NEWSgrist - where spin is art

More Boring Than Buddha

via John Perrault's Artopia, April 26, 2009:

Older Than God

Is the New Museum Slipping?

The biennial problem is perennial. The Whitney Biennial has been difficult to deal with for years, so now as punishment for our art sins, the New Museum will offer another survey of "new" art every three years. The Whitney has already complicated and partially reformed its offerings by going global, using guest curators, and even augmenting its space in '08 with an off-site venue--- the magnificent Park Avenue Armory.

But last year when I was feeling more benign I wrote:

And how many curators? Alas, this Biennial gives me the feeling of too many cooks. Only a committee could include photo-realist painter Robert Bechtle, photo-conceptualist Louise Lawler and abstract painter Mary Heilmann. There are too many lookalikes and almosts. Could this be because Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin, the curators of record (both Whitney staffers), were "overseen" by chief curator Donna De Salvo and advised by Thelma Golden, Bill Horrigan and Linda Norden?

But that was all before the fall --- the fall of the art market. Leading to? Yet another global survey. You were hoping  for the end of hegemony?

No, the NuMu is not slipping. It has very little to slip from. Last year Massimiliano Gioni's "After Nature" was o.k., but little else has been up to snuff. True, galleries have sprouted around the ungainly stacked cubes of its fake building, but that has been the NuMu's only real success: real estate.

And we all know where that's going.

So why bother trying to copy The Biennial? The Whitney is NuMu director Lisa Phillips' alma mater and the institution that spawned Marcia Tucker's New Museum (by giving her the boot).

 

More Boring Than the Buddha

The NuMu "The Generational" has an attention-getting but foolish extended title: "Younger Than Jesus", which  seems to mean that all the 50 artists from 25 different countries are younger than The Christ when He was crucified. I find this truly offensive. And I am not even a Christian.

Will future titles be equally insulting? How about: More Boring Than the Buddha; Bossier Than Moses; Louder Than Luther; Madder Than Mohammad; More Baffling Than Madame Blavatsky?

The Whitney Biennial of '06 had a title too: the irrelevant,  but perhaps anti-cinema  "Day for Night."  Since the Whitney insists upon including established artists with the newbies, thus pleasing and puffing up the latter, the downtown Whitney wannabe can't do that. On the other hand, the Whitney Biennial has, as already mentioned, gone global, the NuMu Triennial must be global too.

Well, yes, art is indeed global. But so is late capitalism and so is tuberculosis. In spite of transnational trends like the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Enlightenment,  and then Modernism, it was once thought nations were little, much cherished pockets of stylistic development, language tics, and even aesthetic surprise. Not so anymore.

But wait. I take it back. Currently art is not global; but art education is. The stress-free Generational  feels like, looks like, smells like any MFA thesis show that one might happen upon anywhere in the world.

Even the three curators (Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman) cannot make head nor tales of their 50 choices, selected from 500 artists, all born after 1976 and - hold onto your seat belts---nominated by "150 curators, writers, teachers, artists, critic, and bloggers worldwide." This  methodology must have sounded really clever in a curatorial meeting or graduate seminar, but the results are dismal. Artists over 33 never innovate? Matisse's late works are his best. And how old was Duchamp when he finished Etant donné?

Furthermore, you are asking for it when you call something "The Generational" and the demographics don't add up to anything really important. Even the curators can't explain what's going on.

If you think the 500-word labels in the exhibition are mind-boggling, here are some pungent quotes from the catalog essays, each title in large letters. The curators herewith reveal that they have set themselves not an art problem, but a packaging problem.
[...]
[...]
Now it may be that because of the economy we will have fewer galleries next fall. Chelsea will be a ghost town. Soon we really may need biennials and triennials and institutional salons in order to see any art at all.

Some sages, nevertheless, have opined that even if all the galleries keep their doors open, we will still need these turgid, pointless, blockbuster surveys as excuses to get together.

But can't we have parties without bothering about the art? Aren't we all on FaceButt? Can't we just watch videos on YouTub? Can't we complain about art without the Whitney and the New Museum?  We do not  need either to learn about new art. There is no new art!
[...]

[read on... all the way to the bottom, where you can take in the Artopia Manifesto]

Wikipedia Threatens Artists for Fair Use

 

Image (ironically) provided by Wikimedia!

via Slashdot:

Posted by kdawson on Friday April 24, @08:47AM, from the ought-to-know-better dept.

Wikipedia Threatens Artists for Fair Use

Hugh Pickens writes:
 
"Can a noncommercial website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia think not. The EFF reports that Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern have created a noncommercial website at Wikipediaart.org intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. Since 'Wikipedia' is a trademark owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Foundation has demanded that the artists give up the domain name peaceably or it will attempt to take it by legal force. 'Wikipedia should know better. There is no trademark or cybersquatting issue here,' writes the EFF's Corynne McSherry. 'Moreover, even if US trademark laws somehow reached this noncommercial activity, the artists' use of the mark is an obvious fair use.' It is hard to see what Wikipedia gains by litigating this matter, but easy to see how they lose."

See the EFF article here:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/wikipedia-threatens-

The legal history here:
http://wikipediaart.org/legal-history/

Fairey: Critique of Image Ownership v. The Brand

Here's a clear, thoughtful piece that cuts straight to the core: in our society, Property is pitted against Free Expression (and hence Culture, Art, etc.) in an extreme way. Many artists don't get it; most lawyers don't get it. The critics of Shepard Fairey really don't get it. Voila, the Copyright Wars.

via NYTimes blog, The Moment, Art April 10, 2009, 1:08 pm:

Graphic Content | Shepard Fairey Is Not a Crook

By Steven Heller

Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama poster.

