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New criticism – John Kelsey and the end of seeing
The artwork mirrors the conditions in which the artist produces it. Penck's Der Ubergang, Passage, 1963
What happens to a painting when it is reproduced as a digital .tiff (tagged image file format) file, or further, when printed out by an Epson dot matrix printer? What do we miss and what do we gain when we look through 3D glasses? What is the relationship between collage and painting in the age of Photoshop and Paint? When we can no longer see a direct relationship between the value of an artwork and the amount of time and effort it takes to make it, does that mean there are no such material values left, or that we are beginning to value the thinking, talking and re-thinking that goes into creating a work of art?
John Kelsey writes not just about the context of an art work – issues raised by, or that arise out of the work itself – he uses the work to explore questions, things on his mind as it were.
His editors, Daniel Birnbaum and Isabelle Graw, suggest that Kelsey’s kind of critical “play” is all that can be managed given that conventional art criticism has been superceded successively by curators, then impressarios, then dealers and finally collectors, who now lead the process of identifying and validating art.
Albert Oehlen's collage-painting machine diagrammed by John Kelsey.
There is more to it than that. There is a shift taking place that is hard to describe. Kelsey is looking for value in different places, in different ways, in the world at large of course, but also in the ways we interpret the world. “Art becomes a way of working on the displacement of information from one format to another, and of working on the way we are displaced too, in work and in play.” (p. 68) Compared to art criticism which pivots on the interpretation of what can be seen relative to what we know as having been seen before, Kelsey’s writing speaks an end of seeing. By writing about the economics and other exigencies of art practice, the artwork emerges in relation to, contingent upon, representative of, the circumstances under which it was produced and is being viewed. We, as observers, are afforded the opportunity to be more fully present with the artwork as social beings within a social framework.
Within this collection of 26 previously published essays, The Self Employment Rate dips deepest into social/political analysis, mentioning artists (Marcel Broodthaers, Martin Kippenberger, Merlin Carpenter) in passing, using them illustratively. This approach allows Kelsey to cut to the core of the culture of crisis we are now living: “[O]ur self-employment increases according to the degree we make ourselves flexible within the networks of communication that we busy ourselves extending under the sign of the social, in the modes of art and entertainment.” (p. 181)
Kelsey doesn’t see many options, for criticism or for artists. “Artists will either have to make do with exploiting the merely superficial differences that designate their own practices within a generic (and ever more captured and productive) availability to abstraction shared by every metropolitan self-employee, or they will invent new and specific ways of interrupting themselves. At a certain point, it just seems boring not to pursue the latter option on some level, not to appropriate and make use of our own special crisis as a kind of art.”
Art writing as competitive sport.
Rich Texts: Selected Writings for Art
John Kelsey
Sternberg Press, 2010
248 pages (numbered pages start at 7 and end at 245)
Softcover with dust jacket bearing on the interior side a colour photo of an artwork by Michael Krebber.
978-1-934105-23-8
Curiously illustrated with photos of professional women tennis players at work.
US $19.95
Order in North America from R.A.M. Publications + Distribution.
Game on.
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book image: http://www.worldfoodbooks.com/artist/john-kelsey/
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Errata?
The title of the essay The Self-Employment Rate is asterisked to refer to previous publication, just as all the other essays in the book are, but no previous publication is noted at the bottom of that page. Perhaps the essay was first published in the book. But if so, why the asterisk? If not, where’s the citation?
Where are the credits for the b/w photos of professional women tennis players?
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Addendum
“We must insist that what artworks are economically, centrally determines what they mean socially and also artisitcally.”
- Andrea Fraser, L’1%, c’est moi.” p.6
Nice, if it only wasn’t said as art.
Is this site being inadvertently mothballed?
I can’t seem to bring myself to report about the CAMDO-Pages “pop-up bookstore” at Art Toronto 2011. All that effort is going to other places on the web, Facebook, etc. I feel like this site is getting fossilized, not unlike this artwork by Jaqueline Rush Lee.
Found here: http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/endicott_redux/arts/page/2/
cites Center for Book Arts in New York: http://www.centerforbookarts.org/
Petrified Book, by Jaqueline Rush Lee
Notwithstanding its ups and downs over the years, the New Yorker remains the ne plus ultra of English language magazine publishing. Every author hopes to be either written about or published in it. It’s the Nobel Prize with subscribers.
Canadian author Patricia Pearson enters the pantheon of such celestial and celebrated talents in the October 17th issue with her History: The Customer Reviews in the Shouts and Murmurs section, on your local newsstand this week.
If, as Twain advised, “It is the will of God that we must have critics… and we must bear the burden,” Pearson lightens that load considerably.
Pearson’s blog Good News About the Coming Apocalypse
Sketchbook with voices
Eric Fischl's 1986 book, reprint edition by Chronicle Books, ISMB-13 978-0811875493
It struck me as sadly desperate that an artist and a critic as celebrated as Eric Fischl and Jerry Saltz are would stoop to publishing this sort of novelty or gift book. But when I got the book home and opened it up to the colophon page, I discovered it was first published in 1986, which is about when Fischl’s career was peaking. So that left some doubt: is it a cynical effort to cash in from the mass market or sincere effort to reflect on the creative process in a way that is both accessible and encouraging of actual creative play?
Although it’s hard to imagine that very many people would buy this book to use it a sketchbook – it’s much more likely to be given as a gift to the aspiring artist or creative-type friend after which it would sit on the shelf. But I’m planning to take it at its word and use it just that way to see what happens.
I paid $24 for this book when I could have paid only $16 to Amazon and had them deliver it to my doorstep. Why? It’s not because I’m some sort of fanatical supporter of local business or bookstores, though I am to some extent, so much as that I can’t resist buying books when I go into a bookstore. In fact, I try to avoid bookstores for that very reason. It’s hard on the pocketbook and eventually I am going to have to get rid of the books.
