NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Kindle: Fire Extinguisher?

Image via v.max1978 (flickr)

In a recent conversation I had about sharing books, and the difficulty of engaging in such basic activities as sharing posed by e-books, my acquaintance went so far as to describe the book -- the old-school printed kind -- as a nearly perfect technology. He may be right. As a user and lover of Kindle, as well as a reader and lover of printed books, this sharing problem continues to rankle:

via Defective By Design:

Amazon Kindle extinguishes the fire of learning
Posted On: Wed, 2011-09-28 11:59 by mattl

Amazon came out with their newest line of Kindle ebook readers today, including the appropriately named "Kindle Fire".

To quote their TV commercial: "The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

This device does not kindle that fire -- it extinguishes it, with more of the same digital restrictions.

Let's look at the facts:

• Amazon claims you have no right to sell or share the books you buy. They advertise a "lending" feature which, at best, allows you to lend a book one time ever, to one person, who must also be a Kindle user. You don't get to make the decision about whether you can lend a book or not -- the publisher and Amazon do. That's not sharing.

• In fact, when people tried to cooperate to make large-scale use of the lending function, Amazon shut them down. The most prominent example of this was the web site Lendle, which is back up now, albeit with fewer features, including a feature which made it easy to lend the books you have without typing in all the titles -- a move forced on them by Amazon to discourage sharing.

• The power exerted over its users, arbitrarily blocking lending of books and remotely removing books, is unacceptable even if they later change their minds or promise to stop doing it.

• Amazon is working its way into public libraries and schools now, subverting the functioning of the very places they, in the above quote, claim to support.

• Via the wireless connectivity of these devices, Amazon can hold data about everything you read.

• Also via the connectivity, Amazon can delete books from Kindles. They have already done this multiple times. They say they won't do it anymore, but they make users sign an agreement which still gives them the authority to. They have demonstrated only reasons to doubt their word.

• Although it is possible to use the Kindle for DRM-free materials, that is not the system that Amazon is promoting or working most actively toward. Funding Amazon's work in this area, even if you use it differently, is supporting their moves at limiting sharing and access to books.

The result: More of the same: A major threat to the shareability -- like fire -- that has enabled human culture and knowledge to advance.

Take action!

• Send a message to Amazon's Kindle Team via Twitter -- @amazonkindle -- be wary of using Twitter directly, as it uses proprietary JavaScript. Using your Twitter account via identi.ca is a good choice.
• Contact Amazon customer services: Chat, phone and email support here and ask them to drop DRM from the Kindle.

• mattl's blog

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Blood on the Tracks? Dylan's Ballon Dogs

First there was this piece in the NYTimes artbeat blog about Bob Dylan's paintings being based on nay, copied [GASP!] from famous photographs. Ho hum. Then there was something amusing in ARTINFO about a guy and his flickr stream of old images, [Dylan Shanghaied My Flickr!], which somehow manages to downplay the major fact that the guy collects public domain images, which means neither he nor anyone else owns the copyright to them; he just collects them and makes them freely available online.

Okay, so far, no one has much of an angle on this story.

Happily, Mike Masnick of Techdirt points to the obvious: Dylan's copyright hypocrisy. (Think Koons and balloon dogs).

Mike's belittling comment, "Painting from a source photograph is a good way for many to learn how to paint," is pure snark aimed at Dylan's Sunday painter cred. But it should be noted (again and again) that painters have used photographs as source material since the invention of photography (Manet, Degas, Sickert...); and if you really want to go there, you can think hard about Vermeer's use of pinhole cameras to mediate and project images of his interiors before painting them. Imho, the more productive narrative about painters and their age-old use of photographs as source material is not the one about copyright and ownership, but the one about technology and mediation. But that's another story for another post.

