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The Grift Economy

This article first appeared in Art21 Magazine, Apr/May 2014 Issue: 'Value'

Wolf Paw, Distribution of Wealth, 2104. Mixed media; dimesions variable. Courtesy Ace Chinchilla Gallery, Zurich. © Wolf Paw. All Rights Reserved.

Copy That!

The Grift Economy

by Joy Garnett | Apr 14, 2014

“A grift isn’t fully realized until it is grifted.” —Giovanna della Grema, The Grift: Imaginative Futures in Contemporary Fine Art, 2104

 

Dear Artist,

I hope this finds you well. I am Giovanna della Grema, the director of Ace Chinchilla, LLC, an advisory group for global contemporary fine art based in the capital of Switzerland. I am also senior partner of Grema & Grema, Ltd., our family’s bespoke art consultancy business, whose reigns were recently handed over to me by my father, its founder, after his untimely death by motorcar accident. Thanks to his foresight I am able to legally and fruitfully communicate my proposal to you today.

Also, may I add, it is with deep sense of purpose and utmost sincerity that I write this letter to you, knowing full well how you may feel receiving such a missive from someone you have not met or heard from before. There is no need to fear, as I discovered your listing in reliable US-based arts publications, including the renowned Arts in Americas Directory, which lends credence to my humble belief in the wisdom of this communiqué. I also assure you of my honesty and trustworthiness.

Not at all incidental to this proposal is my exceptional role as private consultant and curator to none other than Her Excellency (HE), the celebrated Sheikha Noor bint Ascii bin Zift, whose beauty and generosity are well known throughout the global fine art community. You will no doubt have read about HE these past several years in all the major newspapers and art magazines, not to mention the annual Top 1000 lists. But in case you, a busy artist immersed in your own process, are not up-to-date on Her Excellency’s growing achievements, I will gladly fill you in at a later date should we continue to discuss our potential arrangement. For now, I will simply point you to a few facts: Her Excellency is heir to a small family estate, an exquisite jewel situated on the pristine outskirts of the eponymous Royaume de Zift² founded through the implementation of the Village-Turned-Nation-State Solution policy after the climactic events that swept through the realm in the previous decade.

Zift rises from the banks of a former ancient river that for millennia emptied its waters off the northern coast of the African continent. After myriad filthy hovels were razed, Zift was redesigned top to bottom by the visionary “starchitect” Hubertus IV of Hohenlohe-Langenburg-Elf (the great-great-grandson of the Alpine ski celebrity), who earned his degree from the prestigious NYUCorp (Eastern Divisions) soon after the close of his generation’s war. Ever since, sparkling Zift has lent its name to all that touches its borders.

But I must cut this history lesson short and come to our main point. On behalf of Her Excellency, I offer this morsel: we are very much interested in working with you.

Currently we (Her Excellency and myself) serve a handpicked coterie of international young artists, including Martín Martín, Juno Bieber, Agnès Hermès, Antonio van den Boss, Viv Smith, Wolf Paw, Uli Abramovitch, Minus Wei, Julep Haden-Guest, Mustafa Deliria, and several other up-and-coming individuals of enormous potential. We are forging long-term relationships with these fine artists as we spearhead the contemporary resurgence of established patronage systems that once flowered in the golden age of every culture, long before the advent of the now-defunct, twentieth-century model known as The Gallery System, not to mention that short-lived, unsustainable-but-widespread phenomenon of the same era, the International Art Fair.

But before I go into detail about our proposal, which was confided to me privately by Her Excellency herself, I feel obliged to assure you in advance that both Ace Chinchilla Gallery, LLC and Grema & Grema, Ltd. are committed to meeting the diverse and changing needs of contemporary fine artists, and to providing cultural programmes for the ideas and practices encompassed and encircled by the cognitively challenging, opaque global culture of contemporary fine art. The core focus of our multiplatform initiative is to foster personalized and discreet intercourse with and within the world of contemporary fine arts—including painting, fine digital photography, 4-D relational performance, and new and newish media forms—to establish innovative, critical, telecommunicative dialogue between artists, institutions, and potential audiences. I am, in my dual capacity as senior partner of Ace Chinchilla and sole consultant to Her Excellency, committed to working directly as Artist Ambassador to those cutting-edge contemporary art institutions around the globe that one cannot avoid thinking about, as well as major fine arts magazines (such as the one enclosed in this e-information packet), where you can read all about the very artists we carry. It is our goal to create long-standing brands and prestigious environments for fine artists who we feel merit our support, as can be witnessed on our renowned website and attested to by our worldwide, high-end clientele.

