NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Lessig on Fair Use: Google Print vs. Author's Guild

UPDATE 9/28/05: The New York Times gets it right:

Op-Ed Contributor: Search and Rescue 
By TIM O'REILLY

AUTHORS struggle, mostly in vain, against their fated obscurity. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales from major booksellers, only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies. Against this backdrop, the recent Authors Guild suit against the Google Library Project is poignantly wrongheaded. [read on...]

NEWSgrist posted earlier this year about the problems encountered by Google Print , and then again when the print hit the fan in August. Various experts have weighed in; now read what Lawrence Lessig has to say:

reBlogged via Darknet:
Lessig on the Google-Authors Guild dispute
By JD Lasica on Digital rights & copyright

Lawrence Lessig has come down on the side of Google (as have I) in the dispute between Google and the Authors Guild. Writes Lessig:

I've been waiting to offer my opinion on this whole mess until I've thought it through, I've been reading a lot of other, much more informed peoples' opinions, and this is what I come up with.

First, information is power. If Google does not get this information out, someone else will. ...

Second, it's a fair use issue. Google is not talking about publishing the entire works of a particular author; just a tiny snippet, maybe some bibliographic information, and that's it. Think of a card catalog here in your public library. From the Official Google Blog:

"Let's be clear:Google doesn't show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries."

Thirdly, anything that is legitimately attempting to give people more access to literary works is all right by me. As an English major, I plan on using Google Print to search authors past works, find connections I hadn't thought of, and yes, probably buy some books. I'm not going to be reading whole works on my 'puter ...

...and more from Mr. Lessig:

It is 1976 all over again. Then, like now, content owners turned to the courts to stop an extraordinary new technology. Then, like now, copyright is the weapon of choice. But then, like now, the content owners of course don’t really want the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the content owners ought to lose.

This is the best case to illustrate the story I told at the start of Free Culture. Property law since time immemorial had held that your land reached from the ground to the heavens. Then airplanes were invented — a technology oblivious to this ancient law. A couple of farmers sued to enforce their ancient rights — insisting airplanes can’t fly over land without their permission. And thus the Supreme Court had to decide whether this ancient law — much older than the law of copyright — should prevail over this new technology.

The Supreme Court's answer was perfectly clear: Absolutely not. "Common sense revolts at the idea," Justice Douglas wrote. And with that sentence, hundreds of years of property law was gone, and the world was a much wealthier place.

[read his full post, with comments from readers]

NY Art World: Land of Flesh-eating Zombies?

image source

This time last year Jery Saltz wrote about the NY Art world as "Super Babylon" :

[...] these days the New York art world feels more dark than splendid.

That world has been compared to a machine, a circus, a cult and a club; it's been called a brothel, a dinner party and a high school with money. I called it a trading floor in 1999. In 2001, ultra-observant Frieze magazine publisher Amanda Sharp declared it "a wounded animal." Regardless, the city's art world is expanding, and money is conspicuous. Idealists open galleries to add to the discourse but are often turned into selling machines. Artists go from unknown to mainstream overnight. Youth is worshipped. Art fairs proliferate, although many who participate say they hate them. The underground is vanishing. Consensus stands in for criticality. Avoidance and denial are everyday things. Private dissatisfaction is rampant, yet this discontent turns passive in public. So many people have so much invested in the system that the New York art world feels as if it's trapped in a paradigm it can't escape.

[...] Skill without vision and innovation is only competence or proficiency. In an inverted Bushian world, where appearances pass as core, many have forgotten that every original artist redefines skill.

[...] we need to remember that the system is not the same as substance; any one of us is bigger than it; show for show, New York is still the best place for gallery exhibitions in the world; vision, instinct, surprise (not for its own sake) and private experience are the lifeblood of art; and underneath it all we're still gypsies.
(Super Babylon, Artnet 9/14/04)

This year he plows forth in "The Battle for Babylon":

[...] the art world has never been so flush with money. There are almost 300 galleries in Chelsea, with more than 30 expanding or relocating there this season. A 20-story "gallery condo" is under construction; Matthew Marks is opening a fourth gallery space, Perry Rubinstein a third, Pace a second; Marianne Boesky is building her own building. No one's closing. There are also hundreds of contemporary galleries outside Chelsea. So New York truly is Art City. Or is it?

Even with all the buzz, we're in a predicament. Partly, this is because while this hyper-driven phase allows more artists to show quickly, it reduces art to its exchange value. Popularity and market viability are measures of quality; things are considered successful if they sell; selling means selling big. Consequently, the system is making people offers they can't refuse when it should be making them offers they can't understand; too many have too much invested in the system as it is to change or challenge it; a sameness has set into the operative model of what a gallery is.

