Helter Stupid" album knows this is a blast. And let's not even start with the Stooges mixed up with Salt N' Peppa.
I do agree with Mike though that a lot of this kind of work can be fairly adolescent and for me, doesn't hold up so well on frequent repeat listens. I could listen to "No Fun" by the Stooges probably every other day for all eternity and still love it, but the novelty of the mash up of that song with Salt 'N Peppa has perhaps worn a bit thin. Steve Albini once said something that I think was quite conservative, but also had an element of truth. He complained that when people hear samples in music, what they like and respond to so positively about that music are the qualities that are found in the original material that was sampled. Those samples were often painstakingly created and produced from nothing and then grabbed - with all their richness intact, for say... a P Diddy song.
There was a fun interview a while back with film-maker Abel Ferrara who uses the music of Schoolly D in nearly all of his films (except perhaps "Driller Killer" which pre-dated Schoolly D). Anyway, Ferrara ripped into Jimmy Page for suing Schoolly D over sampling Led Zeppelin without giving them any money, but then Page freely collaborated with P. Diddy on that horrible Godzilla theme that endlessly repeated the main riff from "Kashmir". But then again, what does Jimmy Page know - those nutjobs wouldn't let Martin Scorsese use their music but instead they sell "Rock & Roll" to Cadillac?! WTF!
Marc
Another really great example is the Jamms (Justified Ancients of MuMu and later the KLF and later the Timelords) with their release "1987, Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (What the Fuck Is Going On?)" which shamelessly ripped the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and ABBA. The record was ordered recalled and remaingin copies were destroyed. This is the first time I can think of when the sampling issue came up this way. Right around the same time the Beasties Boys had a Beatles rip that was intended to go on Licensed to Ill but was pulled. WHPK used to have a cart with it.
These things led to Age of chance rather than sampling Prince just covering it. Which seems normal now, but Kiss had only been out a few months at the time. Followed by Laibach and Pussy Galore covering complete albums arguably unsuccessfully.
One little fact about that Cadillac commercial. Originally they wanted to use the Doors song "Break on Through" but one of the band member, which ever one objected to the Doors 21th Century reunion tour refused and so they turned to the remaining members of Led Zep who as it turns out are bigger whores.
Curt Alan Conklin H: 773.782.0659 C: 773.343.2348 F: 425.790.9739 calanc at yahoo.com curt at curtconklin.com 1942 N. Wolcott Ave. Chicago IL 60622
If you take everything lightly you can carry more stuff.
Sadly I still haven't managed to see "Sonic Outlaws" which Mike mentioned, but on a related note, I highly recommend the book "The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2" that Negativeland released concerning the debacles over their U2 record. (or mostly problems with U2's label as well as their own label SST). Unfortunately in some cases like this, the artist being sampled or otherwise messed around with has no big problem really, but their labels and handlers, who are often far more concerned with profits - especially once their legal fees to pursue all of this nonsense start piling up - won't relent despite the artists' wishes. Plus some people just don't have a sense of humor.
And then there are the inconsistent people like Metallica, who made it out of the underground thrash metal scene in large part thanks to rabid tape trading in the early 80's (since no one would play great songs like "Phantom Lord" and "Metal Militia" on the radio). Then when they started playing huge stadiums they freely let people tape them. They even released a full length video of live bootleg-quality footage shot entirely by their fans. And then of course, well... they became money grubbing assholes. Lest anyone think that this has nothing to do with art, I'm willing to bet the decline came around the same time that little prick Lars Ulrich started buying paintings by Basquiat, or started selling really good paintings by artists associated with COBRA.
Oh, and let's not forget Richard Carpenter who sued Todd Haynes' film "Superstar" about the Carpenters out of existence. You can find millionth generation bootlegs but that great film deserves to exist exactly as it is - with the original music.
Curt Conklin wrote: "Originally they wanted to use the Doors song "Break on Through" but one of the band member, which ever one objected to the Doors 21th Century reunion tour refused"
Was it Jim Morrison? :) Marc
At 07:24 PM 3/15/2004 -0600, you wrote:
If you read this book please note that they try real hard to characterize themselves as copyright martyrs. The real problem in their case was not copyright at all, the issues were really trade dress violations, which are significantly less sexy to discuss.
Richard Holland wrote: "If you read this book please note that they try real hard to characterize themselves as copyright martyrs. The real problem in their case was not copyright at all, the issues were really trade dress violations, which are significantly less sexy to discuss."
If by "trade dress violations" (I'm not sure I've ever heard this term) you
mean that they made the record look like it was by U2, with the hope of
duping U2 fans into buying it, well yes, I think that's true and I haven't
read the book in a while but I'm pretty sure they never quite admit to that.
I remember when the record came out (wish I'd bought it), a store wrote in
marker on the shrink wrap "new Negativeland record!" - knowing of course that
most people might be duped otherwise. (This was at the kind of store that
would be more likely to proudly sell Negativeland records than be caught dead
selling U2 records). But there were also copyright issues over the use of
Casy Casem's voice on that record as well right? And the book includes
articles from others on Copyright too so that is part of why I recommended it
- it has a lot of info about John Oswald and his banned Plunderphonics album
with the Michael Jackson collage on the cover.
Negativeland have definitely made some very dubious ethical decisions and perhaps been more than a little irresponsible. Falsely suggesting to the media that a kid killed his family after having an argument with his parents about their song "Christianity is Stupid" is certainly problematic! But the media frenzy that resulted (documented on "Helter Stupid") is really interesting and reveals aspects of how the news feeds on itself that are really compelling (and funny). I'm not quite gonna say the ends justified the means, but I think they have done some courageous (and at times stupid) things that have exposed interesting aspects of how copyright law impacts creativity.
