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Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 176

Found Art (Soho): Unmonumental 176, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

History & Omission... More on the Pictures Generation show

Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) Untitled (You Are Not Yourself), 1981
Private collection, courtesy Skarstedt Fine Art, New York

This letter from Philip Smith should be widely distributed. Also: Douglas Crimp's take, and Barry Schwabsky's piece in The Nation...

via Art in America:

Setting the Record Straight

by AiA Staff 06/26/09

The following letter from artist Philip Smith arrived at Art in America' s offices on June 11, 2009.

Dear Art in America:

As one of the five original artists in the seminal 1977 "Pictures" exhibition, I read with great interest Jess Wilcox's interview with Mr. Doug Eklund regarding his "Pictures Generation" exhibition at the Met. [See "The Pictures Generation: A Conversation with Douglas Eklund" published in Art in America's online edtion on April 21, 2009.]  In the interview Mr. Eklund explains my omission from the show by stating, "When I reviewed [Philip Smith's] work for this show, it seemed not strong enough to be included ..."

The truth is Mr. Eklund never contacted me or any of my representatives regarding my archives from the period.  It is unclear as to what work he actually reviewed to make this sweeping judgment.  If, in fact, my work was "not strong enough to be included" how did I ever end up in the original "Pictures" exhibition, much less the over 100 exhibitions since 1977 that have also included the Whitney and Beijing Biennials?

Had Mr. Eklund contacted me, I could have provided him with hundreds of examples of photo-based work that include slide-shows and photo-works, as well as photo-based paintings, drawings and sculptures from the period, all in accordance with the "Pictures" aesthetic.

What happened with regard to my omission from the "Pictures Generation" exhibition has set off alarm bells with various critics.  Most notably, Holland Cotter wrote a front-page Arts section article (May 31) on this issue titled, "Cultural History is Being Written and Revised, Right Before Our Eyes. It Can Be a Disturbing Sight." In the article Mr. Cotter writes about the "Pictures Generation,"...The show...as history has problems.  The most obvious of them is factual.  Of the original five "Pictures" artists, only four are acknowledged.  No work by Mr. Smith is on view; his name is mentioned only once in the catalog. His portrait has effectively been removed from the hall of fame ... In the interest of accuracy Mr. Smith should have been included in the Met show.  As it is, his absence turns historical record into invention ..."

In the The Nation, Barry Schwabsky also expressed his concern regarding the omission of my work. "... Smith, by the way, has gone missing without the slightest explanation ... it's unfortunate that a reader of the catalog (co-published by the Met and Yale University Press) might easily not realize he had ever been included."

Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York Magazine, posted on his Facebook page, "... one wonders why Philip Smith was excluded from the Met show when he was in the original "Pictures" show ... it's annoying how so many curators mindlessly buy whatever party-line they're sold." {more}

As you can see, I am not the only one puzzled by Mr. Eklund's inexplicable curatorial decision to ignore my work and my influence.  Even more bizarre is the notion that artists not related to the ‘Pictures' aesthetic were pressed into service by Mr. Eklund.  As Martha Schwendener reports in The Village Voice, "Eklund admits, many artists, when contacted, refused to identify themselves as ‘Pictures artists'."

One cannot help but wonder why the Met so obviously chose to rewrite art history and produce an historical survey damaged by flawed scholarship and for what reason.

I have had the pleasure of being reviewed in A.i.A., and would greatly appreciate it if you would consider an examination of what really took place in the creation of the "Pictures Generation.'" Apparently, there is much more to this story than has been publicly discussed.


With warmest regards,

Philip Smith

via CultureGrrl:

Q&A with Douglas Crimp: Responses to the Met’s "Picture Generation" from the Group’s First Proponent

By Lee Rosenbam

{excerpt}

April 30, 2009

[...]

The person I was most interested in hearing from is curator/critic Douglas Crimp, who was a seminal figure at that moment of contemporary art history and is now an art history professor at the University of Rochester. It was he who first identified the affinities of this group of artists and their creative progeny as a new, important development, when he curated and wrote the text for the 1977 "Pictures" exhibition that provided the seed from which the Met's show grew. The enduring influence of that small show and the Crimp's related essay far exceeded expectations when the display of five artists---Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntuch and Philip Smith (the last of whom has been snubbed by the Met's show and catalogue)---opened at Artists Space, a feisty alternative venue in New York.