To my point then: all we need are your Full Names, GlobalSensChipID number, and your Bank WireSIM code to start the process of changing the certificate of the deed of deposit in your favour to enable you to come over to claim the money and start your residency with us. That is all. Very simple. Let me know what you think about this. In the interim, we—Her Excellency and I—continue to be astounded by your distinguished output and anticipate assisting you with the development of your career, as only we can.

I look forward to hearing from you and would be pleased to provide you with more details. We are very interested in your work. Thanks a lot.

All my best,
Giovanna della Grema

(The above letter is inspired by true events. However, none of it is real. Any resemblance to actual people, real or imagined, is coincidental.)

________

1. A play on “A gift isn’t fully realized until it is given away,” from Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1979), 50.
2. “Zift,” Urban Dictionary.

 

Joy Garnett is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. She blogs about art and open source culture at NEWSgrist.com, and is Arts Editor for Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. She is currently writing a book and working on a visual archive. She is addicted to Instagram. 

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Lost in Transmission

 This article first appeared in Art21 Magazine, Feb/Mar 2014 Issue: 'Translation'

Bill Murray, opening segment from Lost In Translation, 2003. Directed by Sofia Coppola. Screenplay by Sofia Coppola. Produced by Ross Katz and Sofia Coppola. Studio: American Zoetrope; Tohokushinsha Film. Distributed by Focus Features

 

Copy That!

Lost in Transmission

by Joy Garnett | Feb 4, 2014

Director [in Japanese]: Mr. Bob-san, you are relaxing in your study. On the table is a bottle of Suntory whiskey. Got it? Look slowly, with feeling, at the camera, and say it gently—say it as if you were speaking to an old friend, just like Bogie in Casablanca, “Here’s looking at you, kid’—“Suntory time.”
Ms. Kawasaki: Umm. He want you to turn, looking at camera. OK?
Bob: That’s all he said?
Ms. Kawasaki: Yes. Turn to camera.
—Lost in Translation (2003), a film by Sofia Coppola

 

“Translation is possible and impossible at the same time.” —Modesta Di Paola, Translation in Visual Arts (2013)

Translation has long been perceived not as an art as much as a necessity, an imperfect implement deployed in the interest of communication across some barrier. But even where loyalty to the original holds sway, it is never as simple as a one-to-one correlation. Translation requires creative transformation.

In academe, translation is tendered as a process that enables permeability across a tangle of disciplines and agendas. It is discussed against the backdrop of exoticism and the colonial enterprise while the field of Translation Studies focuses not on standards of verisimilitude but on an increasingly fluid “paradigm of mediation,” a “multifaceted and interdisciplinary act…manifested in a multitude of synonyms such as ‘emulating,’ ‘adapting,’ ‘rewriting,’ and ‘recreating.’”¹

In recent decades, translation has jumped its banks. It has moved beyond the ideal of taut correlations into the realm of shared impulses and multiple authors, where circles of interpretation—and misinterpretation—overlap and converge. In this global commons, where information flows nonstop, translation acts as an interlocutor of hybrid texts and a mediator for unstable states. It is a passage instead of a place, a process and not a result.

In light of our ongoing, post-postmodern moment of rip, burn, copy, and remix, it might be useful to think of translation in terms of transmission. A pulsed signal is sent; information is broken into packets and coalesces into a whole once it reaches its readers, listeners, and viewers, who in turn relay the message to their own contacts. As in a game of telephone, the original message changes with each transmission. Information gets lost while new information accrues along the way.

In the visual arts, translation, transformation, and transmission are intertwined. In the arena of copyright, fair use, and appropriation, we say transformative use to denote a standard of creative translation, as when a preexisting object or artwork is sourced and repurposed to produce something new. Source materials are transformed through translation into novel forms and subsequent transmission to new audiences and contexts, and new artworks are born.

Perhaps, in this age of sharing and remixing art and information, translation will soon be embraced as the paradigm for the art of our time and not simply as a process of faithful renderings. Maybe translators will finally be seen as the artists they are, and artists will be understood as translators.

