The Art World Doesn't Understand Finger Prints (a stream of consciousness review)

3am. Zero hour. Just got done making a T-Pain related blog. Can't sleep. Better turn on my Xbox and watch something instantly on Netflix. I guess I shall watch Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?

Oh boy! A controversy in the art world. Yes, abstract paintings are not generally liked by people who don't study art, haha! My kid could paint that. They should've called this documentary that instead! Oh, wait, that was a documentary too.

Teri Horton, the film's hero is a trucker who found a painting in a thrift store for five bucks, and maybe, oh maybe it's a Pollock. I go to the thrift store a lot, but I've never found anything worth 25 Million dollars. I saw a lady on Antiques Roadshow on Thursday who had a blanket worth 35,000 dollars. One time I found a videogame that goes for 60 bucks used on Amazon, and I got it for 4 dollars. Does anyone wanna make a documentary about that?

Who is narrating this film? I like him. He's making this story seem very fun. And important. Important, but still fun.

Who is this documentary for? With references to CSI and such, it would seem to be talking to Joe Sixpack. Is it for people in the artworld, which seems to be the Evil Empire of this film? Probably not. I think this film seems to be made for people like me, with an interest in art, but also highly accessible documentaries, available for instantaneous streaming on a gaming console. Very stylized. They are making this documentary about a painting seem very fluid, fast, highly entertaining.

You know, Teri. You find treasures in dumpsters and thrift stores. These things can turn out being worth big money. You thought your found painting was your big find. You should've found a baseball card. They're less snooty.

Her son wants her to sell the painting. I find things at thrift stores that I could sell for a great deal. Maybe I will.

How funny that she's a long-haul trucker and she's in this Pollock controversy for the long haul.

These art world experts are being so glib in their attacks on science. I won't believe that their attitudes are common, as I've met quite a few art historians, and why would they study art history if no one is interested in advancing our understanding of historical art?

Eat the connoisseurs.

Club Internet

Hi everyone. I wanted to pass this along.

The new Club Internet exhibit, Dissociation, is now online for viewing.

There are some real gems in there, I hope you enjoy.

Dissociation
curated by Harm van den Dorpel
www.clubinternet.org

works by
Samuel Beckett, Charles Broskoski, Harm van den Dorpel, Ida Ekblad, Thomas Galloway, Jodi, Tobias Madison, Ilia Ovechkin, Christopher Pappas, Hayley Silverman, Ola Vasiljeva, Damon Zucconi

For Nicole's Critique

Greetings,

I've posted a few PDF's in my Intermedia Folder (npietran) under Public. Here is a recent tid-bit that goes along with my readings and interests...

From:

A version of this article appeared in print on August 23, 2009, on page MM22 of the New York edition.

EXCERPT FROM:

THE ETHICIST

By RANDY COHEN

Published: August 18, 2009

A friend of mine was a tour guide in Alaska. He tells me that his boss planted a taxidermy moose and bear off in the distance. Apparently, the chances of seeing a live moose or bear on such an outing is about 10 percent, and no one wanted to disappoint the mostly nearsighted and elderly tourists. Deception — yes! Unethical? JANICE FISCHER, AUSTIN, TEX.

To arrange this ludicrous, if benign, contrivance to deliberately fool the clientele is a kind of lie and hence unethical. If during a tour, however, a shirtless Alec Baldwin happened to race through the clearing and some folks mistook him for a bear, a very handsome bear — he is a hairy man — so be it. The guide would have no duty to set them straight and could simply keep silent.

For my crit next Monday...

I just received this lecture announcement in my email from International Programs' listserve. Thought some of you intermedia-minded folk might be interested:

Joanna Demers, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Southern California, will present a lecture titled “William Basinski, Tape Loops, and Mourning” as part of the International Programs series “Taping the World: The Global Legacy of a Neglected Technology.” The lecture takes place on Tuesday, September 15 at 4 p.m. in room 101 of the Becker Communication Studies Building.