Having been told at the press preview that Crimp himself was present among us (although all public remarks came from Eklund), I cornered him (as luck would have it) in front of works by his favorite artist in the show, Louise Lawler, whose reputation may get the biggest boost from this Metropolitan Museum exposure.

In the spirit of "Pictures," I'm appropriating Crimp's comments for my own work. (I'm the "Q"; he's the "A.")

Q: What's your take on the Met's take on a subject in which you had been so involved?

A: There's been an uptake of the "Pictures" exhibition that's continued for about 32 years now. It's been a very long process of being tied to this moment and that little exhibition that I did at Artists Space. I guess at this point I can say I'm pretty detached from it. Of course I'm also extremely attached, but I'm detached insofar as I've watched the process of something I did and a couple of texts that I wrote become a part of history. I've realized over time that you can't control the way history is made.

Q: If you could control it, how would you do things differently than this [the Met's show]?

A: I have no interest in controlling. I did something: I did a little exhibition; I wrote a text; I rewrote the text and published it a couple of years later in "October." It had effects. A lot of it is very gratifying to me. A lot of the attention has been paid to that little exhibition, but also to what I wrote about a group of artists and a phenomenon.

It's been interesting to see how much that has had an effect and I guess it has proved to me that all of us who participate are making art's meanings---the viewers of art, the critics of art, obviously the artists and the museums that make exhibitions---all of these constitute meaning in works of art. Meanings don't inhere in the objects themselves. They actually have to do with reception.

Q: Are the meanings that you see here different from the meanings that you intended back then and the meanings that you would attribute to these things now? How does your perspective differ from the point of view reflected in this exhibition?

A: It's not so much about my being married to what I thought then. I don't even know what I thought then, because I thought so many many things subsequently. It's more about what I think now.

In what Doug [Eklund] was just saying [in his remarks to the press], he gave a certain amount of attention to the importance of women and I think that has to be really emphasized. In his first wall text, he mentions feminism but then he goes on to define the influence of feminism as something like, "It doesn't matter what the gender of the artist is." [The wall text stated that feminism "made it possible for woman artists to define themselves as artists who happened to be women."]

I think that's NOT the lesson of feminism. The lesson of feminism is in the kind of art that's being made and the kinds or propositions that were being made through the art---the critique of originality, for example, which is something I already argued for early on with respect to Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman. I think that's a feminist perspective and that is a crucial aspect of this formation of artists. I didn't recognize that at the time.

I don't think that the work of Louise Lawler---probably the artist I feel closest to, in relation to my subsequent work---can be understood without taking account of second-wave feminism.


Louise Lawler, "Pollock and Tureen," 1984, Metropolitan Museum, image courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures

Q: Do you have a more political take on all of this than we're seeing here?

A: I don't know, but what struck me about the Sarah Charlesworth piece is that it actually was not just a photograph but [related to] a particular political event [the kidnapping by the Italian Red Brigade of Prime Minister Aldo Moro]. I'd have to read the catalogue to know how he [Eklund] is dealing with the politics of it. [Eklund sticks with how "conceptually astute" the piece is. It shows photographs that appeared on various newspapers' front pages on the day when Moro's hostage picture was published. His image is the small one on The Times; second from top on The Guardian.]


Sarah Charlesworth, "April 21, 1978" (detail), from the series Modern History, 1978, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

Q: What do you make of Philip Smith's absence from the Met's show?

A: He was not so much of the group, of the social world, of the people who formulated this. He's gay and this [the Met's show] is a very straight configuration of artists. I don't know what's happened to him, career-wise. It's a slightly touchy subject: I think Philip is upset, reasonably.

What's more interesting is that four of the five continue to be artists that we think about. [Crimp also noted that he himself had omitted Smith and added Sherman in his second essay on "Pictures," published in "October" magazine. Eklund later told me that he had made a "curatorial decision" to exclude Smith: "I didn't respond to his work strongly enough to include it."]

[read on...]

via The Nation:

COLLECTION OF B.Z. AND MICHAEL SCHWARTZ
Big Camera, Small Camera, by Laurie Simmons, 1977

A Million Little Pictures: The Pictures Generation Revisited

By Barry Schwabsky

This article appeared in the June 1, 2009 edition of The Nation.