Of course, not everyone greets this prospect with enthusiasm.

Sarah Morris, “Black Beetle,” 2008. Installation view at Fondation Beyeler, Riehan/Basel. Photo: Todd Eberle

Take the recent case involving the painter Sarah Morris and a group of origami artists who sued her for copyright infringement.² Led by the well-known origami artist and retired physicist Robert J. Lang, these artists dispute Morris’s right to freely use their origami crease patterns as sources for her work.

According to Dr. Lang, crease patterns are complex entities that exist simultaneously as instructional diagrams and freestanding designs. Different orders of information are graphically encoded into their geometry. However, such nuances and their deeper significance are little known outside a small, rarefied group of origami practitioners and cognoscenti.

Sarah Morris and her work belong to another rarefied group, the blue-chip contemporary art world. Throughout her career, she has utilized flat geometric shapes, a signature palette, and found patterns to produce paintings in the context of modernist abstraction. Morris searches for sources in the physical and digital repositories that house the material around us—the archive of our cultural commons. A practitioner of origami herself, she is clear-eyed about translation being the basis of her process and regards the crease patterns as fair game:

Robert Lang, Praying Mantis, opus 416. Medium: One uncut square of paper. Composed: 2002. Folded: 2002. Size: 4 inches. Diagrams: Origami Insects II. Crease Pattern shown at left

I use all types of things in my work…Industrial design, mapping, instructions, geometry—I am creating a physical space in these paintings…I never thought for a moment that I couldn’t use this as a touchstone or as a launch pad for my work.³

The case Lang v. Morris settled out of court in March 2013, the terms of the agreement remaining, for the most part, confidential. It is understood that Morris transformed the crease patterns by translating them as paintings and transmitted them anew through the context of contemporary art. Lang states as much: Morris “is clearly creating new works of art that can stand on their own merits (as opposed to merely copying something and passing it off as her own).” But he goes on to say: “I’m not so crazy about having my own work described as being merely ‘found diagrams’ as she’s done here.”⁴

And yet, while crease patterns are visually compelling and mathematically evolved, the nature of their utility remains instructional and vernacular. They are intended for creating origami. Morris, a painter, adapted these instructional diagrams to make something else. In a world where individual expression is valued, she has every right to do this. But in some quarters, her paintings have yet to be acknowledged for what they are: acts of translation. For some, this part of the message is still lost in transmission.

________

¹ Modesta Di Paola, “Translation in Visual Arts,” Interartive, August 2013.
² Dan Duray, “Beneath the Fold: The Twisted Tale of Origami v. Sarah Morris,” Gallerist, May 28, 2013.
³ Duray.
⁴ Ibid.

 

Joy Garnett is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. She blogs about art and open source culture at NEWSgrist.com, and is Arts Editor for Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. She is currently writing a book and working on a visual archive. She is addicted to Instagram. 

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Free-Fail

This article first appeared in Art21 Magazine, Dec/Jan Issue: 'Failure'

Bruce Nauman, Bound to Fail, from Eleven Color Photographs, 1967-1970; color photograph;

AP Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

 

Copy That!

Free-Fail

by Joy Garnett | Dec 1, 2013

 

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. 

—Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)

 

Artists are no strangers to failure. Despite our persistence, we don’t always end up doing what we intended. Somewhere down the line, our initial plans are rendered irrelevant and our designs come undone, scattered by unnamed processes.

It’s not just about waiting for the happy accident. Failure has its rigors. It is not something experienced only by beginners, nor is it something to get past. Failure is a lifelong commitment. As our dedication to failure increases, our understanding of the meaning and value of failure changes. Gradually, we learn to give ourselves over to failure. We come to see that our best works rise from our most profound failures and that by failing utterly and repeatedly, we will stumble into as-yet-unimagined exigencies of work and play, even as we continue to fail.

According to those who are seasoned at failing, failure is not only inevitable but also necessary. We human beings need to fail, and we need to do so often.

Fail again. Fail better.

Samuel Beckett’s admonishment to fail better may not resonate with many people. Perhaps it comes out of a twentieth-century moment of urbanity, ferment, rigor, and wit now lost to us. These days, we routinely disavow our failures, ignoring them while in hot pursuit of malformed ideas of success. Failure, of late, is highly underrated.