Here's Mike's post - don't forget to read the priceless comments.

via Techdirt:

Bob Dylan, Defender Of Strong Copyrights, Once Again Caught Copying Others

from the sing-a-song-of-hypocrisy dept

by Mike Masnick

Thu, Sep 29th 2011 11:40am

Bob Dylan has a pretty long history of appropriating works from others, but then going after anyone who has built on his works. He's also been held up by copyright maximalists as someone whose career just wouldn't be the same without strong copyright. So it's somewhat amusing to discover, once again, that he's been caught outright copying others. Emily Goodhand points us to the news that Dylan has a new painting exhibit, and people have started noticing that some of the paintings appear to be clearly copied from old photographs. Take these two comparisons from the NY Times:

 

 

The images on the left are from Dylan's exhibit (photographs taken by the NY Times' Marcus Yam). The top photo on the right is by Henri Cartier-Bresson, and the lower photo is by Leon Busy. It would be difficult for anyone to argue that the paintings were not based on these photos. Dylan had claimed that the paintings were all based on scenes he had seen in his travels. I guess he may have seen those photographs during his travels, but that's certainly not the implied origin of the paintings.

Now, to be clear, I actually don't see anything wrong with Dylan making such paintings. Painting from a source photograph is a good way for many to learn how to paint. On top of that, the paintings don't take away anything from the photos, and may actually create more attention for the photos. It does feel sleazy, though, to not credit the source. But the bigger issue is the hypocrisy of it all -- of arguing that others can't appropriate his works, while regularly and directly appropriating the works of others... and then refusing to admit to it.

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Felix Salmon: Who owns Spiral Jetty?

Image via greg.org

 

via Felix Salmon | A slice of lime in the soda (@ Reuters):

Who owns Spiral Jetty?

By Felix Salmon, Jul 8, 2011 03:50 EDT

Greg Allen is a true polymath: he’s a filmmaker, curator, art collector, web entrepreneur and a philanthropist. He’s an artist in his own right: he likes to play with conceptual art-about-art-about-art works. He even has an MBA in finance from Wharton. And now he’s set up the Jetty Foundation, which has made a bid to lease from the state of Utah the site of Robert Smithson’s most iconic work. (And, according to Tyler Green, the Greatest Post-War Artwork in the world.)

The backstory is here; basically, the land used to be leased by the Dia Foundation, but that lease expired and now everything is up in the air. Greg explains:

In the simplest terms, I’m bidding for the lease because it seems irresponsible not to…

When I called the Department to ask to be notified if the State decided to open the lease for competitive bidding, I was told I’d be added to the list. At that moment, it occurred to me that parties other than Dia were expressing interest in the lease.

As weeks passed, with no resolution, the possibility that Dia might not automatically get a new lease grew, along with the uncertainty of Spiral Jetty‘s fate.

At the core of Greg’s bid is a pretty mind-bending three-way distinction between the artwork itself, the intellectual property it represents and the land it is made of. Here’s Greg trying to explain things to Tyler:

“I made very clear in my application letter that by creating this foundation and by pursuing this lease, we are acknowledging fully the artist’s estate as the owner of the intellectual property of the artwork and Dia as the owner of the title of the artwork (as donated by the estate). I was making no claims on any of those items. I think that’s a distinction that the state itself had not really thought through in its own process.”

Greg dryly says in his own post that he “will not speculate” on “no-doubt invigorating conceptual implications” of this idea — but I’m pretty sure that very few people other than Greg Allen would have come up with the idea that they could somehow own the Spiral Jetty without actually owning Spiral Jetty. I particularly like the way he talks in his post about “Dia’s undisputed ownership of the Spiral Jetty artwork”, as though it’s self-evidently obvious that you can separate the land comprising the object, on the one hand, and the object itself — and that they could be owned by two different entities.

Indeed, if Greg’s bid is accepted, there will be no fewer than four entities with ownership claims here: the Jetty Foundation, with the lease to the land; the state of Utah, which owns the land; the Dia Foundation, which owns the artwork; and the Smithson Estate, which owns the intellectual property rights associated with the artwork. Clear? I didn’t think so.

With more conventional art, these kinds of distinctions make no sense at all. For instance, I own William Powhida’s drawing of the market oligopoly system; he, however, owns the intellectual property and so I need his permission if I want to reproduce or sell images of it. My ownership is of the object, not the intellectual property. The object is the artwork: I could never sell the paper that the drawing sits on without selling the artwork itself.

In the case of Spiral Jetty, however, Greg seems to be asserting that what we have here is something closer to architecture, where a building can be owned by one person and the land underneath it by another. (Unsurprisingly, this is not good news when it comes to property values.)