Marc
Just a quick note to the Art is Next thread -
Hasn't anyone been following the whole Joy Garnett buzz on other lists (nettime, thingist, rhizome).
It's all they can talk about lately - Garnett made a painting that utilizes a photojournalistic image, and the photographer sued her.
I find the debate kind of boring myself, but maybe because from what I can see the painting isn't all that interesting.
If you're interested in all this stuff though you should check it out. Just google "Garnett" and "molotov"
Kevin hamilton
Forgive my rustiness on these issues, I actually argued about this with a couple members of the band via e-mail. The relevant section of the Lanham act below:
Sec. 1125. - False designations of origin, false descriptions, and dilution
forbidden
(a) Civil action
(1)
Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any
container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or
device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin,
false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading
representation of fact, which -
(A)
is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the
affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person,
or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods,
services, or commercial activities by another person, or
(B)
in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature,
characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another
person's goods, services, or commercial activities,
shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she
is or is likely to be damaged by such act.
(2)
As used in this subsection, the term ''any person'' includes any State,
instrumentality of a State or employee of a State or instrumentality of a
State acting in his or her official capacity. Any State, and any such
instrumentality, officer, or employee, shall be subject to the provisions
of this chapter in the same manner and to the same extent as any
nongovernmental entity.
(3)
In a civil action for trade dress infringement under this chapter for trade
dress not registered on the principal register, the person who asserts
trade dress protection has the burden of proving that the matter sought to
be protected is not functional.
So basically you can't sell soap in a box labeled Tide unless you happen to
own that trademark.
Casem Kasem never sued, he did send some letters saying "knock it off". He
would have a copyright complaint about the recordings. The law in action of
the situation was that, if he would have sued he would have given them the
publicity they were shooting for.
I think the book doesn't cast them as courageous, more like the kid on the
playground who pokes the larger kid to see how much aggravation it will
take before the big kid gets pissed and acts surprised when they get
punched out.
I like their spirit, I doubt their good judgement.
R
AND, then they went on to make a record to anger the soft drink companies
in an effort to get sued again, and the companies didn't care.
At 08:19 PM 3/15/2004 -0600, you wrote:
There is so much litigation in this regard it hardly seems worth debate.
You can't prepare derivative works from a copyrighted work without
permission of the original author.
At 07:55 PM 3/15/2004 -0600, you wrote:
Richard Holland wrote:
"Forgive my rustiness on these issues, I actually argued about this with a
couple members of the band via e-mail. The relevant section of the Lanham
act below:"
Thanks for sharing! Or course the sad thing about knowing precise legal
information like this is that it reminds you that so many things that might be
fun to do are illegal.
Kevin wrote:
"Garnett made a painting that utilizes a photojournalistic image, and the
photographer sued her.... I find the debate kind of boring myself, but maybe
because from what I can see the painting isn't all that interesting."
That's the other aspect of this. People get sued for making really boring
things in violation of various acts all the time. Although I'm glad the show
took place, most of the stuff in the In These Times offices was rather dull
(the CD that was made in conjunction with the show was a bit better).
Marc
So true, it makes it harder to justify my thoughts on file sharing.
Hey Curt,
Of course it is, thanks.
Market punishment, ew, gross. I thought law and religion were bad
enough.
Well even if I wasn't happy about it would sure be pretty cool. You
don't think very much of housewives then? Please, you can call me out
for being naive, but there is no reason to make broad attack on
housewives.
Excuse me, what does this mean? We're just having a conversation here,
nobody ever told me I had to make work to be on this list.
What if?
Well, if someone took an idea of mine and worked with it and
re-presented it in a way that suits them, this would just seem to me
like healthy cultural discourse. I am not saying that I would be happy
to see my work used by white supremacists or to dis the housewives of
north america or something. But I think artists should expect these
things to happen if s/he makes work and releases in a way that is
beyond h/er control. Whenever artists come up with captivating new
visual terminology advertisers always co-opt this to sell their
clients' products. This does not send me into a panic, this has been
happening forever. If radicals have learned anything it is that
anything can be reduced to a commodity. I am just going to continue to
insist that art can be way more interesting than commodity. Artists can
control their work, they can control how their work is presented and
what they ask of viewers and patrons. But at some point along the flow
it really is beyond the control of the artist.
I guess I am not really talking in terms of the law here, because, when
I say I am interested in intellectual property I guess I am just barely
interested in the legal aspects of it. I am more interested in how
intellectual property can become a space for play. Seriously, I know
I'm a dork, but I'm being totally honest.
In the scenario where someone takes my work and makes tons of money off
it I'd respond in one of two ways, depending on what they di
"It's more complicated than that."
"But it also can not be denied that the likes of Napster and Kazaa are
hurting the music distribution industry. Although that's Virgin and
Coconuts, it is also Myopic, Reckless, Grammaphone and all the other
independent stores that we love. One of my best friends owns
Dustygroove
and this is a conversation we have all the time. They will also bear
the
brunt of this punishment."
"Would you be happy if an image you created was appropriated by
Thomas Kincade who added custom sofa coloring and brush texturing and
sold
it to millions of tasteless housewives around the country?"
"Of course this exercise requires us imagining that you actually make
work, but still."
"Or what if the appropriator didn't make money off it? What if they
used it to
promote their cause - one you didn't agree with - or used it to promote
their own careers (as DJ Dangermouse has undoubtedly although perhaps
unwittingly done)? "