There’s something so perfect about this video that I’ve returned to it several times. It’s been featured in lots of main stream media, but it’s a kind of exemplar. It’s a perfect conversation between a song written by Jonathan Coulton and a dance by an actress named Emily. I’m not sure how many times the song has been heard, but Emily’s performance has been seen more than 300,000 times. It’s a conversation between two artists on a single theme. Each performance is at a very high level, each performance brings something out of the other. When the cost of the technology falls away, it’s the art, the talent and the people that shine through.
2 CommentsCategory: art
I’ve been thinking of the dis-intermediation of printing. The disruption of the book, the magazine and the newspaper are in the headlines. A change is upon us, the valuation of things and the physics of the economy are irreversibly new. The big companies that employ thousands are the ones we think of most. The ones with the most reach, the powerhouses, the giants, the ones with the furthest to fall seem the most tragic. It’s a trans-valuation of all values.
But my mind wanders to the little literary magazine, the publishing project done for the love of it. These little magazines always seem to lose money and struggle on year after year. There’s an industry of writer’s workshops across the country that coach and prod writers to fill the pages of the little literary magazines. The interesting thing about these little magazines is that it still takes a lot of money and infrastructure to publish them. Desktop publishing brought the price down, but there’s still the editing, design, printing and distribution.
We now have a publishing medium that allows direct distribution of text over the network. Blogging software has become the new typewriter, and publishing is as easy as Tim Berners-Lee originally imagined it would be. The little literary magazine serves the purpose of a filter, it finds the best writing. But the cost of the filter is not much more than the cost of producing the printed matter. Is the writing about the tradition of ink on paper, or is it about the art of putting one word after the other?
The other thread this tangles up with is Hugh Macleod’s idea of the global microbrand. Hugh writes and draws cartoons from a small town in Texas called Alpine. It’s just up the road from Marfa, Texas, the place where sculptor Donald Judd established an outpost for modern art and minimalism in 1971. Times have changed, and space has changed too. Used to be that Marfa was a long distance from New York City, now it’s just a click away.
Of course for the UNIX operating system, 1971 was the beginning of time. It probably also marked the date when distance began to shrink at a visible rate.
Audiences for the little literary magazine, or Hugh Macleod’s cartoons, no longer need to be locals. They don’t have to live in Alpine, they can see it all through the network. It’s a gathering of tribes from across the globe, not tribes based on proximity or kinship, but on a common social object. We like Hugh’s sense of humor, or the taste of an editor who assembles a collection of short stories. We form a bond.
The highest value in the swirl of texts, images and sounds that roar by us minute by minute, second by second on the network is the good editor, the curator, the finely-tuned filter. Philip Roth, in an introduction to a collection of eastern European writing during the cold war, made an insightful comment: when nothing is allowed, everything is significant; when everything is allowed, nothing is significant. When we can see everything, where do we choose to rest our eyes?
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The opening reception for Christine Cariati, Liz Hager and Mark Ulriksen’s group show at Back to the Picture is tonight (Saturday, March 29th) at 7:00pm. You can find all the event details here. I’ve already dropped by the gallery and the work looks great.
Learn more about each of the artists on their web sites:
The image at the top of this post is a detail from Christine Cariati’s painting “Vuillard’s Garden.” The painting is, in part, a tribute to the intense pattern work in the paintings of Edouard Vuillard. The medium is gouache on paper. Gouache is opaque watercolor, and a notoriously difficult painting medium. Cariati’s natural landscapes are filled with color, beauty and spirit, even as the figures portrayed act out a darker Darwinian drama.
Liz Hager’s Digital MetalTypes are a revelation. I’d never seen photographs printed on to a bright copper metal sheet before. Hager incorporates self-designed textile patterns, 19th-century studio portraits and her own botanical photos into a series of captivating photo-montages. Through these images and the stories that accompany them, the viewer is invited into a private world filled with the secret thoughts and unconventional associations of its inhabitants. The viewer decides where to draw the line between fact and fiction.
Mark Ulriksen is well known for his covers for The New Yorker magazine. Over the years he’s had some of the great ones. Most recently his cover “The Emperor’s new clothes” was a wry comment on the troubles of Eliot Spitzer. Ulriksen creates acrylic paintings for most of America’s major publications, book publishers, advertising agencies and graphic designers. He paints pictures of the famous and infamous, newsmakers and homemakers, musicians and athletes, dogs and politicians. This show will exclusively showcase his work for The New Yorker.
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I liked this article by Kevin Kelly so much I thought about copying the whole thing in this blog post. And I suppose I could have taken credit for it by changing the font, or maybe the color of the font, and calling it appropriation like Sherrie Levine or Richard Prince. Copying, reproduction and appropriation are tricky concepts, but Kelly makes some nice progress in thinking through value in the age of digital reproduction.
I particularly liked this quote:
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless. When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
When the product is digital, it is in its core, super abundant. Kelly’s essay looks for value in other places, in what he calls the “generative.” He defines these as kinds of things that can’t be copied, like trust, immediacy, authenticity, etc. For instance, we will pay for the container that we like. A book exists in many forms, sometimes the traditional hardcover format is just what we want. Other times a digital version is what we need when we’re searching for a particular piece of text. The actual book doesn’t exist outside of its containers.
One reason to posit this range of new manifestations of value is to stop the legal crusades against consumer in an attempt to enforce the economics of scarcity with digital products. If we allow the digital to be abundant, what can we sell? What will have value? Television is freely distributed, it aggregates audiences and sells advertising. Most of the content sites on the web work based on this age old model.
The problem with scarcity is that it’s undemocratic. A scarce resource, if there’s a market for it, sells for a high price. Few can afford it. Mass production and mass consumption of the affordable is where real money is made. It’s that jump from industrial production and low prices to digital reproduction and no price that is confounding. Mass production and digital production will need to combine into a seamless stream of the free and the cheap.
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