NEWSgrist - where spin is art

475 Kent Street: The Sum of All Fears

via C-Monster.net - where high gets low:

Get out. A hedge fund manager needs your apartment.

January 23rd, 2008

Wanted: Cheap artist’s loft building that can be quickly taken over for the purpose of rapid gentrification. Willing to concoct some ridiculous story about zoning in order to get rid of current, below-market-rate tenants on the coldest day of the year. Motivated buyer. (Photo courtesy of BruceLaBounty802, who is currently couch-surfing his way through New York City. See more of his "evacuation" photos on his Flickr.)

This past Monday, a number of friends, along with several hundred other residents, were "evacuated" from 475 Kent in Brooklyn, because of alleged fire hazards (a matzo factory in the basement) and because the landlord had been renting out the commercial spaces as residential units. It all seems pretty damn bogus. People have been living at 475 Kent for years. I've personally been going to visit friends there for more than a decade. Why do I get the feeling that this building will eventually be converted into luxury condos? And why do I get the feeling that all of us, who live paycheck to humble paycheck, will eventually be commuting to New York City from somewhere in Philadelphia? And why why why is NYC turning into the anonymous suburb I fled?

Posted by C-Monster.

Archive Fever: Cheesy Sublime?

Must read: Holland Cotter's review ("Well, It Looks Like Truth") of the current show at ICP, "Archive Fever," organized by Okwui Enwezor :

"Photography, with its extensions in film, video and the digital realm, is the main vehicle for these images. The time was, we thought of photographs as recorders of reality. Now we know they largely invent reality. At one stage or another, whether in shooting, developing, editing or placement, the pictures are manipulated, which means that we are manipulated. We are so used to this that we don’t see it; it's just as a fact of life.

"'Archive Fever' puts us deep inside right from the start. The gallery walls have been covered with sheets of plain industrial plywood. The exhibition space looks like the interior of a storage shed or a shipping container packed with images both strange and familiar.

"Familiar comes first: Andy Warhol's early 1960s 'Race Riot,' a silk-screened image of a black civil rights marcher attacked by police dogs. Warhol, our pop Proust, was a child of the archive; he lived in it and never left it. He culled his images straight from the public record — in this case Life magazine — and then made them public in a new way, as a new kind of art, the tabloid masterpiece, the cheesy sublime..." [read full article]

{{{Shaky?}}}

PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE The next Met director will have to balance new, new things (shark by Damien Hirst) and classics ("Madonna and Child" by Duccio di Buoninsagna).

(Favorite weird juxtaposition of the week)
 
from:

NYTimes, Ideas & Trends
What Awaits the Met
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: January 13, 2008

THOUGH expected, the news last week that Philippe de Montebello would retire as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art elicited a range of emotions among museumgoers: pride and sadness at the end of a stellar era, and anxiety about the future.

"I was shaky," said Jerry Saltz, the art critic for New York magazine, striking a common note. "Because just at a time when big museums are getting things like new wings so spectacularly wrong, the Met has been getting things close to perfect."

Mr. de Montebello is indeed leaving strong, following several recent gallery renovations and a run of well-attended, scholarly, rigorous and critically acclaimed exhibitions. What happens next at the Met has relevance for all major institutions undergoing a generational shift — and all museums in this young century. Here are some themes certain to arise. [read on]

Copy our records for your friends, please!

There (finally) seems to be a growing trend to ditch DRM (Digital "Rights" Management) in favor of new business models and perhaps even new licensing practices in the music industry that are more in tune with the culture and technologies at large (file-sharing, etc.) -- read about Radiohead and their decision to release In Rainbows on a pay-what-you-wish basis -- or free -- download. Of course, these decisions are being initiated by the artists not their labels...

via Henrik Moltke's Blog:

Tone: Please copy my CD (You won' t get in trouble, promise!)

Tuesday, January 15, 2008, posted by Henrik Moltke at 11:03 PM

This is big. On january 21st, the extremely charming Aalborg-based indietronica artist Tone (Sofie Nielsen) releases her new album, "Small Arm of Sea", under a Creative Commons license.

Her label, Urlyd, says Copy our records for your friends, please! and the danish collecting society KODA backs the release, making sure commercial uses are covered by the usual compensation scheme. This is historic, and I am extremely pleased to see this happen for the first time in Denmark.

Oh, and did I mention - Tone's music is GREAT. I had the pleasure of listening to it last summer, live, on a lawn in copenhagen - and the bits I've heard from this release are very very promising. You can count on me at the Copenhagen launch at Gefährlich, Fælledvej 7, 2200 København N, KBH jan 22nd 2008, at 21:00h (map)

Tone website and Myspace

Also, check out this news piece from Tv2 News (in danish)

...

