NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Ben Neill playing @ The Stone

Ben Neill playing @ The Stone, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

benneill.com/
www.lemurbots.org/
www.thestonenyc.com/

Spiral Jetty: Catalyst for Engagement

Image, Michael Buitron; Via. Showing some of "the on-site debris that Dia carted away to pristine-ify the site."

Tyler Green (Modern Art Notes) re-opens discussion about the future of Spiral Jetty and other earthworks...

UPDATE: ...not an hour after I posted Tyler's piece, Michael Buitron responds on his blog and in our comments -- the game is afoot --  here's an excerpt of Michael's blog post, followed by Tyler's post:

Michael Buitron, Leap Into The Void, 9/22/08:

Photograph Michael Buitron, taken from a 1952 Piper Cub.  

Robert Smithson, Rozel Point, Oil Drilling, and the Jetty's Location

Yesterday I posted directions to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. Today Tyler Green begins a series of posts on the Great Salt Lake, and the potential impact of oil exploration in the area. [...]

The Utah Geological Survey has some some good information about Rozel Point on their web site:

Rozel Point is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) fields to produce oil in Utah. The seeps have been known since the late 1800s and production attempts began in 1904. The field produced an estimated 10,000 barrels of oil from 30 to 50 wells, but has been inactive since the mid-1980s due to extremely difficult production, very high refining costs, and rising lake levels.

Rozel Point may not be the place to take a first date. In the August 1995 issue of Survey Notes, Thomas Chidsey writes of “crude oil dripping from abandoned wellheads, tar on rocks and beach sands, and dead pelicans along the beach…”

The wellheads have since been capped, but rusting industrial debris remains. The sweet perfume or retched stench of crude fills your nose. And, you can occasionally see, hear, and feel the U.S. Air Force test weapons in the Lakeside Mountains across Gunnison Bay to the west.

The pink waters of the site picked by Smithson can be attributed to the rock causeway built by the railroad. In the 1950's the lake was divided in two, and the increase in salinity north of the causeway caused the red algae bloom and brine shrimp to replace the preexisting ecosystem.

[read full post]

Tyler Green, Modern Art Notes (MAN), 9/22/08:

All week on MAN: The future of Spiral Jetty

       

            On January 29, 2008 artist Nancy Holt emailed friends about a threat to her late husband Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty: Pearl Montana, a Canadian oil-and-gas company, had asked the state of Utah for permission to engage in energy exploration and extraction near the Jetty. The greatest and most important earthwork in the world was potentially threatened by a corporation that wanted to make a buck regardless of the possible cost to the health of an ecosystem or to a seminal artwork. Holt urged people to contact the state of Utah as soon as possible, to explain to state officials the cultural import of the Jetty and to urge the state to deny Pearl Montana's application. Holt asked them to act quickly: The end of the public comment period was 36 hours away, on Jan. 31. [Photo]

Holt's email was first published on Jan. 30, here on MAN. By the end of the day, scores of blogs picked up on Holt's plea. (Most of the traditional media didn't pick up the story for a week. The New York Times, for example, didn't publish anything until Feb. 6.) On that afternoon after Holt's email went up on MAN, so many blog readers from around the world flooded the state of Utah with emails and phone calls that the state extended the public comment period on Pearl Montana's application. Mostly as a result of a blogs-driven, international 'Save the Jetty!' outcry that resulted in Utah officials receiving over 3,000 emails, Pearl Montana's application was delayed. On August 7 state officials rejected it. Thanks substantially to blog readers, art won.

For now. Eight months later it's clear that Pearl Montana's initial application to explore and drill for oil just west of Spiral Jetty won't be industry's last attempt to treat the Jetty's neighborhood as a commercial resource. It's also clear that drilling is just one of many threats to the Great Salt Lake and to the Jetty. Conservationists are confident that Pearl Montana will be back with a revised application soon, that the company is waiting for the initial 'save the Jetty' fervor to die down. [The map at right is an old Google Satellite image of the Great Salt Lake. The Jetty is marked with a red dot.]

The question is: Is Spiral Jetty threatened by future commercial development? And are arts organizations, most of which have little or no experience in dealing with the confluence of interests and entities involved in preserving an artwork in the landscape, using all available and appropriate measures to save the Jetty?

In a way, Smithson himself expected the Jetty and other earthworks to serve as a catalyst for this kind of engagement between industry, government and environmentalists. Smithson wrote this in 1972, as part of a proposal to a mining company for a project in Ohio:

Our new ecological awareness indicates that industrial production can no longer remain blind to the visual landscape. Earth art could become a visual resource that mediates between ecology and industry.... I am developing an art consciousness for today free from nostalgia and rooted in the process of actual production and reclamation... A dialogue between earth art and mining operations could lead to a whole new consciousness.