But in the case of lend-lease buildings, the lease on the land is, as a rule, held by the owner of the building. It takes a former investment banker like Greg Allen to come up with the idea that the leaseholder could be different from the owner of the building, with all the “invigorating conceptual implications” that implies.

And of course there are big differences between Spiral Jetty and a piece of architecture. Spiral Jetty is the land: it doesn’t just sit atop the land. (Indeed, right now, it’s under water.) When Smithson made the work, what he was doing was pretty simple, conceptually speaking: he took a piece of Utah, and made it art.

Today, Spiral Jetty is still art and it’s still a part of Utah. But art is big business and big money now and Spiral Jetty has become both valuable and politicized. A large part of the subtext to Greg’s bid is that the Dia Foundation has done a bad job of handling local Utah politics and that a Jetty Foundation would be significantly better at that kind of thing than Dia is.

But the Jetty Foundation’s interests are not fully aligned with Dia’s. For one thing, of course, they’re bidding against each other to lease the land. And then there’s this, from Greg’s post:

Should the State decide to award Dia a new lease on the site, I would hope that the Foundation’s role will be constructive and catalytic in bringing the importance of site and local engagement to the fore for the decades ahead.

This is a clear statement that the Jetty Foundation will continue to exist even if it doesn’t get the lease and ends up with no right to anything. Greg has created a pressure group, basically, and one of the entities that the group exists to pressure is the Dia Foundation.

I can’t imagine that Dia will be overjoyed by Greg’s arrival on the scene, or thanking him profusely for taking on the burden of dealing with local Utah politics. Instead, I’m quite sure they’re hoping fervently that they will be re-awarded the lease to the site and that the Jetty Foundation will then wither quietly away. That solution is still the easiest and most obvious one. And it would surely create fewer tensions on the site than awarding the land to a foundation which Dia neither controls nor approves of.

Barry Schwabsky: 'Tableaux Mourants'

via Triple Canopy:

"Tableaux Mourants" was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston.

Tableaux Mourants

by Barry Schwabsky

How we look at networked photography and collected copies.

THE ART PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE PAST two decades has been marked by the appearance of color photographs on a monumental scale, works conceived and produced to address the public rather than an intimate audience. This work, for instance that of Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky, embodies what the critic Jean-François Chevrier called, in 1989, the “tableau form,” a term subsequently taken up by Michael Fried. Even to those of us who remain skeptical of Fried’s claim that this development accounts for “why photography matters as art as never before” (to quote the unwieldy title of his 2008 book), it is clear that the form has given us works of extraordinary artistic quality. It has also changed photography’s relation to the art market by providing the kind of “trophy” pieces on which collectors dote. To some extent, the museumization and marketization of photography through changes in scale parallels replacement of monitor-based video works with mural-size video projections during the same period.

But the apparent triumph of photographic imagery (and video) for gallery presentation could well turn out to be something of a swan song. Behind the back of the tableau form, photography has discovered the potential of a new, antimonumental, dematerialized (or inframaterialized) relation to the public via the Internet and social networking. (The ubiquity of Flickr and Facebook is well known; Color, a new smartphone app, eliminates the private origin of photos altogether, enabling users to see all images captured by strangers within 150 feet. “Essentially, everybody is sharing one lens,” says the president of the company, which will own the photos and store them on its servers.) These not only seem to be cannibalizing the entire existing heritage of still and moving photographic imagery but are also eliciting a vast quantity of new production. An artist can make tableau photographs only in limited quantities, under professional conditions; their production depends on the market or the support of enlightened patronage. By contrast, the Internet promotes the widespread public circulation of images taken and collected by nonartists, most of which are generated for reasons untouched by the likelihood of profit. (We see something similar happening, even more clearly, in music, where the development has elicited howls of protest from professional musicians and the music industry, whose livelihoods are eroding as a result, though the actual effect on music has been mostly salutary.)

The new photographic aesthetic arises from a vernacular engagement with everyday technology that barely existed a decade ago.

