Appearing to break through the steel bars that surround them, these characters represent the “free passage of all populations, and appealing for a world without borders,” said creative foundation Brilliant Minds, which organized the installation.
This is a beautiful sculpture by Ai Weiwei. The foundation Brilliant Minds was created by the man who became unfathomably rich by founding first Pirate Bay and later Spotify. Someone should put a sticker on the Arch that says paid for by musicians everywhere.
I am reading Ai’s book “1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows”. For me the book became really interesting after he arrived in New York, in February of 1981.
There were tens of thousands of artists in New York, but only a few dozen who were making money. For a certain subset, art had become a
target of speculation and just part of the race to find the next new thing.
Art had long been a consumption commodity, a decoration catering to the
tastes of the rich, and under commercial pressures it was bound
degenerate. As artworks rise in monetary value, their spiritual dimension
declines, and art is reduced to little more than an investment asset, a
financial product.
and
Around this same time, a couple of pictures of mine were part of a group exhibition in the East Village. When the show closed, rather than take the pictures home with me, I just chucked them into a dumpster. Dumpsters are everywhere in the streets of New York City, and you could probably find a number of masterpieces in them. I must have moved about ten times during my years in New York, and artworks were the first things I threw away. I had pride in these works, of course, but once I’d finished them, my friendship with them had ended. I didn’t owe them and they didn’t owe me, and I would have been more embarrassed to see them again than I would have been to run into an old lover. If they were not going to behanging on someone else’s wall, they didn’t count as anything at all.
Tilt-shift perspectives for under a buck? TiltShift Generator for the iPhone.
While we were in Japan I read The Painter of Battles: A Novel
by Arturo Perez-Reverte – I read the Kindle version on my iPhone. At one point he writes about the lines that cross to bring people together or diverge to keep them apart. The net of interaction. What a Buddhist might call Karma, I suppose. The other day a friend asked about my photography. I wrote:
Photography, and much of art in general, is about making associations, that is, seeing, or rather recognizing, lines, diagonals, shapes, colors in a landscape, seeing some kind of order in a landscape that tells a story. As such photography is no different from cooking or making music. It’s all about using reference points and infusing them with some kind of meaning or emotion.
Each culture has their own reference points. What an American would consider pop-food, middle of the road, palette-pleasing, a Chinese or Japanese person might find strange or even inedible – when asked which Western food is the most digusting, Chinese school children overwhelming elected uncooked mushrooms – and there are of course dishes in Japan and China that are very challenging to Euro-American tastes.
The same is true in music, of course. Bebop or very traditional Flamenco, modern classical music – they might all require a little getting used to, just like a bowl of really hot green Thai curry. Jazz that isn’t challenging enough for a Bebop fan might be much to complex for a Jazz n00b.
Food that might be considered too spicy in the USA or Europe, might not be spicy enough for people in South-East Asia. So, references are culture-dependent, although those references are becoming more globally understood – even in Italy one can now find Chinese, Thai, Japanese restaurants.
It seems to me that art is about linking. The linking of a landscape with geometry in a photograph. The linking of a new dish to the flavors of a season. The linking of a melody to a tradition or a style. The linking of poetry to an emotion, or a season – and possibly without mentioning the emotion at all. And therein lies the difference between art-linking and internet-linking. Internet is about literal hypertext. Art, whether it is a painting, photography, poetry, music or cooking, is about poetic linking. A poem about momiji leaves falling from the tree in Autumn is not about linking to the species of tree, but might be about the brevity of an individual life. Or, it might be about the sadness experienced when leaving friends.
What I like about my solo concerts with slideshow is the fluid linking that occurs every time. Linkage between the photographs themselves, linkage between the photos and the music. Linkage between what is going on onstage and the members of the audience etc….
Speaking of linking: I bought Robbie Williams’ new album “Reality Killed the Video Star”. You are surprised? Well, I didn’t buy it for the music, I bought it to play the meta-game, to find all of the references and to check out the production. Williams brought in the old A-team: Trevor Horn, Stephen Lipson, Anne Dudley etc.
The Meta-game starts with the album title, actually. The producer of the album is Trevor Horn, who produced many hit records in the Nineties, including Seal, Grace Jones, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and others, and who had a big hit in the Eighties with an album called “Video Killed the Radio Star”. So, reality killed the video star, who in turn killed the radio star…
The sound of the music is terribly compressed, but I imagine the orchestration sounded quite lush before mastering. Anyway, I hear John Lennon, Elton John, The Beatles, Kraftwerk, OMD, David Bowie and many others. A cornucopia of sounds from the Eighties.
PS: I really enjoyed The Painter of Battles: A Novel, although, maybe enjoy is the wrong word. Not an easy book, but I found it very rewarding.
PPS: Of course, literal linking could be just the start, just as poetry started with literal descriptions, e.g. I am sad because Summer is over and you have to leave before turning to less direct imagery. A meta-story could appear on the interwebs any minute, something that links noises, music, images, poetry to a text. Moving toward complexity, life does (((Yoda-speak))).
Jon told me he saw Billy Bob Thornton on a TV show, asking another man to name a rock band after 1980 that we will listen to in a hundred years. The man named Bruce Springsteen to which Thornton immediately replied that Springsteen started in the Seventies. Then U2 and REM were brought up, but Thornton said that he could name at least 100 bands from the Sixties and Seventies that will be listened to a century from now.