Flush or not, people are frustrated. In private many say most of the shows they see are safe or conservative. Yet most reviews are enthusiastic or merely descriptive. Too many critics act like cheerleaders, reporters or hip metaphysicians. Amid art fair frenzy, auction madness, money lust and market hype; between galleries turning into selling machines, gossip passing as criticism and art becoming a good job; the system, while efficient, feels faulty, even false.

Perhaps it was ever thus, but today it seems more thus than ever. Now the system regularly replicates conditions it's familiar with, defaulting to known positions, producing pathogens of itself. It knows art is a good investment and traditionally made by men so more men show and sell while fewer women show at all. The ratio of one-woman shows in New York galleries between now and Christmas is a deplorable 17 percent. Thus the discourse is being driven from a place that suppresses difference. This system needs to be starved into submission or changed.

[...] Everyone maintains there's new content. If so, there should be new forms to house this content. We need to reimagine what a gallery is. Galleries shouldn't be seen primarily as shops or salesrooms but as test sites and arks. Few gallerists are flesh-eating zombies who only want to sell art; most want to shape culture. Many are disgruntled with only being managers of the trading floor. Galleries should have attitude. Most already have positions. These positions have to be heightened and emphasized, which is where attitude begins.

[...] We also need to acknowledge that much of the local work we see and talk about is seen and talked about only here. This provincialism could spell trouble; although interestingly, Berlin, London and Los Angeles are becoming more provincial too. Perhaps this is intrinsic to the Super Paradigm; maybe these regionalisms will eventually mingle or war with one another. I'm not advocating an esthetics of negativity or oppositionality. That brand of radicalism is sclerotic. Rebellion may be a better word for it. Whatever, art shouldn't only be about tweaking middle-class values or critiquing and redressing the art world.
(The Battle for Babylon, Artnet, 9/19/05)

Sweet Dreams : Contemporary Art and Complicity

Sweet Dreams : Contemporary Art and Complicity
by Johanna Drucker
264 pages
University Of Chicago Press (July 15, 2005)
ISBN: 0226165043

via Amazon:

[...] Calling for a revamping of the academic critical vocabulary used to discuss art into one more befitting current creative practices, Drucker argues that contemporary art is fully engaged with material culture--yet still struggling to escape the oppositional legacy of the early twentieth-century avant-garde.

Drucker shows that artists today are aware of working within the ideologies of mainstream culture and have replaced avant-garde defiance with eager complicity. Finding their materials at flea markets or exploring celebrity culture, contemporary artists have created a vibrantly participatory movement that exudes enthusiasm and affirmation--all while critics continue to cling to an outmoded vocabulary of opposition and radical negativity that defined modernism's avant-garde. At the cutting edge of new media research, Drucker surveys a wide range of exciting contemporary artists, demonstrating their clear departure from the past and petitioning viewers and critics to shift their terms and sensibilities as well. Sweet Dreams is a testament to the creative processes and self-conscious heterogeneity of art today as well as a revolutionary effort to solicit collaboration that will encourage the production of imaginative thought and contribute to contemporary life.

via Artnet, 9/9/05:
Book Report
by Walter Robinson [excerpt]

Communism, fascism – does capitalism have a place in this pantheon of art and ideology? Not really, though Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (University of Chicago Press, 2005, $40) promises to focus on the ways that contemporary art (from the 1990s till now) has surrendered to the temptations of sugary mass-market culture.

Pinups by Vanessa Beecroft and Lisa Yuskavage, heaps of consumer goods by Jason Rhoades and Jessica Stockholder, assorted engagements with media, technology, spectacle, identity, branding and the like -- artists have given up their stance of avant-garde opposition, Drucker says, and now just want to get along.

What’s more, she doesn't think it's a bad thing. "The unblindered gaze, willing to inquire into the complicit relation between art and its ideological condition (of production, reception, evaluation, effect, even formal composition and conception), will find a rich and fertile field."

Alas, her argument is ultimately unremarkable, though there's plenty of fireworks along the way, some 292 pages of academic hash-slinging. A much-published author on artists' books, Drucker is a former professor at Yale and now heads a media studies program at the University of Virginia. This view from the academy has two amusing consequences, amusing at least to those of us in the journalistic trenches. One, her range of artists wanders far from the A List (i.e., many of them should be so lucky as to be "complicit" with "capital"); and two, she spends much energy sparring with something that she calls "the October position," as if that superannuated journal still had any heft.

Is contemporary art just another branch of the culture industry, or does the avant-garde somehow pierce the veil of capitalist ideology? That question remains unanswered, though curiously, the cover illustration for Sweet Dreams is Gregory Crewdson's "Ophelia" photograph from 2001, an X-Files-style image of a young woman in a white nightie floating in a flooded middle-brow living room, a picture that seems . . . ambiguous in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina. (Even worse, the weather service has picked Ophelia as the name for the next hurricane on the horizon.) Coincidence?