Of course the digital image can always (at least temporarily) be captured by the museum (though not so far by the art market). Take, for instance, Wolfgang Staehle’s Empire 24/7, in which stills of the Empire State Building were sent continuously by live feed to ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1999. But the point is that the place of the digital image cannot be fixed within the museum; its presence there represents a new permeability of the institution, which is suddenly networked with places beyond its walls. Boris Groys astutely reminds us in Art Power that even under these conditions the aura of uniqueness granted to the image is in principle salvaged (and therefore so is the raison d’être of the art museum): While “the digital image is a copy”—a duplication of a file that in itself has no pictorial content, that is “invisible,” as he puts it—“the event of its visualization is an original event.”

STILL, THERE'S VISUALIZATION and visualization. When I look at a digital image on my phone, or on my computer, or on the screen of the camera or phone with which it was taken, I am not making any particular decisions about how to visualize the image file. I am simply taking it as it comes. So it’s not quite the case that, as Groys claims, with this visualization “the figure of the curator arises again.” The main decisions have already been made by whoever produced the hardware and software I’m using. The curating

happens, rather, when I save the image, when I create an archive of digital files. But what’s different about my relation to these saved images is that I will never print most of them. They are not meant to take on a materialized form, but only to be seen (or, better, to have been seen) on-screen. And this is true not only of people like me, who desultorily accumulate pictures that others have taken and hardly ever take a picture themselves, but also of many people who take pictures incessantly. The taking, archiving, and circulating of these images is emblematic of the new mode of visualization and takes precedence over their contemplation.

But that isn’t to say there is no artistic intention behind these images, compared with grand-scale tableau photographs. The flip side of the Wall/Gursky aesthetic is represented by Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, a compendium of the artist’s source material but also a work in its own right; the books of Hans-Peter Feldmann, which are constituted by the collecting and recontextualizing of reams of images; and also, in a different way, the work of Garry Winogrand, who at his death left twenty-five hundred undeveloped rolls of film and three hundred thousand unedited images. Winogrand’s hyperproductivity had become nonproductivity; his photographic activity had become unmoored from the goal of arriving at a finished work, an individual image of paradigmatic significance. Similarly, Winogrand’s contemporary Vivian Maier, a remarkable but unknown Chicago street photographer, shot one hundred thousand negatives, only a few of which were ever printed. The posthumous printing and exhibition of those images is arguably a distortion of her work, which was only ever the archive itself.

On film, Winogrand’s late work, like Maier’s, was essentially inaccessible, even to the photographer himself. In digital form, on Flickr or a photo blog, those images could have been open to the world. The new photographic aesthetic in formation, arising from a vernacular engagement with everyday technology that barely existed a decade ago (and which artists are approaching with the same innocence and fascination as everyone else), will have less in common with the monumentality of the tableau form than with the compulsive image collecting of Richter and Feldmann and image producing of Winogrand and Maier. What new technologies have made possible is the public manifestation of activities that were previously mostly private. The artistic intent of those who make, collect, and disseminate these image constellations is becoming less important than the aesthetic uses to which any given viewer puts them, and the ephemeral appearance and disappearance of images on-screen, phenomenologically removed as it may be from what we previously recognized as embodying the art of photography, is as worthy of our consideration as the printed photograph.

Why It's OK For You To License Your Artwork Any Way You Want

Image Via

 

Via Techdirt:

Youtube, Creative Commons And Why It's OK For You To License Your Artwork Any Way You Want

from the it's-still-yours-isn't-it dept

Culture

by Tim Cushing

Wed, Jun 8th 2011 2:42pm

Youtube (finally) introduced a Creative Commons licensing option for uploaders on June 2nd, allowing users to make their original works freely available to others to remix and build upon without worrying about infringement charges down the road. At this point it's only implemented a CC-BY option, but it expects to introduce others further down the road. The key to this license is that it allows others to use these licensed videos commercially, which has proven to be a sticking point for certain parties with a vested interest in keeping uploaded contributions licensed solely to the creator.

Two dissenting opinions appeared nearly immediately. The first argument against the CC-BY license appeared at the Viralfier blog, where Scott Burke has decided that CC licensing is the worst thing ever (or "evar"), running down 6 reasons why you shouldn't use this new option:

Take another example. MasterCard wants to use your sweet snowboarding video in a worldwide advertising campaign. Great! Except you already gave the rights away, when you tagged it with a Creative Commons license. You might get a brief attribution at the bottom of the ad — but wouldn’t you also want a licensing fee?