In reassessing the value of failure, we might consider Princeton computer scientist Ed Felten’s expression “the freedom to tinker,” by which he means the freedom to get under the hood, to learn from mistakes and failures as we play with and modify our work. By embracing our freedom to tinker, we may fully inhabit the experimental, investigative mode-of-being that is kept alive through repeated failures.

And so, the freedom to tinker is predicated on being and feeling free to fail. We must not self-censor from a sense of shame and decorum or from fear of legal repercussions. In being free to fail, we exercise a certain right to free expression that many of us have come to take for granted.

Recently, while thinking about the freedom to fail, I came across an article in Blouin Art Info about the emerging Brooklyn artist Lauren Clay and the complaint leveled at her by the estate of Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith (1906–1965):

“An exhibition of the 31-year-old artist’s work was scheduled to open at the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ, on October 18, but due to allegations of possible copyright infringement by the estate of Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith, that show may not go on.”

Left: Lauren Clay, Cloud on single-mindedness, 2012, paper, acrylic, 30 x 24 x 12 inches. Right: Lauren Clay, No side to fall into, 2012; acrylic, paper, wooden armature; 18 1/2 x 7 x 3 inches. Courtesy the artist and Larissa Goldston Gallery

 

 “Clay’s exhibition was to include seven sculptures that reference Smith’s Cubi works—his looming welded-steel assemblages of delicately balanced geometric shapes with brushed gestural surfaces. Unlike Smith’s austere sculptures, which are eight-to-ten feet tall, Clay’s works are colorful, mostly smaller tabletop iterations, roughly 18 inches tall, and are made from materials like papier-mâché and hand painted faux woodgrain.”¹

 

Well, this certainly wouldn’t be the first time that an artist’s estate aggressed a living artist. Indeed, over the years, the phrase “artist’s estate” has become synonymous with overreaching. And while this particular instance may seem overblown, it is consistent with the positions that usually come to bear in these conflicts.

 

VAGA homepage, screenshot.

 

In this instance, the remedy sought by the estate’s copyright representative, the licensing organization VAGA (Visual Arts and Galleries Association), included putting the offending works under “house arrest,” meaning that they could not be shown or sold. Robert Panzer, executive director of VAGA, is quoted as saying, “What [Clay] did was make them look just like the original…We don’t think it’s transformative enough.”²

A number of intellectual property (IP) lawyers weighed in. Nicholas O’Donnell, writing for Art Law Report, states, “[T]he Clay [sculpture] seems more derivative than transformative. If I sold a ¼ scale Andy Warhol poster that was originally a silkscreen, I would hardly expect to get away with it.”³

But are Ms. Clay’s sculptures equivalent to posters? One cannot help but wonder if Mr. O’Donnell is aware of Rachel Lachowicz’s work, or Sherrie Levine’s appropriations, or indeed the work of so many contemporary artists that explore feminist, post-minimalist, and conceptual themes.

Rachel Lachowicz, Cerulean Blue (Warhol), 2012; mixed media: pressed eyeshadow, aluminum; 24 x 24 inches. Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery

 

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, on his art-law blog Clancco, goes further to malign Ms. Clay’s work, questioning how their “tired, cliche, and essentialist critique promotes the progress of anything other than piracy.”⁴

These remarks, when taken together, are aggressively dismissive, perhaps by rote, offering scant insight to the subtleties of copyright and fair use when it comes to the current contemporary art landscape. It makes me wonder if lawyers are uniquely ill-equipped to advocate for artists and others who traffic and sometimes revel in unremitting failure. After all, it’s not clear how one might acknowledge and embrace the tenets of failure while under constant pressure to win.

Clearly, not everyone can succeed at failure.

Eventually, I discovered a few wise words offered by Alfred Steiner, a lawyer who is also an artist. In the comments section of the aforementioned Clancco post, Mr. Steiner points out that Ms. Clay is a woman, and the sculptures in question were made from materials traditionally associated with craft and femininity:

 

“[Clay’s works] are based on sculptures made by a man from a material (stainless steel) traditionally associated with masculinity, using techniques also traditionally associated with masculinity (welding). At least that aspect of the commentary is clear. Who knows what else might be contained in the work. Smith’s estate is harmed in no way—nobody would buy one of these instead of a Smith…Not allowing [Clay] some room to play with art history would be chilling and not worth the trivial (assuming it exists at all) effect that the works might have on the market for derivative works based on Smith sculptures. When you balance cultural value of allowing artists room for free play with the market harm to the copyright owner, there really is no question. Not only should fair use apply here, but as unique works, they should be protected by a safe harbor to prevent harassing claims from overzealous copyright owners.”⁵

