I’m not up on the legal or ethical nuances of the now mature debate about copyright/left, piracy, etc, but I think I know two things: I want to see the continuation excellent thought to be written and published and that requires money one way or another; and I think it’s right that my favorite authors, and even the ones I don’t like, get paid so that they can live.  But I also believe that the impulse towards piracy will not go away; the virtually irreversible way the Internet has been designed and then emergently developed, makes piracy, even ultimately ethical piracy, too easy too resist for mortals, perhaps especially when we say “oh, it’s just Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, they’re dead, they won’t mind!”  As it also clear, there are many living (and much less famous than the aforementioned) authors, breathing normal modern people who drive cars and have mortgages, on aaaarg, who, whether they are for or against, are not getting paid where they could (I didn’t say should) be getting paid.  One inchoate suggestion to mitigate comes to mind: the open-source software techie community has been leading the way for many years towards a highly permissive, tip jar model (definitely influenced by communist thought, though they call it common sense)… again, this usually operates under the threshold at which individuals become consumers in a knowledge economy, and points on a parabola, but is something like this model an option for philosophy with a niche audience? Should every writer, tenured or not, make a website with a little donation button; I bet many would be pleasantly surprised if they did.  This is sort of reducible to the argument I hear a lot regarding copyright; make it really easy for us to pay you, to which I’ll add: also pay you whenever we spontaneously feel generous or have some dosh in our pockets to. That’s to a degree the reality we’re working with.

But onto my more theoretical suggestion: I knew from critic Claire Bishop (via Artforum then via Academic Search Premier via Bard College wifi), to read up on Mouffe and Laclau (via aaaarg) who wrote at some length about an agonistic model of democracy.  This is one of the notions on which good relational aesthetics, of which I am a supporter even when I often cringe or get hypercritical about it, seems to be consistently grounded in… Things will probably never be perfect — until we are all uploaded to harddrives and allowed the Vanilla Sky life we all deserve, where we can meet our long lost lovers afresh, again and again, each balmy Jamaican evening or whatever your hetero/homo fantasy, forever, now, never bored, no existential void at the middle of things –  especially in this concatenous, multiplicitous, fragmented present in which we vascillate between advanced civility and brilliance, hopeless endless catastrophic barbarism, and not metaphysically knowing which way up is, what morality is, whether objective reality exists, whether we’re better off than our million year old early hominoid ancestors, whether it’s wrong to eat animals, whether men are all created equally, what historical actors can be legitimately considered in a materalist ontological framework, etcetera, but we can TRY GOD DAMMIT, we can strive (god meant in the secular sense of hetero ego love narratives of course).  We can create microtopias!  Out of recyclable, upcycleable materials.  We can read Bruce Sterling, E.O. Wilson, Stewart Brand, be kind when we can, and start free, ad hoc pedagogical interfaces.  I think the same can be said for the situation with publishing; war is peace in a sense it has been argued if provocatively, so I say let’s keep the agonistic relationship going… there’s more writing out there with more eyeballs getting to it, with more initiatives being orchestrated as a result, than ever before (even if this is partially a function of population increase) and somehow it’s working, agonistically.  There will be casualties!  Frivolous lawsuits against deceased Oklahomans, legitimate lawsuits against brat hipsters who know they’re pushing their luck and milking the radical political associations of p2p spuriously, authors struggling financially who could be struggling less or even well-off, career changes, but there will be more eyes on the prize: truth.  Publishers are going to invent more built-in self-destruct mechanisms, hackers are going to continue cracking DRM.  Non-activists will mostly keep reaping the benefits of using their ex-girlfriends’ Netflix accounts.

The goal is thinking and writing and acting our way out of the catastrophic car-wreck of history, out of technological determinsm (which the self-awarely agonistic model puts a wrench in), and of the fundamentally hostile conditions of the universe (disclosure: I’m a misotheistic agnostic currently, there have been many of us).  Even allowing for singularity and permanent virtual reality vacations, we eventually we need to be getting off this rock in large numbers within the next several hundred years (‘the eventual choice of ours is spaceflight or extinction’ to paraphrase Carl Sagan) and/or, probably both, majorly downsize world population.  Or we give up on the human project and turn to antinatalism, nihilism, a very very very grave form of Lewboski-ism.  I am suggesting the much less drastic but seemingly irrational plan of action that we actually draw out, protract the checkers-like, Tom and Jerry-esque, war over intellectual property, and more provocatively that we occasionally switch sides (we all feel like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man sometimes anyway), batting for the Lessigs, the slashdotters, the Estonian hackers, the spam-kings, and the Mark Taylors and even RIAA on ocassion; it’s a kind of dither that will confuse the hell out of them, and in the process we’ll get to keep our precious content, our precious celebrities and lionized heroes, and not pay that much for it unless we’re hardcore fans, patrons.  We’ll also continue to deal with invasions of privacy, mainstream media and news that panders to what I believe is honestly a mostly imaginary audience of dimwits, stupid ads, and occasional wrongful imprisonment: the secular sacrificing of a life; but you know what, 250,000 people died in Haiti a couple of months ago, and that was the universe’s fault; our ethical perplexedness is not completely unwarranted.

some related images:

Danny Snelson - Endless Nameless

anniversary letter from Richard to Patricia Nixon

Adrain Piper - Everything

Aeolipile - created by Hero of Alexandria, 1st century A.D.