 

more via HM, iCommons list:

I hope to release a statement soon on behalf of CC Denmark, but since both KODA and we were taken by surprise when this surfaced on national TV news yesterday (the formalities on this agreement are not  fully done, but KODA confirms) it' ll be a couple of days. Guess rock n' roll (or in this case indietronica) couldn't wait :)  

PS: They've picked the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Denmark license for the album
...

PRESS RELEASE for immediate release
Wednesday, January 16 2008

DANISH LABEL: PLEASE COPY OUR RECORDS FOR ALL YOUR FRIENDS!

Danish label Urlyd announces the release of the world's first Creative Commons-licensed physical music album, backed by Danish copyright collecting agency KODA. Consumers are free to copy and redistribute the album legally – and are encouraged to do so by the record label. "In the past allowing your fans to share your music meant waving goodbye to an important revenue stream for the artist. URLYD is the first label to offer the artist and fan the best of both worlds" say the founders.

We're all familiar with the classic "All Rights Reserved" notice in books, music and film recordings stating that copying is prohibited. Yet today, sharing a musical work is easier than making a phone call. Illegal filesharing of copyrighted works has been a major concern for record labels and publishers since the advent of Napster. "Music wants to be free", computer-savvy teenagers argue. Now an alternative path that is both legal and free is emerging – from the music industry itself - in the shape of a small Danish independent record label, Urlyd which uses the Creative Commons licensing system. On Monday, January 21, 2008, the labels' first release, Small Arm of Sea by female indietronica singer, songwriter and producer Tone, will be available for purchase in Danish record stores. With her abstracts beats, unique voice and hypnotizing lyrics, Tone makes her debut after little more than a year spent lurking in Denmark's musical underground and on MySpace. Printed on the CDs and vinyls are the words "Copy this album for your friends, please!". We really mean this. On the same day the album will be available for download – freely, at no charge and without Digital Rights Management (DRM) – at the record label's website, urlyd.com.  Anyone can download it for free or pick up the album in-store.

"Music connects directly with feelings, things you experience. We believe music in best when shared and this perfectly natural behavior should be encouraged, not criminalized", say the founders of Urlyd, Christian Villum and Sune Petersen. "We cannot tell music lovers how or whether to support the artist, so we give them the choice between donating online, going to a live performance or purchasing the album in-store where it is sold as a limited edition. We believe this positive approach will benefit both artists and consumers".

Innovative audiovisual album format
Urlyd launches a new audiovisual format combining traditional CD/LP with the DVD format – at regular CD price. In collaboration with Danish VJ and video artist Kristian Ravn-Ellestad, Tone (Sofie Nielsen) unites music and video intro a mesmerizing audiovisual experience – an important element of Tone's live performances.

Creative Commons and KODA
Until recently the use of Creative Commons licenses was incompatible with services provided by collecting societies such as KODA (KODA administers Danish and international copyrights for composers, songwriters and music publishers when their musical works are performed in public). If a singer, musician, publisher, or producer wanted to distribute her work for free online under a Creative Commons license, she was forced to give up the right to receive compensation through royalties collected by the collecting agency. As a consequence, mostly bands without a recording contract and outside of the collective rights management have used the Creative Commons model.    "The novelty here is that our artists can collect commercial royalties through the traditional model while fully using the potential of the internet - giving fans the freedom to do what they ultimately do best."

For more information, contact URLYD
Christian Villum - villum@urlyd.com - (+45) 2087 7153 or Skype: christianvillum

(Christian Villum is currently in New York City, available for interviews)

urlyd.com - press photos in high resolution available on urlyd.com/press

For more information about Creative Commons, see http://creativecommons.org 

Appropriation, Decontextualization, History and Public Domain

[Image source]

There's been a discussion raging on several blogs regarding Shepard Fairey, his self-serving entrepreneurship, and his "plagiarism" of anonymous protest images from the Public Domain. The main complaint is here, while perhaps a more thorough and thoughtful discussion is at a blog called Just Seeds, a self described "Visual Resistance Artists' Collective" -- [more info]. These are activists who take it upon themselves to "educate" the rest of us through their art, while perhaps eking out a small income from the sale of posters, prints, etc. Someone like Shepard Fairey who brands himself and who is in essence his own cause, is clearly their natural enemy.