 

But let us take a step back. We can agree that the artist David Smith is a towering figure, his giant steel sculptures doubling as monuments to his success. His works therefore function as monumental both in the art-history narrative and in the world of art commerce. By contrast, Ms. Clay’s works are decidedly “unmonumental”: they are handmade and diminutive. Hence, the argument made by the Smith estate, VAGA, and any number of IP lawyers might be broken down as follows: How dare this unknown woman artist besmirch these ineffable works of male monumentality, rendering them in a decidedly anti-minimalist, funky-junky aesthetic, and—perhaps the worst offense—in the abject medium of “chewed paper?”

Regardless of whether or not Ms. Clay’s works fail as artworks, we can probably agree that the message and sensibility they project is antithetical to that of David Smith’s Cubi series and his work as a whole. In being antithetical, these works are certainly not too similar; they are about as different as can be.

David Dodde, Fleurs et Riviere, 2013. La Grande Vitesse (Alexander Calder, 1969) as substrate; 43 x 54 x 30 feet; 1,500 magnets, 18 flowers, and 39 leaves, hand-cut. Photo: Brian Kelly

So, while the notion that small, colorful, chewed-paper sculptures could in any way threaten Smith’s legacy or his market is laughable, Ms. Clay’s works are threatening, but only because they thumb their noses and poke a little fun at macho, self-important, Ab-Ex sculptures. When Ms. Clay unwittingly parlayed her works by planning to display them in a group exhibition, she upped the ante just enough to agitate the estate lawyers, who emitted their flurry of documents and eventually struck a deal.

This points to the fact that on some level, Lauren Clay’s sculptures are terribly successful—all too successful. I hope that she will be able to move on from this rather jarring, if strangely illuminating, unintended success, so she may continue to play and tinker and maybe even fail some. She apparently didn’t fail hard enough this time. She will have to try again. Fail again. Fail better.
________

¹ Rozalia Jovanovic, “David Smith’s Estate Demands ‘House Arrest’ for a Young Artist’s Works,” Blouin Art Info, March 10, 2013.
² Jovanovic.
³ Nicholas O’Donnell, “Lauren Clay, the David Smith Estate, David Dodde, and Fair Use: Are We Learning Anything?” Art Law Report, October 18, 2013.
⁴ Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, “Artist and Smith Estate Settle Copyright Dispute,” Clancco: The Source for Art and Law, October 15, 2013.
⁵ Alfred Steiner, comment 29293 of “The Perils of Copying David Smith Sculptures,” Clancco: The Source for Art and Law, October 4, 2013.

 

Joy Garnett is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. She blogs about art and open source culture at NEWSgrist.com, and is Arts Editor for Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. She is currently writing a book and working on a visual archive. She is addicted to Instagram. 

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They Are the World

This article first appeared in Art21 Magazine, Oct/Nov 2013 Issue: 'Becoming an Artist':

For the new Art21 Magazine, Joy Garnett launches her new column with some thoughts on copying and archival tendencies in the 21st century.

 

Christian Marclay. The Clock (video still), 2010; single-channel video with sound; 24 hours. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

 

Copy That!

They Are the World

 by Joy Garnett | Oct 8, 2013

I sometimes forget that my students have always lived with digital media, not to mention with the ethos of information sharing that digital technologies engender. As digital natives, they were born at or after the onset of digital mainstream culture. They have never experienced a world before laptops, personal computers, and smartphones. They have never traveled abroad without the convenience of ATMs or booked a flight without the ability to check-in online and print their e-tickets. They have probably never received paper bills for their credit cards, and they don’t use stamps. They have never lived outside the network or off the grid; the grid is the air around them.

My students were teenagers when Aaron Swartz (at fourteen years old) cowrote the specification for the RSS feed. They are his peers. As young adults, they have eased off their PlayStations (for the most part!) to enter more challenging pursuits with the help of ever-more sophisticated personal gadgetry and software. They came of age with participatory reblogs like Tumblr, photo-sharing sites like Flickr, and all manner of social media. They tend to stream their music and watch movies via torrents; they learn of world events through online news channels and blogs and, since 2006, Twitter.