May 13, 2009

{excerpt}

"On Saturday, September 30, 1967," as artist Robert Smithson was careful to specify, he embarked on a trip from New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal to his hometown. He was about to undertake what in his now-famous text he would call "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey." (It's not clear whether the piece should be called an essay or a story; perhaps it's best to call it an artwork made of writing and pictures.) The monuments in question were things like concrete abutments for a highway under construction and a pumping derrick connected to a long pipe. As he stepped off the bus at his first monument, a bridge connecting Bergen and Passaic counties across the Passaic River, Smithson noticed that "Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an overexposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a series of detached 'stills' through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank."

Writing in a tone derived in part from the deceptive objectivity of the French nouveau roman (he quotes from Mobile, Michel Butor's collage-travelogue of the United States) and in part from British new-wave science fiction (he entertains himself on the bus ride with the New York Times and Brian Aldiss's dystopian sci-fi novel Earthworks), Smithson evokes a vacant reality made only of "memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures." Critics fascinated with Smithson's apparently post-Duchampian idea that banal objects become art simply by being looked at a certain way--that "a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance," as he would write a year later--have often overlooked the way Smithson framed his saturnine view of postindustrial culture through the eye of the camera. His alienation allows him to perceive that things, made or natural, are mere photographs of themselves, and that these photographs are essentially "stills" excerpted from the film that is time. Rereading "The Monuments of Passaic," one begins to wonder whether the grainy snapshots with which Smithson illustrated his text are secretly not photographs of the monuments but in fact the monuments themselves. It is clear that, for him, the image is always of something that was already an image. Artists have perennially had the feeling that they are merely the channel for something that is already art, but Smithson's notion of sunlight pitching images into his eye through the camera is a peculiarly gnostic or paranoid version of it, with a visceral punch characteristic of a contemporary of William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick.

Smithson died in a plane crash in 1973 at the age of 35, so he could hardly have been part of the exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Pictures Generation 1974-1984" (through August 2), which is devoted to a loosely knit group of artists mostly born ten to fifteen years after him--the first wave of baby boomers, if you like, the first generation to grow up with (black-and-white) TV. And Smithson is barely even mentioned as an influence on this group in the extensive catalog essay by the exhibition's curator, Douglas Eklund, who imagines Smithson as an artist of "cataclysmic processes and sublime vistas of the natural world," as distinguished from these younger artists who were more immersed in "the media culture of movies and television, popular music, and magazines, which to them constituted a sort of fifth element or prevailing kind of weather." Eklund nominates Smithson's contemporary John Baldessari, a smaller artist but a legendary teacher, as the Pictures group's honorary chef d'école. Yet Smithson's ghost lingers everywhere in the show, and as ghosts tend to do, it lingers mostly to reproach. What a work like "The Monuments of Passaic" shows so clearly is that, for Smithson, nature and the image-apparatus were one and the same, and to see is always to see a mediated image. Some of the works in "The Pictures Generation"--most of the best ones--are based on the same premise. But too many of the artists really do seem to have believed, as Eklund does now, that their work should be concerned with "media culture" as a self-contained area of investigation, and their work is all the narrower for that.

"The Pictures Generation" takes its title from a famous exhibition of 1977--famous in the sense that many more people remember it than ever really saw it. The original "Pictures" took place at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space, in New York City, and it was further publicized by a couple of articles by its curator, the critic Douglas Crimp, published in Flash Art and October in 1979. Of course, the Met show is far more than a rerun. Crimp exhibited the work of just five artists (Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith), whereas Eklund's "Pictures Generation" encompasses nearly thirty--among whom Smith, by the way, has gone missing without the slightest explanation. There's nothing wrong with that in itself because Smith's work, a more traditional kind of painting, really does seem to have been on a different track. But it's unfortunate that a reader of the catalog (co-published by the Met and Yale University Press) might easily not realize he had ever been included.

That's just one example of how Eklund, having amassed a vast amount of information on his artists and their milieu, has organized it haphazardly. The catalog is a rarity in being blessed with an index, but if you look up "Pictures" in the index, you will find, perversely enough, multiple references to "artists not included in" the 1977 show but no entry to point you to a page that says who was included. Basically, though, Eklund's loose-knit Pictures generation mainly comprises two distinct groups of artists. One consists of former students of Baldessari's at Cal Arts who had moved east to New York. The other group, less academic in formation and more working class in origin, had gathered around the artist-run space Hallwalls in Buffalo before migrating downstate. There, both groups gravitated to Artists Space and the downtown art and music scene, and some of the artists began to show with the commercial gallery Metro Pictures, which was co-founded by the former director of Artists Space, Helene Winer, in 1980. Its opening was immediately and presciently seen by the critic Robert Pincus-Witten as "definitely" marking "the death of the '60s" (as though the intervening decade had merely been an extension of it).