Analytical Engine - unbuilt proto-computer 1829, replica, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace

Yann Arthus-Bertrand - 6 Billion Others Project

Benjamin Edwards

Ben Fry

Daniel Bozhkov - Training in Assertive Hospitality - 2002

cellular automata

Dylan Stone - Lifesize Watercolor - 2005

Christian Phillip Muller - Passe Immediat

Yes to All - Sylvia Fleury - 2007

from Brucennial - on the cover of Bookforum

David von Schlegell (they look like laptops)

Erwin Wurm

Helmut Smits - Unseen Work - 2008

Jan Hoeft - Hallo herr lewitt

Matthew Barney for JCrew

e-toy corporation - Mission Eternity

Jochem Hendricks - Tax

Lucas Samaras, Mirrored Room, 1966

Human!  Your entire existence takes place in a matrixial hallucination composed of binary data and pre-written loops!

Yin Xiuzhen

More advanced lifeforms from across the Oort Cloud exist in more elaborate dimensions, and your efforts to contact us have been in vain.  Your teeming metropolises are ersatz desnsities of digital matter.  Here… (alien produces a city from its suitcase)

James Turrell - Bridget's Bardot - 2009 - Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Actually, I lie, you are actually inside Bridget Bardot’s vagine.

Anthony Gormley, Human Forms

Idiot human. I blast you with my lazer gun.   PEW PEW!!

Emilio Chapela Perez

Marcin Maciejowski

Ignacio Uriarte

Alex Villar

Jorge Macchi

Anna Jermolaewa

Bernard Boutet de Monvel

Tina Barney

Brian Kuan Wood

Yann Serandour

Wade Guyton

Trevor Paglen

Reed Seifer

Thomas Demand

Terry Rodgers

Pawel Althamer

Conrad Shawcross

Eric Tabuchi

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage

Ola Rindal

Paul Kolker

Paul Kos

Alejandro Cesarco - Here Comes The Sun - 2004

Lois Weinberger - Spontaneous Vegetation

John Gerrard – Lufkin – 2009

n55 – City Plant Farming Module

Finnboggi Petursson - Centre - 2005

Joost Conijn - Wood Car - 2005

Matthew Buckingham

non-art image - will find source

4chan.org atheism meme, nth variation

Lara Favaretto

Mark Curran - The Breathing Factory, Leixlip, Ireland - 2006

Adam McEwen

Thank you.

-Paris

photo c Simon Summerfield

Here’s a passage from senior editor Eric Banks’ reflection on the inaugural issue:

“ARTFORUM IS AN ART MAGAZINE published in the west–but not only a magazine of western art. We are concerned first with western activity but claim the world of art as our domain.” With this declaration of manifest destiny and a blurry, mysterious, uncaptioned cover image–a shadowy Jean Tinguely thingamajig that looks like a Jurassic Park escapee in repose–Artforum came into being in June 1962 with a forty-six-page issue weighted heavily toward exhibition reviews, which bookended a feature section titled “Forum.” The design was a bit quirky– heavy-stock burnt orange dividers literally segregate the parts of the magazine–but the Pisani Printing Company’s foray into art publishing had begun.

For at least two decades prior, perhaps since the 1984 interview “Game with Vestiges”, Baudrillard had been declaring that every possible artistic form and function had been exhausted, so that what we were left with was a game of rehashing and recombination.  In 1994, long after his theories on the Simulacra had been appropriated by the American art scene and he had been hailed as a visual arts guru, he published The Transparency of Evil, in which he extended his exhaustion argument to the claim that since art had infiltrated every sphere of existence, the ideals of the avant-garde had been realized, a state of “transaesthetics” had come to be, and by virtue of these conditions, art itself as something separate had disappeared.

This argument was further sharpened and pointed toward those who populated the field of interests called the art world in the essay The Conspiracy of Art (1996), which famously stands as the culmination of Baudrillard’s betrayal (or simply rejection, depending on how one views it) of the art world.  Here, Baudrillard talks of how “art” as a designation is held up by the collusive efforts of those who stand to profit from it, including the most earnest artists.  Though Baudrillard’s radical critique on art largely got him ostracized from the art world, and though he was not able to recognize the richness and variety of new frontiers contemporary art has produced since the early 1990s (perhaps because the old can never really cope with the new, and because of the perceived frivolity of the Now), the weight of his claims — which nearly sink the boat — are still slowly, reluctantly, existentially being integrated into the mainstream understanding of contemporary art.¹

What I wanted to do in view of this is begin an image series in which works of art — conceptual, performance, installation, political, new media, participatory, research oriented — are paired, contrasted, and appraised against similar objects and events that emerge from unadorned reality as what Baudrillard might have called “strange attractors”.  Each week we will invite someone to contribute a new pair.