Demers specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular and concert music. Her work has appeared in Popular Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Social Science Research Network, and her monograph, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity won the 2006 Book of the Year award from the Popular Culture Association. Her next book, Listening Electronically: the Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, is under contract with Oxford University Press.

“Taping the World: The Global Legacy of a Neglected Technology” is a Major Project initiative of International Programs, funded by the Stanley-UI Foundation Support Organization. Professor John Durham Peters and Associate Professor Kembrew McLeod are co-directors of the project which will investigate the cultural, historical, aesthetic, and political imprint of tape recording as the single most important medium of sound recording in the last century.

EDIT THIS POST (a review of RiP! A Remix Manifesto for Sept. 14)

Copyright has been on my mind lately, as I'm sure you know, from my comments surrounding the intellectual property issues I saw with Post Secret, as written about on this blog and in class. So when I logged onto Hulu, looking for the newest episode of the world's greatest drinking show, Three Sheets, and was offered a film called RiP! A Remix Manifesto, I figured I had nothing better to do for an hour and 26 minutes. Well, looking back on it, there were plenty of other things I could have done that would have been more worthwhile than watching this film, so, in an effort to derive some sort of benefit from that time not spent playing Xbox, I am writing this review.

I do like, in particular, that the film, having the word manifesto in its subtitle, actually does present a manifesto, first and foremost. It is this:


The one toe in, one toe out nature of the filmmaker's presence in the film kind of bugged me. Get in or get out, my man! I don't need to constantly know that Girl Talk is your favorite musical artist for you to tell me about Girl Talk. The fourth time Gaynor referred to Gregg Gillis this way, I nearly closed the window and gave up.

Somewhere in the middle of the film, the message gets a bit muddled. Gaynor takes up the cause of people sued by the RIAA for downloading songs using the internet. While this is certainly an interesting debate, I feel that Gaynor fell into a common trap for full-length documentaries: only having about 45 minutes worth of argument. Gaynor spends quite a bit of time dealing with these copyright infringers, but never notes that while his whole argument up to this point has been that creation is based on the past and that the past must not be controlled too tightly in order to allow for new things to be created, downloading a song and listening to it does not create anything, except for a fuller playlist on your iPod. There is a large difference between Gregg Gillis cutting up a song to form "the folk art of the future" and someone pirating something because they disagree with the copyright that supposedly protects intellectual property.

The "open source" nature of the film was fairly interesting, with Gaynor clearly marking clips that had been submitted and created by others.

The film ends in Brazil (or Brasil, as I prefer to spell it), where remixing has become a way of life, from DJing classes being taught in communities to keep kids out of favela-based gangs to the national government infringing on a patent in order to produce aids medication cheaply for all of its citizens.

This is the part of the review where I would complain that the film was only preaching to the crowd and will not likely change any copyright rules in America, which the film argues is what must happen to change the way the world thinks about copyright law. The film argues that copyright law has been written by and for by corporations, but doesn't offer any reason why THEY might want to change it. There must be some sort of evidence to show that opening copyright can actually make companies money. The films claims they are just in it for the money, something Disney and Warner and all their pals would probably not deny.

The film credits all samples contained there-in and encourages people to share it and remix it, implying a creative commons copyright that looks little something like this:

Now that I think about it, the film seems to advocate Creative Commons in practice, but only briefly mentions it and espouses a stance closer to CopyRiot.

Fold, Re-fold, Repeat--Opening Friday, Sept. 4

Fold, Re-fold, Repeat: An Evening of Art and Poetry  

Friday, September 4, 2009
5:30 - 8 pm

Performances at 6, 6:30, and 7pm

Arts Iowa City Gallery
Lower Level, Old Savings & Loan Building 
103 E. College St. 
Iowa City, IA 52240

Art from David Elzer, Jessica Meyer, Lee Marchalonis, Nicole Pietrantoni, Kate Davis, and Jessica Langley.

Performances by Amanda Nadelberg (6pm), Alan Felsenthal (6:30pm), and Devon Wootten (7pm).