Pincus-Witten's judgment should raise suspicions when we read Eklund's summation of what constitutes the rough unity of the Pictures group: "They synthesized the lessons of Minimalism and Conceptualism in which they were educated, with a renewed (though hardly uniform) attention to Pop art because it chimed with the new, media-driven world they had inherited." Maybe, but if all that was at stake in the work of the Pictures generation was an effort to tie up a tidy little semiotic package out of the unruly and contradictory impulses of an older generation, it's not likely anyone would be taking the trouble to re-examine their work today. Opening the exhibition up to encompass so many artists was a good decision in that it helps re-create a sense of context, but a more stringent selection focusing on, say, nine central figures--Brauntuch, Goldstein, Levine and Longo plus Louise Lawler, Allan McCollum, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and James Welling--would have allowed for more specificity. One might then have said that the Pictures group had gleaned from the Minimalists and Conceptualists a sense that art should assume an incommunicative, pugnaciously neutral stance--that it should throw down the gauntlet of its own incomprehensibility. The public's inability to find anything to see or any evidence of work or meaning in, say, a row of bricks by Carl Andre might be repeated in its encounter with Levine's photograph of a photograph by Walker Evans or one by James Welling showing some crumpled foil. But this willingness to use recalcitrant inconsequentiality to frustrate the viewer's desire might be all they have in common.

[read on...]

Tainted Love reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail

via Visual AIDS >blog:

Tainted Love reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail

From The Brooklyn Rail
July/August 2009

Tainted Love
by Kara L. Roney

Love is not about power. It is not about politics. It holds no stake in reason, activist articulation or abstraction—or at least that is what the literary romantics would have us believe. Love, in fact, is intimately connected to the above, its voice most powerfully manifest in its contribution to communal world-making and social reform.

On the evening of June 28, 1969, a riot broke out at the Mafia-owned Stonewall Inn, one of the sole refuges at that time for the gay community in New York City. Largely viewed as the catalyst for the modern gay rights movement, these demonstrations would become a touchstone for the gay faction in America, giving birth to a number of organizations that would, at first, advocate for gay rights and later agitate against the AIDS epidemic. Forty years later, Tainted Love, curated by Steven Lam and Virginia Solomon, features works by a number of these organizations and collectives—among them General Idea, Gran Fury and fierce pussy—as well as individual artists intimately connected to the AIDS movement in some form. These artists, responding to the personal and communal devastation wrought by the epidemic, as well as the notion of love as a political animal, invoke the aesthetics of language, text, video, photography, and even the traditional platform of painting as activist signifiers.  (continue reading here)

[Tainted Love closed June 28, 2009 at La MaMa La Galleria.  For exhibition details and catalog click here)

Post Print?

screen grab, LATFH.com


via The Brooklyn Rail:

In Print We Trust

by Sarah Hromack

Historically speaking, those of us who embraced the Web long ago have suffered the summary dismissal that tends to accompany all major cultural paradigm shifts. This all-too-familiar feeling of resistance toward the Web (hide your daughters, the Internet is coming!) has only been exacerbated by the current economic climate, where newsroom vets are gripped by terror as “The Youngs” hack their way into a system formerly reserved for J-school initiates. As the mainstream media embrace the Web, that dialectic tension already feels a bit tedious. Bloggers are getting their due—or making progress at, least—and that is that. We are and always have been evangelists for the Web, devoted to a platform that provides us with a degree of agency that the print bureaucracy simply does not. The curious part, however, is that we’ve never stopped wanting to see our words in print, even when editors have refused to look at them.

Enter the Book Deal, a harbinger of fame (and hopefully, fortune) that for many now serves as a strategic reason to begin blogging in the first place. The most lucrative deals tend to be awarded to those whose sites function as durational book proposals, where an author’s thesis coalesces through a succession of topical, short-form posts. These one-offs lend themselves naturally to publication in print, where the narrative has more room to develop. (A great irony, yes, given the Web’s indexical capacity. Yet a couple hundred thousand words simply do not read the same online as they do on the page.) Political pundits tend to score publishing contracts, as do other subject-specific authors. Being “Internet famous” never hurts, either: Minds reeled around this time last year when former Gawker editor Emily Gould spun her now-seminal New York Times Magazine account of her tendency to “overshare” into a full-on memoir deal. Her take was initially said to be $1 million, a rumor that has since been debunked.