Steven Heller, a former art director at The New York Times, is a co-chair of the MFA Design Department at the School of Visual Arts and a blogger and author.

Even before Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama “Hope” poster became the focus of legal and ethical scrutiny — for Fairey’s use of Mannie Garcia’s A.P. news photo as the basis of the now ubiquitous image — some design critics and practitioners had already questioned the street artist’s habit of “sampling” existing imagery. A scolding essay by Mark Vallen, entitled “Obey Plagiarist Fairey,” which was published online in 2007, accused Fairey, who created the “OBEY GIANT” project in 1989, of “expropriating and recontextualizing artworks of others.” The booty in this alleged thievery is primarily propaganda imagery from the 1920s (Russian Constructivism and Bolshevist posters) to the 1960s (Chinese Socialist Realism and counter-culture rock posters). However, Vallen’s harsh indictment seems not to have hurt Fairey’s reputation. If anything, the criticism enhances his subversive agenda, as it fosters debate about the line between influence and theft in art and design.

Fairey’s image-making follows the lead of earlier rogue art and design movements, like Dada in the 1920s or psychedelia in the 1960s, as well as the Situationists in the 1970s, and even the retro/postmodernists (i.e., designers who borrowed passé commercial art styles) in the 1980s and 1990s. Some guerrilla art is rooted in a romantic Robin Hood notion: steal from the powerful; tamper with sacred cows; and avoid getting caught. Fairey has been caught several times, and was arrested on his way to the Feb. 6 opening of a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston.

Left: John Van Hamersveld’s poster of Jimi Hendrix, image from Post-future.com. Right: Shepard Fairey’s “Andre Hendrix Print.”

Comparisons have been made between Fairey and Andy Warhol’s transfiguration of the Brillo Box into an evocation of pop culture; he is also linked to the skateboarder practice of ripping off and then satirically twisting mainstream corporate logos and brands by altering a name or symbol. His sensibility is perhaps even more reminiscent of the old Mad magazine advertising parodies and their derivative, Wacky Packs, which send up mainstream products by co-opting and changing their names.

Those who rebuff Fairey’s work are angry that he misappropriates (read: steals) famous art and design works; they argue that Warhol changed paradigms while Fairey makes knockoffs. I did an interview with Fairey for his recent book, “Obey: Supply & Demand,” and I admit that on occasion he has come close to crossing the line from acceptable borrowing into murky infringement territory. But after seeing the satiric art barbs that he aimed at politics, cultural icons and bêtes noires in his exhibition at the I.C.A. (where I participated in a panel discussion on appropriation), I can say this: Shepard Fairey is not a crook.

Left: Koloman Moser’s 1901 cover for Ver Sacrum magazine. Right: Fairey’s “Nouveau Black.”

He has indeed copied a number of established graphic works in art and design history, including Koloman Moser’s emblematic Art Nouveau cover for the 1901 Vienna Secession magazine Ver Sacrum and the image (well known in graphic design circles) of a pained woman holding her ears, which was taken from a poster cautioning against noise pollution by the Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann. Yet these images are playfully twisted, not maliciously pilfered. The critics argue that literal replication of the originals — and this is true of Moser and Muller-Brockmann’s imagery, among others — is ethically wrong, but that charge fails to take into account Fairey’s fundamental ethos. His is a wink and a nod toward visual culture and media monopoly. No designer with Fairey’s experience and historical knowledge could be so stupid as to pinch such visible historical artifacts and call them his own. On the contrary, Fairey sees popular visual culture in terms of what Tom Wolfe has called a “big closet” of shared objects. For him, the ubiquity of the graphic design and advertising art that he relies on for source material makes it a kind of commercial folk art. Although some of what he borrows is not as anonymously vernacular as one might like, Fairey believes that the fact that it is designed for public consumption makes it free for the taking.

Shepard Fairey’s “Obey” painting.

In Fairey’s parodies of Warhol’s “Marilyn” paintings (in which he replaces Marilyn Monroe with his famous Andre the Giant image over the headline “Obey”), or of a popular poster of Jimi Hendrix by John Van Hamersveld, it is difficult not to recognize Fairey’s humorous intent or his sly commentary on how media –- as art and commerce –- exploits everything that will turn a profit. Fairey is essentially arguing that icons can be conflated and repurposed to achieve manipulative results. His own appropriation refers to that which goes on in the mass media every day. At its most articulate, his work is a critique of image ownership.

But this does not mean the results are not sometimes simplistic. Indeed, some of his posters are ruefully naïve. Still, after seeing the last 20 years of Fairey’s output at the I.C.A., the last thing I’d call him is a crook. What I would say, however, is that his “Obey” has evolved from a cultural critique into a successful commercial brand with anti-establishment overtones. To protect that brand, even he is now aggressively using legal means to stop other artists from appropriating his work. While there’s nothing crooked about this, it is painfully ironic, if not disappointing, to see “Obey Giant” co-opted by Obey the Brand.

Closings (Soho) 69

Closings (Soho) 69, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).

Found Art (Chelsea): Unmonumental 149

Found Art (Chelsea): Unmonumental 149, originally uploaded by Joy Garnett (archive).