I suggested Prince, but could not come up with much else. What about Jazz, can you name a bunch of young players? Easy to name the greats from the fifties, sixties and seventies, isn’t it. Could be I am not listening to Jazz radio… wait, there basically is no Jazz radio anymore… So, what happened with the record labels and with radio during the last decade and a half has something to do with it. But was that action or re-action?
Could it be that there is a relation between the downward spiral of art and music education in our schools, starting sometime in the Eighties, and the music and art scene? Has anybody studied the effect the lack of music/art education might have had on our culture in general? How about this: what if the lack of art/music education means that more people simply don’t know what a superior photograph looks like? If any photo of the Pantheon will do, why would the press, for example, hire a photographer to take a great photo of the place?
Maybe people have not been given the tools (((art-education))) to analyze a photograph? This came up in a conversation with a photographer friend, after our performance in Newport Beach today… And if a person knows near nothing about music, because the subject was never brought up in school, they also don’t know what it takes to play an instrument, the studying, the practicing, the discipline…. Therefore music and performance is devalued. And it’s not going to get better soon, as Californian government has promised to slash more of whatever is left of art and music in schools because of their budget crisis.
I find this inquiry as fascinating as a doctor might find dissecting a cadaver. Very complex, with lines crossing and double-crossing… a veritable hive of connections and layers. What is the origin? How is it connected? Which piece should I move first to strengthen the position? Which was the biggest mistake? I think it is safe to say that, as Dr. Sacks mentioned, we are a musical species – to deny that is to inhibit our personal and cultural growth. So, the first step is to not only provide arts education, but to attempt to really integrate it into the curriculum. We certainly don’t all have to become musicians, painters, photographers, but an appreciation and rudimentary understanding of the arts, and in particular music, would, I believe, enrich all of us.
Here is a little riff on Tradition and Originality:
Tradition and Originality are poles, extremes like the absolute and relative that in reality can’t be torn apart. There is a flamenco tradition, predated by the Arabic tradition, but there is also the guitar-tradition, the coaxing sound from any wooden box tradition, which includes all string instruments, etc. etc… Tradition is the rootsystem, Originality is the bloom. Tradition is the mountain you jump from to fly. And sometimes it works the other way aroud, too, when an original event becomes a new tradition. Tradition is craft to the originality that is art. All the study-pieces and etudes we play and practice are like sacks filled with sand, which we pile up to climb and jump.
Finished the book The City and the City by China Mieville on Friday morning. What a book, what a trip! Don’t know what to write about it. It was compelling, twisted, fantastic.
“…And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.”
Counter to some predictions, photography and video are are not bound to ‘Free’. I’m in agreement with Anderson that ‘Free’ is most certainly carving out its space–even reasonably so–in every digitally based industry, but I’m in complete alignment with Gladwell that the two markets ‘Free’ and ‘Not Free’ can and will continue to co-exist reasonably nicely. The trick is/will be in finding the balance.
Read the whole piece here. A lot of very good food for thought.
Somewhat related is this entry at Slashdot:
Slashdot Technology Story | If You Live By Free, You Will Die By Free “Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban writes that the problem with companies who have built their business around free is that the more success you have in delivering free, the more expensive it is to stay at the top. ‘”They will be Facebook to your Myspace, or Myspace to your Friendster or Google to your Yahoo,” writes Cuban. “Someone out there with a better idea will raise a bunch of money, give it away for free, build scale and charge less to reach the audience.”‘ Cuban says that even Google, who lives and dies by free, knows that ‘at some point your Black Swan competitor will appear and they will kick your ass’ and that is exactly why Google invests in everything and anything they possibly can that they believe can create another business they can depend on in the future searching for the “next big Google thing.”
Anything generic is moving towards free. Anything truly original is moving towards value.
Latin or Blues electric guitar moves towards free. Santana moves towards value. A photograph of the Pantheon can be found for free on the internet, an original and completely different photograph of the Pantheon cannot.
For an artist the lesson might be this: If you want to fit into a certain category of music or want to fit into a specific radio format, you will have to fight free – because similar content WILL be available for free!
If, on the other hand, you are developing something truly original, a different sound, a new expression, then it might take you longer to find recognition, but you will develop value.
If, what you are creating is too far out… maybe you just have to wait a few months (((or sometimes years))) to let the world catch up. Suddenly you might find that your strange new sound fits in quite nicely.
In other words, I get the sense that the current economy and internet-culture should push a young artist towards more original and away from trying to fit in. And that would be a good thing.
During the Winter I read some of 2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolano. In the book an English artist cuts off his right hand and nails it to a self-portrait. The painting becomes his “last self-portrait”, or at least the last one painted with his right hand, and increases the value of all of his other paintings…
‘Suicide’ sculpture of Damien Hirst causes controversy in Spain | Art and design | guardian.co.uk It is Damien Hirst with a bloody hole in his head – the richest bad boy of British art finally turned into a piece of half-pickled art himself. Spanish artist Eugenio Merino’s sculpture, which shows a Hirst figure pointing a gun at himself and blowing his own brains out, is meant to be a comment on the British artist’s own £50mdiamond-studded skull, For the Love of God. Merino has called his piece “4 the Love of Go(l)d”, suggesting that Hirst’s attempts to increase the value of his own work would only be enhanced by his own death.
“I thought that, given that he thinks so much about money, his next work could be that he shot himself. Like that the value of his work would increase dramatically,” Merino told The Guardian. “Obviously, though, he would not be around to enjoy it.”