Tehching Hsieh - Cage Piece (1978-79(

V.S.

Stefania Follini, who was involved in a 1989 experiment on circadian rhythms, and voluntarily isolated herself in an underground room fifty feet down a cave in Carlsbad, New Mexico, away from all outside indications of night and day, for 166 days.

Maurizio Montalbini, the sociologist who initiated the project with Follini, lasted in isolation for 366 days in 1993, thinking it had only been 219.

1. http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/2008_Kellner_Baudrillard%20and%20the%20Art%20Conspiracy.pdf

Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie Woogie (1921)

VS

Mark Bradford - Kryptonite (2006)

We will start with ten a day.  This list will get obscure fast, don’t worry.

Simon de Pury – Ralph Fiennes

Larry Gagosian – Jeff Bridges

Julian Schnabel – Mickey Rourke

Andy Warhol – David Bowie

Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper

Marina Abramovic – Meryl Streep

Catherine Opie – Kathy Bates

Liam Gillick – Stephen Dorf

Nicolas Bourriaud – Vincent Cassel

Matthew Barney – Christian Bale

Additions #1:

Hans Ulrich Obrist – Peter Sarsgaard

Maurizio Cattelan – Adrian Brody

Adrian Piper – Halle Berry

But I ask myself: what I am I rebelling against?

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning?  However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialist.  Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task of philosophy is the analysis of language.”  What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant.”¹

As an aside, Sam Wagstaff, mentor, benefactor, and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, famously described his collecting as a game of ‘Idiot’s Delight’ (a term notable as the name of the only film in which Clark Gable sings, as well as an alternate name for the game of Solitaire, a game known for its low chance of winning).  Moreover, it is not just the web medium that challenges the specialness of the lone artwork, but the sheer volume of works that exist, each vying for slivers of our attention.  Traditional images and objects — paintings, photographs, and sculpture — are particularly challenged because of the volume of non-art images we see daily that are, sometimes, arguably, endowed with as much content as anything called art.  So, what are we missing out on, practically or existentially, by giving a painting eight seconds of our time in thumbnail, ninety-six dot per inch format, rather than thirty minutes of our time in solitude in a gallery, or over the course of a lifetime above our imaginary fireplace mantel?

For me, browsing through images (and texts) with great rapidity is defensible because I feel like I’m getting somewhere with my grasp on art, so that I can … I don’t know … change things?  Change what?  I guess I mean that there’s a dilemma that spans artmaking, criticism, and curating, which is: when do you know enough to do it most effectively?  When should you stop researching precedents, and get to work?  What if you curate a critical, thematic, intragenerational art show, not knowing that there are serious flaws in your selections because you missed out on one chapter or another in art history?

And most criticism I read seems banal, not because it isn’t supremely intelligent or insightful or true, but because the stakes are low.  Maybe we need to see a militarization of the critic:  You don’t like this work?  Destroy it.  But in order for that to be justifiable, there must be a dominant, presumably correct, methodology that the critic is advocating and protecting, and we don’t have that.

I’ve gone off track here, but the inspiration behind this post is a passage from a review in Paper Monument, of Song Dong’s recent show at MoMA, featuring hundreds of household items horded by the artist’s mother over several decades in (pre-Great Leap Forward) Communist China.

…in the installation, the same fundamental alchemy persists: In poverty, the object is so difficult to obtain that it acquires a value far above and beyond its utility; as utility diminishes, the object retains a powerful but undefined meaning. The term “sentimental value” does not seem adequate here. Even the Chinese phrase shebude-literally, unable to let go-suggests holding onto a possession that is personally valuable because of its association with a loved one. But the things Zhao held onto, and invested with a peculiar brand of value, were bits of twine, plastic food trays, empty tubes of toothpaste, and the like: objects universally agreed upon by an industrial, mass-market culture to be garbage and unlikely to retain the emotional imprint of any of her loved ones. More saddening is that, in many cases, Zhao’s possessions moved directly from acquisition to storage, bypassing the station of utility entirely.²

Maybe we need less art, maybe even a poverty or a simulated poverty, for the alchemy to return.  Someone explain if I have this all wrong.

One last comment regarding a parallel I sometimes see, between browing art, and playing videogames:  1up.com, a popular videogame website, once posed to its audience the question, “Why do you play videogames?”  And of the thousands of anonymous answers, the one that seemed most profound to me was, “Because its easier than real life.”

Went to Sotheby’s today as part of a performance piece I think I’m doing, and because they had macaroni and cheese soup at the cafe.  Saw the Important Russian Art show.  Observations and pictures to come.

1. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p 174
2. Everything Must Go, Deborah Kuan, Paper Monument Journal of Contemporary Art, Issue 2