Well sure, Scott. Who wouldn't? But it's not as if the video was doing much on its own, all locked down and whatnot. And hindsight, while having perfect 20/20 vision, is hardly what one would call a "business model." There's also exposure and the fact that the original video still belongs to you.

His next point deals specifically with the "exposure" aspect, showing how that doesn't work either:

klaatu42‘s recent hit viral video, Ultimate Dog Tease (you know, “The maple kind?”), has received 35 million views to date, and his channel has 385,000 subscribers. The source video that it’s based off of, is by IcePrincessXXIV. klaatu42 gives her about as prominent a link as you can get in the video.

How many subscribers did that translate into for IcePrincessXXIV? 600. A full 0.15% of the action.

Those are admittedly terrible numbers, but is counting subscriptions really a viable measurement? I watch tons of videos (and see tons of overlaid ads) on Youtube and I think I'm subscribed to maybe two channels. (And that's just me. Add in my family and everything goes exponential.) Does this mean that someone's successful use of your video instantly translates to jacksquat on your end? I hardly think so.

Points 3 and 4 deal with two familiar "arguments," the first being that if you give something away for free, you obviously think your artwork is worth nothing. This fallacy is hardly worth arguing but can anyone out there think of anything valuable that's being given away for free as part of a hugely successful business model? (Try Googling it.) The other has to do with your limited legal recourse in cases where your video has been misused or infringed upon. Good point. Regular copyright holders never have these problems and their legal battles run very smoothly because of that fact!

The real reason for this post emerges in point 5, where Scott encourages readers to join Viralfier's closed beta. Because Viralfier is "a startup which is developing a 'game-changing toolkit for creating and marketing viral videos.'" Hmmm. Suddenly, this advice seems a tad off. (Point 6 seems to have something to do with making an 8-bit cat "cry." Double-hmmm.)

The second opinion is more of the same, but much briefer: Won't work. Too crowded. Not interested. I ingested several grains of salt (80% of my RDA for sodium) when greeted with "ReelSEO: The Online Video Marketing Guide" upon opening this link. 

Of course, anti-CC sloganeering and misinformation-spreading is old news at this point. Another conflicted and interested party, ASCAP, spent part of last year trying to build a warchest to fight Creative Commons. The Portuguese Socialist Party attempted to outlaw CC licensing, thus making it illegal for artists to give their work away for free. Several others have also stepped up to the plate to take a swing at Creative Commons, claiming that it is "anti-artist" and that Creative Commons licensing "has put a large number of creatives out of business."

Why do they care? Or, more realistically, why do they pretend to care? 

Two reasons:

1. In their minds, art is always zero-sum. If someone takes your artwork and builds on it successfully, then it must logically follow that no one but this "someone" will ever be able to make money from that particular piece of art. Apparently, artwork can be "used up."

2. The gatekeepers and artists tied to these systems can't compete with free. This isn't necessarily the kept artists' fault. They often have no say in the matter. But because the industries aren't interested in competing with free, then the free option needs to be removed.

It gets uglier when you, as an artist, go head-to-head with this mindset. The accustations will fly. "You obviously feel your artwork is worth nothing." "Don't you care what happens to something you created?" "There's no legal recourse with Creative Commons." "You must be an idiot/untalented hack if you don't do things the way they've always been done."

I wonder why they just can't let artists distribute their art the way they want to, rather than using hyperbolic statements to FUD-up the debate or humiliate underinformed artists into doing things their way. Is creative work inherently "worthless" if you can't immediately apply a price tag to it? Why does it all boil down to "price" and "control"?

But the most irritating aspect of this so-called "debate" is the hypocrisy. All this effort on "behalf" of artists is nothing more than a completely condescending effort to save "ignorant" artists from themselves. And for what? A chance to play ball with a bunch of gatekeepers who care more for their profit margins and quarterly sales than they do about 99% of the artists they "represent?" It's one thing to run your own industry into the ground. It's quite another when you disparage other options solely to benefit your own system.

That goes for you, too, Viralifier and ReelSEO.

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