Now, as studio artists in college or graduate school, they face a career landscape that offers them more varied choices than mine did. For one thing, the boundaries between careers in so-called commercial art and more personal, gallery-driven art have become blurred or nonexistent. The business of art has become a preoccupation, even as the art world is transitioning away from its entrenched and outdated models. New possibilities and strange bedfellows are welcome. But regardless of whether my students are interested in pursuing careers in academia or animation, or in the less dependable world of commercial galleries, their studio practice is part of the digital world—their world. Priorities have shifted away from an earlier paradigm of authorship with its well-worn image of a creator in isolated reflection. This is probably true for the rest of us, too, we analogue natives. But even if one works in relative solitude, the ethos of the creative commons and the practice of “share and share alike” has infused all our thinking to a much greater extent than we realize or are willing to admit.

Penelope Umbrico. For Sale/TVs From Craigslist, 2009; C-print on metallic photo paper; dimensions variable. Courtesy LMAK Projects, New York.

 

Whether primarily invested in painting or animation, glitch art or video, net art, conceptualism, or social-media performance, most artists today, but especially younger artists, lean decidedly towards research and experimentation across all mediums. We are nothing if not interdisciplinary.

As an artist and analogue native, I first became enamored of new media art in the late 1990s. Along with countless other artists, including those who would continue to work with traditional mediums, I began using the Internet to transmit and share images and information, to index my source material, and to archive my work. The Internet, so many of us felt, was really a medium. As such, we knew it would afford us new possibilities to juxtapose and recontextualize—to copy, repurpose, and share—methods understood to be part of the artist’s tradecraft at least since Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, echoed nearly a decade later by Hal Foster in his October essay, “An Archival Impulse.”

Foster identified this archival tendency as an impulse that is present in certain artists who prefer to “elaborate on the found image” and object, and who harbor an insatiable desire to “make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.”[1] I would argue that this impulse, rather than being the domain of what Foster calls “archival artists,” is in fact present in all artists. Historically, artists have referenced, appropriated, and quoted from the world around them as well as from other art in order to produce new meanings and contexts. We are all archival artists.

Bernd and Hilla Becher. Gas Tanks, 1983–92; gelatin silver prints. Courtesy C4 Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

 

Today, being an artist means negotiating the vast digital library that we, as a global culture, have created for ourselves. For all of us, the archive and its exigencies are paramount, and we dip in consciously or unconsciously as we think and play and tinker with ideas, meanings, mediums, and forms. The tools we use to access this archive have changed. And so it follows that our perception of the archive has changed.

Along with change comes discomfort. The most obvious point of intergenerational dissonance I sense while teaching digital natives is their attitude toward copying: they haven’t got one. While artists of previous generations are often painfully aware of the shift away from the possibility of controlling copies and reuse of their work, or parts of their work, my students don’t see copying as problematic, either from a practical or ethical standpoint. They don’t think about it, not just because they take copying for granted; it is implicit in everything they do. There is no question that we inhabit a living archive that we generate.

 

Dina Kelberman. I’m Google (screen grab), 2011; Tumblr blog.

 

Copying is as old as humankind’s foray into making things. Image-making processes and technologies, from oil painting to digital imaging, all entail some form of copying. And of course, not long ago, photography was a new and, to some, threatening copying technology that married hardware to wetware long before software was invented. So it is strange to think that copying, a most natural human act and one that is integral to creative production, has come to be seen in such a negative light. One could say that copying has been given a bad rap, demonized by an old system trying to close the floodgates or at least contain the creative behavior that new technologies have engendered. I have written elsewhere about the steady stream of anti-copying propaganda launched over the past few decades by the music and movie industries and how mimicry, memory, and archiving—all processes integral to making art—require copying.

It seems to me that younger artists, the digital natives among us, will help us to ease away from our conflicted attitudes towards copying, appropriation, remixing, and mashing. They have fully embraced the archive. They are the archive. And they see, naturally more clearly than we do, the beauty and creative potential inherent in the technologies that they live and breathe.

___________

[1] Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 4.

 

Joy Garnett is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. She blogs about art and open source culture at NEWSgrist.com, and is Arts Editor for Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. She is currently writing a book and working on a visual archive. She is addicted to Instagram. 

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