Smithson was prescient. That "consciousness" is the debate which began when Pearl Montana filed its first application and when the art world responded. 

This week on MAN I'll detail the latest threats to the Jetty and its view-shed, as well as threats to the Great Salt Lake that could have -- or are already having -- a substantial impact on the Jetty. Here's the lineup:

• Tomorrow I'll discuss the health of the lake and industry's latest attempts to claim more of it;
• On Wednesday I'll write about Utah's first, tentative steps to decide what kind of resource the Great Salt Lake should be, when and why Utah (finally) got interested the lake;
• On Thursday I'll discuss whether the Jetty should be protected by the state or the federal government; and
• On Friday I'll analyze at whether existing organizations with stewardship of the Jetty and an interest in the lake are doing enough.

        September 22, 2008 12:00 PM     | Permalink         

The Schlock of The Few: Germaine Greer Bitch-Slaps Robert Hughes

Damien Hirst at Sotheby’s with a selection of his works he hopes to sell for £65m. Photograph: Felix Clay

via The Guardian, Monday September 22 2008 {found on C-Monster!}:

Germaine Greer Note to Robert Hughes...

Watching Robert Hughes shape up to Damien Hirst has been fun, but it would have been more fun if Hughes had been able to lay a glove on his quarry. The critic swung wildly but the artist was always beyond his reach. Hughes claims to be astounded that Hirst's 35ft statue Virgin Mother could be worth £5m and yet be made by someone "with so little facility". What is touching about Hughes's despair is that he thinks that artists still make things. It's a long time since Hirst actually made an artwork with his own hands. A more cogent criticism of his installations might be that the quality of the craftsmanship demanded by Hirst is really not very good. The shelves and cabinets in Pharmacy (1992) were sloppily fitted and poorly finished, but they still sold for £11m. The first time I saw Mother and Child Divided (1993), with bubbles of gas clinging to the decomposing carcasses of cow and calf, and took a good look at the structure of their vitrines, goosebumps stood up on my skin. I had a momentary vision of the whole setup exploding, showing the onlookers with floods of formaldehyde, shards of plate glass and a blizzard of jet-propelled cow parts.

Hirst is quite frank about what he doesn't do. He doesn't paint his triumphantly vacuous spot paintings - the best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard. His undeniable genius consists in getting people to buy them. Damien Hirst is a brand, because the art form of the 21st century is marketing. To develop so strong a brand on so conspicuously threadbare a rationale is hugely creative - revolutionary even. The whole stupendous gallimaufrey is a Vanitas, a reminder of futility and entropy. Hughes still believes that great art can be guaranteed to survive the ravages of time, because of its intrinsic merit. Hirst knows better. The prices his work fetches are verifications of his main point; they are not the point. No one knows better than Hirst that consumers of his work are incapable of getting that point. His dead cow is a lineal descendant of the Golden Calf. Hughes is sensitive enough to pick up the resonance. "One might as well be in Forest Lawn [the famous LA cemetery] contemplating a loved one," he shouts at Hirst's calf with the golden hooves - auctioned for £9.2m - but does not realise it is Hirst who has put that idea into his head. Instead he asserts that there is no resonance in Hirst's work. Bob dear, the Sotheby's auction was the work.

I have known Hughes and liked him all my adult life, but I have also disapproved of him pretty consistently. I was present when he was the after-dinner speaker at the Royal Academy dinner four years ago, when he was so dismissive of any art that was not drawing, painting or carving, that I suspected him of tailoring his speech to fit what he took to be the conservatism of the academicians. I could hardly imagine that he had turned his back on all the most important movements in 20th-century art or that he was still in love with the figure of the great master whose sensibility is finer, sentiment more noble, hand more divinely driven than those of the rest of us lesser mortals. No wonder Jake and Dinos Chapman put so much energy into defacing Goya, I thought, and stumped off home.

Everybody loves it when Hughes goes off on a rant about the schlock of the new, but he is too easily seduced into blaming the wrong people. A Hughes label is crafted to stick fast to its victim. As long as that's only Julian Schnabel, who is gifted enough to survive both over-valuation and under-valuation, there's not much harm done. Hughes's love of Lucian Freud is a different matter, based as it seems to be in a perception of kindredness of spirit. He denies any pretension to moral superiority, but his condemnation of art he refuses to understand is entirely expressed in moral terms, which leaves no alternative but to see Hughes promoting himself and his favourites as morally superior. What he is most impressed by in Freud's work is, after all, its laboriousness. Hughes doesn't understand a good deal of art - doesn't get Basquiat or Baselitz, for example. What is being presented as aesthetic sensibility is, in fact, moralism, of a kind that has always bedevilled innovative artists. Sorry, Bob, but you're a stuckist, after all.