Newer publishing platforms and social networking applications—namely, Tumblr and Twitter—have ushered in a new kind of blog-to-book deal: The user generated model. Look at this Fucking Hipster is the Internet brainchild of one Joe Mande, a standup comedian with his own show at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater and, as of early June, a soon-to-be published author. LATFH is his chronicle of hipsterdom at its sartorial best, posted anonymously to a Tumblr account that caught the attention of editors at Penguin’s Gotham Books imprint, publisher of blog-to-book luminaries Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle and I Can Haz Cheeseburger—not to mention the rest of the Internet, where Gawker gleefully outed Mande as the site’s author. LATFH The Book will likely take the form of its analog predecessor, Vice Magazine’s “Dos and Don’ts”, a dorm room cooler-cum-coffee table-worthy collection of the magazine’s brutal fashion critiques based on photographs of dubious origin. Reader-submitted or “found” content is perfectly suited to Tumblr, a one-click publishing platform whose users tend to favor rapid-fire, image-heavy posts over longer missives. As with Twitter, bloggers can “follow” one another’s Tumblr accounts, re-publishing posts at will in a free-and-easy exchange of authorship, a Deconstructivist’s dream made manifest through the Web.

While media watchdogs fixate on the actual book deals—namely, on the dollar sum of the advance, as this is one form of online commerce that still amazes us—few pause to consider the books themselves. How strangely anachronistic is it (and yet, extraordinarily telling) that those who participate in perhaps the most monumental democratic exercise ever—and who do so daily, often for a living—would seek to tame the great, unbridled, immaterial beast that is the Internet with some high-gloss stock and two binding boards? How thoroughly odd it is that one would attempt to translate the particular digital reading experience of the Tumblr blog, or Twitter feed, or Facebook update into an analog one. What about the Kindle?

When asked why he felt compelled to select 600 tweets for Twitter Wit, his forthcoming book from Harper Collins, former Valleywag editor and Internet wunderkind Nick Douglas cited Postcards from Yo Momma, another blog-to-book phenomenon written by Jessica Grose and Gawker alum Doree Shafrir:

To make a book out of these submissions is to fix what PFYM is about, or to create an entity intentionally different than PFYM in certain ways. This is not the mere regurgitation of web content: The different balance of reader attention, standards of quality, intended audience, and writer-reader relationship (the reader, for example, can no longer comment, and a mediocre submission no longer encourages similar but better submissions) turns the book into something new. Of course many bloggers with book deals start saving “the good stuff” for the printed version.

The possible pitfall with the blog-to-book translation has as much to do with form as it does content: Sneaking a tweet during a lecture or a film, followed by a quick checkup on my friends’ updates with a flick of my iPhone’s screen, is a much different tactical and cognitive experience than settling in with a piece of printed matter (a veritable luxury given the good, solid twelve-to-fourteen hours a day I spend online as a writer and editor). While I appreciate the convenience of a published compendium of essays culled from a favorite website—again, I’m talking about long-form writing here—the Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook experience depends as much on looking as it does on reading. Why else would Facebook users revolt when the site launched its new interface several months back? Would the Twitter’s infamous Fail Whale, the jovial cartoon that delivers a pop-up apology when the system is over capacity, hold its charm in print? Here, I am doubtful. (To be fair though, perhaps we will surprise ourselves in casting a backwards glance from the Internet to print. One can hope.)

By that token, this hybrid identity between blogger and author wouldn’t exist to begin with if a few chaps in Cambridge and San Francisco hadn’t taken a gamble on the Internet’s ability to summon our most deeply rooted needs and desires. Most powerful amongst these is validation: Everyone wants to feel wanted. And it’s hard to deny an opportunity to see our names memorialized in a tangible, keepsake form. We can’t literally hand the Internet down to our children, after all.