Of course, much of the gut sentiment expressed here, both in the main post and by commentators, rubs me the wrong way, as it privileges certain viewpoints (not to mention certain specific forms of expression) over others; one of the ideas I find particularly noxious is the insistence that art must "benefit society" through spreading the anti-capitalist, anti-culture industry message etc. etc. In the case with Fairey, as activists they are mostly concerned with the dilution or loss of the "original" historical readings of protest images, powerful symbols that reverberate with their own political positions and causes and concerns. Only the author of the main post pauses to consider what it means to try to circumscribe or contain the meanings of images in this way. In other words, there is no sense here of the problems inherent to being didactic, and agitprop trumps other forms of visual expression without ever being identified as propaganda.

In any case, the main concerns on the Just Seeds post are worth thinking about, regardless of what side of the copyfight or political fence you're on: the "loss of history" via Fairey's decontextualization and re-use of these images, and his supposed closing off of public domain works via their newly minted status through incorporation as central images in his own, copyrighted works is an interesting discussion unto itself. And since my name and my "molotov" affair with Susan Meiselas was cited by two commentators, presumably as an example of why appropriation and decontextualization is a bad thing, I decided it might be time for me to chime in, if briefly. Here's an excerpt the post (long, worth reading in full) and my comment:

[Image source]

A Response to OBEY Plagiarist
Posted December 14, 2007 by jmacphee

It's taken me a long time to get this together, but I wanted to throw my ideas into the discussion around the artwork/plagiarism of Shepard Fairey that has been spinning around the web. For those that might not know, Shepard Fairey is the creator of the "Andre the Giant has a Posse" sticker campaign, which became a long running series of "Obey Giant" posters. Mark Vallen, a Los Angeles-based artist (who created some of my favorite street posters from the early LA punk scene), recently published a long critique of Fairey on his blog, Art For A Change. What I'm writing here directly relates to Mark's piece, so if you haven't read it, give it a look here.

Mark's write-up came out of a long discussion that has been going on between a number of politically-motivated artists and archivists about Fairey's work. Throughout the whole process of discussion it has seemed clear that we have been coming from parallel but divergent positions, with different parts of the larger issues at hand being more or less important to each of us. Mark is clearly concerned with social and political potentials of ART, and believes Fairey's wholesale "theft" of historical images cheapens the potential for art to make change in the world. Lincoln Cushing, an artist, archivist and author who has been involved in the discussions, is very concerned with how plagiarism hurts efforts to empower our communities with their own revolutionary art history. However, he also supports strategic use of existing copyright law, and recently got Fairey to pay retroactive royalties on a t-shirt with Cuban artwork appropriated without credit. Favianna Rodriguez, also involved, has been particularly frustrated with Fairey's use of and profiting off of the art of people of color, and the images of the struggles of people of color, while he has had to pay none of the costs for having to live as a person of color in this society or world. People are already rallying to Fairey's defense, claiming his appropriations are legitimate ways to create art, or simply attacking his critics, namely Mark Vallen. I'm not really interested in attacking Fairey, I simply want to make transparent the politics and economics his work uses and depends on. [read full post + comments]

Here's my brief comment that doesn't nearly address all of these concerns (so far no responses...):

this is a great, thought-provoking post that brings all the difficult issues to the fore, and then some. For me the following is the "money quote" if you'll excuse the expression:

One thing Mark, Lincoln, Favianna and others are deeply concerned about with Fairey's work is the using of social movement imagery, as I understand it because he has no "right" to it. But this confuses me. I want to know who DOES have the right to it? Are some people more authentic leftists, so they have more of a right to authentic leftist graphics? For example, the Russian Revolution was real, it happened, it changed peoples lives, there is no question about that, but the public construction of the revolution, i.e. how all the posters, photos, books, etc. build up to a coherent whole in the social imagination, is that "real"? Authentic? Does any one group have the right to claim it? To claim authenticity? Does Fairey have less right to the social imaginary of revolution than the rest of us? Have we made a revolution and he hasn't?

This, imho, is more at the crux of this issue than some of the concerns voiced here about the "loss of history". If you think it through again, you may find yourself to be on the wrong side of a Free Speech issue (ironically), just as Meiselas did re: the molotov cerfuffle, which was why it behooved her to quickly articulate a rationale to her own otherwise censorious actions -- a rationale that would speak to her posse on the Left. I believe that while Fairey obviously has his own interests in mind, there are many subtle and important uses for decontextualization in art. Also: there is a difference between agitprop and other kinds of visual discourse; it's absurd to assume that these various forms of expression can't co-exist, that one would -- should -- cancel the other out.

cheers,
joy

Posted by: joy     at     January 14, 2008 11:30 AM

Consider this an invitation to an open thread. Discussion in the comments section only please (long email rants will be deleted). please try not to hurl invective.

JG