Worldly Toddler Demands Change!

via Rumproast: Your daily Dose of Cute

{watch video; story via DailyKos}

10/24/08> UPDATE: THE NEW YORK ALSO TIMES ENDORSES OBAMA

ACTA: Of Secrecy and Global Trade Treaties

Image Via

via MultinationalMonitor.org {thanks Axel!}:

Counterfeit Democracy
By Robert Weissman
September 15, 2008

A new draft global trade treaty may interfere with fair use of copyrighted materials, require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to monitor all consumers' Internet communications, and undermine access to low-cost generic medicines.

Does the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) contain provisions that would actually do these things?

There's no way to know, because the treaty text remains secret.

More than 100 public interest organizations from around the world today called on officials from the countries negotiating ACTA -- the United States, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Switzerland Australia and New Zealand -- to publish immediately the draft text of the agreement.

U.S. trade negotiators have justified the cloak-and-dagger approach to ACTA on the grounds that all trade treaties are negotiated in secret. But this is not so. Negotiating texts are commonly made public in multilateral trade negotiations, including in the current Doha Round negotiations at the World Trade Organization and the now discarded talks for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, and in treaty negotiations at organizations like the World Health Organization and the World
Intellectual Property Organization.

In any case, what possible rationale is there to keep a treaty that claims to be about unauthorized copying secret? Are the negotiators worried that counterfeiters might somehow influence the negotiations?

No, the reason is to keep the public in the dark.

This matters, because intentionally or not, a treaty to prevent unauthorized copying may easily go too far, and undermine important consumer interests. And it matters because, not surprisingly, there's more to worry about than errors by well-meaning technocrats.

The recording industry, Hollywood, the software moguls, and Big Pharma are all aiming to use tough talk about "counterfeiters" and "piracy" to push governments to do much more than crack down on trademark and copyright infringers who aim to deceive consumers. They want government assistance in enforcement of trademarks, copyright and patents, even though these are private rights. And they want to impose liability on third parties that might possibly facilitate unauthorized uses, even if these third parties are unaware of the activities of alleged infringers.
This is an agenda being pursued in multiple venues, of which ACTA is among the most important.

One reason that ACTA is so important is that it almost certainly is intended to apply to the entire world. Borrowing from the strategy of the failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the rich countries are working out a deal among themselves. Then the rest of the world's nations will be told that they can join the treaty on a take-it-or-leave-it basis -- with major pressure imposed to get
developing countries to take it.

News reports and published material from various business associations certainly give reason to fear what may be in the treaty. The public interest sign-on letter expresses concern that ACTA may:

* Require ISPs to monitor all consumers' Internet communications, terminate their customers' Internet connections based on copyright holders' repeat allegations of copyright infringement, and divulge the identity of alleged copyright infringers possibly without judicial process, threatening Internet users' due process and privacy rights; and potentially make ISPs liable for their end users' alleged infringing activity;

* Interfere with fair use of copyrighted materials;

* Criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing;

* Interfere with legitimate parallel trade in goods, including the resale of brand-name pharmaceutical products (known as drug "reimportation" in the United States);

* Impose liability on manufacturers of pharmaceutical raw materials, if those raw materials are used to make counterfeits. Such a liability system would likely make raw materials manufacturers reluctant to sell to legal generic drug makers, and thereby significantly damage the functioning of the legal generic pharmaceutical industry;

* Improperly criminalize acts not done for commercial purpose and with no public health consequences; and

* Improperly divert public resources into enforcement of private rights.

Presented with these concerns, the U.S. Trade Representative's officials say there is no reason to be worried. ACTA won't require more than existing U.S. free trade agreements, the officials say.

This assurance is, first, not exactly a comfort.

Meanwhile, business groups are explicit that believe ACTA should do far more than existing U.S. free trade agreements. Are they having their way? There's no way to know as long as the draft treaty remains a secret.

+++
Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, <http://www.multinationalmonitor.org> and director of Essential Action <http://www.essentialaction.org>. Essential Action helped organize the ACTA sign-on letter discussed in this article.

(c) Robert Weissman

This article is posted at:
<http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2008/000299.html>.