Or, as writer and Gawker contributor, Melissa Gira Grant, who is also working on a book proposal about sex and the Internet, puts it: “People will sign over their proprietary rights to a post or an image because they don’t see a picture of a hamburger as having cultural value unless it’s published in a book alongside 300 other hamburgers. They can’t see the aggregate form.” Ultimately, the blog-to-book deal constitutes a leap of faith on the part of the author (and publisher!)—an attempt to traverse genres while certain of others’ willingness to come along for the ride. “Publishing is still a healthy industry,” Douglas insists, “and this will be the biggest audience some of my contributors have ever reached.” Spoken like a true believer.

Sarah Hromack is Web Editor of Art in America and the former editor of Curbed San Francisco.

The Future of "Free"

 

Illustration by David Reinfurt

via NYTimes:

What You Pay For

By VIRGINIA POSTREL

Published: July 10, 2009

Fifteen years ago — before Google or Wikipedia or blogging or Craigs­list or podcasts or YouTube — the technology investor and pundit Esther Dyson wrote an article analyzing the business of “creative content” in a future where the Internet made distribution essentially free. “Creators will have to fight to attract attention and get paid,” she predicted. Enforcing copyrights won’t be enough, because creators “will operate in an increasingly competitive marketplace where much of the intellectual property is distributed free and suppliers explode in number. . . . The problem for owners of content is that they will be competing with free or almost-free content.”

That future is today, and it is the subject of “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired and the author of “The Long Tail.” Despite its subtitle, the book is less about the future than the present and recent past, which Anderson surveys in a cheerful, can-do voice. “People are making lots of money charging nothing,” he writes. “Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00.”

Driving the trend are the steeply declining prices of three essential technologies: computing power, digital storage and transmission capacity. Reproducing and delivering digital content — words, music, software, pictures, video — has now fulfilled the prophecy once made about electricity. It has become too cheap to meter. “Whatever it costs YouTube to stream a video today will cost half as much in a year,” Anderson writes. “The trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero. No wonder the prices online all go the same way.”

More precisely, the marginal cost of digital products, or the cost of delivering one additional copy, is approaching zero. The fixed cost of producing the first copy, however, may be as high as ever. All those servers and transmission lines, as cheap as they may be per gigabyte, require large initial investments. The articles still have to be written, the songs recorded, the movies made. The crucial business question, then, is how you cover those fixed costs. As many an airline bankruptcy demonstrates, it can be extremely hard to survive in a business with high fixed costs, low marginal costs and relatively easy entry. As long as serving one new customer costs next to nothing, the competition to attract as many customers as possible will drive prices toward zero. And zero doesn’t pay the bills.

The answer, Anderson argues, lies in cross-subsidies: “shifting money around from product to product, person to person, between now and later, or into non­monetary markets and back out again.” Most obviously, online advertisers can subsidize content by paying for eyeballs or, in some cases, for detailed information on potential consumers. Less familiar is the “freemium” strategy, in which a site like Flickr offers one package of services free but charges for an ad-free package with more features, allowing a small fraction of users to subsidize the rest.

Often, however, the cross-subsidy is a way to sell one product by giving away another. Monty Python created a YouTube channel with their most popular skits in hopes of enticing fans to buy their DVDs. Their shows and movies soon hit Amazon’s best-seller list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent. “Free worked, and worked brilliantly,” Anderson writes.

This technique is as old as the supermarket loss leader or TVs in sports bars. Unlike cartons of milk or six-packs of soda, however, once digital content exists, it costs nothing to hand out to a near-infinite number of customers — no limit of one per household. The Internet, meanwhile, is one huge sports bar, with Google selling most of the beer by collecting infinitesimal amounts (via advertising) across billions and billions of searches and page views. Obscured by the breezy tone of “Free” is a sobering message. “Everybody can use a Free business model,” Anderson admits, “but all too typically only the No. 1 company can get really rich with it.”

Unlike tangible commodities like T-shirts or plastics, most digital content doesn’t generate much new demand as its price falls toward zero. Even with no admission fee, videos, blog posts and online games soak up users’ time, and time has a hard limit. So as the supply of cheap content expands, it can’t simply fill ever-growing closets (or garbage dumps). Instead, the competition for time and attention becomes ever fiercer, and the market ever more fragmented. Any given producer will find profits elusive, especially since it’s so easy for amateurs to enter the market.

Faced with collapsing business models, today’s journalists-in-denial rail against Anderson’s message. Free content cannot be the future, they say, because content is valuable. Fixed costs must be covered. We have bills to pay. The problem, they argue, is that we’re giving our work away.

[read on...]