So why do I still buy books? Maybe it’s because buying is an essential part of what you do in a store. You browse, you discover, consider and choose, a process that culminates in the purchase. This is not something anachronistic like steam powered locomotives but a fundamental part of the consumer experience.
Art books are especially good conduits for this kind of desire machine. Add visual design, size, weight, paper quality, and images to the mix and the process moves to a whole new level, practically fetishistic. No wonder bookstores that are surviving are stocking more and more art books. They’re practically irresistible.
Bad Idea
It is one of the oddities of the interface of art and publishing that you can find obscure little magazines like this one on some Canadian newsstands several years after they were published. It’s like the store buyers forget that magazines have best before dates and treat them more like books. I found this 2008 issue of the UK culture mag Bad Idea at my fav bookstore, Type, in Toronto.
Bad Idea is anything but. Billing itself as “the smart option, young journalism, ideas and opinion” it gives a neat cultural feel to just about everything. In this issue, the economy is the focus with cartoons explaining the economic fallout of sub-prime mortgages and the joys of bingo, articles on the UK’s collapsing pork industry, property investment in Romania and the art market bubble, and a special feature on the credit crunch, illustrated with exceptionally handsome photographs of Bay Street by Sebastian Meyer.
Do you know what a “deal toy” is? Known more formally as tombstones, deal toys are trophies custom designed to celebrate huge financial deals. That fact alone and the samples shown made the $12 price tag worth it. The rest was gravy.
Another super good idea about Bad Idea is that issues 4 to 7 are all available online, using the awesome e-publishing facility Issuu:
Read the current issue here http://www.badidea.co.uk/magazine/
Read about Issuu here http://blog.issuu.com/?page_id=733.
So why on earth call a magazine as good as Bad Idea “bad”? Perhaps it was what Clay Felker, founder of New York magazine, said to the precocious students at the U of California who suggested starting it back in 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Idea
Then again, maybe it really was a bad idea. I can’t find any copy on the website more recent than April 2010 and issue 7 is the last one to follow the 2008 issue I picked up, and email to the address listed on the website bounced back as undeliverable. Funded primarily by the British Arts Council (or so it looked to me) perhaps they succumbed to the very economic crisis they so confidently laid bare.
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An interview with Abbas Akhavan
Abbas Akhavan, 2nd May Day at the Convenience Gallery, Toronto, May 2-30, 2011
RL: This work consists roughly of boards covering the windows of the Convenience Gallery with some posters and graffiti. How did this work come about?
AA: I think it would be really indulgent to make work without considering the context, the neighbourhood, the viewers. My first urge was to re-double the storefront window across the street, to mirror it. And my second thought was to do something for the people at the bus stop that’s right outside the gallery, something with text that talks about waiting.
RL: How did you end up, between the mirroring idea and the waiting idea, doing something that is quite different than either?
AA: If it’s a facade, it has to be more than a window display. I’m interested in windows but I have a lot of anxiety about window design. It’s something art can fall into; it can become either theatrical, coercing you to feel something, or just a decorative window store display. I have done quite a lot of work dealing with the entrances to galleries. My early work had a lot to do with domesticity and trauma, the politics of the nation state enacted in the family – father on mother, mother on kids, kids on pets – so I ended up doing a lot of work about the home, moving from the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom and then gradually to the window and beyond, like the piece I did in Hank Bull’s apartment in Vancouver, with curtains hanging out of the window. It just looks like he forgot to pull them in, but in Vancouver’s gentrified neighbourhoods, you’re not allowed to have your curtains flapping in the wind.
I was interested in the Convenience window because it is a space on the periphery, between the household and the street, so there was the adjacency to domestic space and the neighbourhood. I was very aware of the political moment: the space was across the street from a polling station [for the May 2nd federal election] and I’m not a supporter of the right wing movement so we moved the opening from the 3rd to the 2nd, hence the title, 2nd May Day. May Day has resonance with worker’s national day, activist uprising and also there’s the distress signal May Day doubled, “May Day May Day,” hence the title “2nd May Day.” In this work, like more recent works, my practice is more and more mimetic, taking things and displacing them to different locations. And I’m interested in ‘realness’, pitching realness that is not “art real.”
RL: This kind of fake real is interesting. On the viewer’s side there’s a kind of fakery, fooling them into believing what they are seeing is something it’s not.
AA: I’m not interested in tricking the viewer but in getting them to read it as non-art so they’ll read it as ‘real’, so it’s about bridging the gap, in sort of a historical nostalgic way, like art that looks like life. I have an iconoclastic relationship to making work. I don’t like creating new images or figuration. If I am projecting a narrative onto the work that is otherwise absent from the work, it kind of corners you but hopefully it doesn’t push a meaning onto you. Like the curtains in Hank’s window, they’re just hanging out the window, but in Vancouver this accident was like a flag, waving against the new economical etiquette. Often people don’t read the work as art, as in the case with the laundry I hung outside my studio in Spain – the colours corresponded with the flags of the countries playing against Spain during the soccer finales. I wanted to talk about patriotism, but did not want to hang flags. So since it was laundry exposed in a very rich neighbourhood, it was read as indecent or unbecoming and as I hoped, the laundry was read as obscene and viewers found it extra offensive because of their heightened patriotism, yet the colour coding was subtle enough to insert doubt in the reading of the work as flags.
The work is made to be read as art and hopefully as something beyond it, for example the piece with flowers, there’s something about memorial accidents or accidental memorials, there’s text on the buckets of flowers that says “Everything must go.” So people would take flowers or leave flowers, and the city didn’t try to take it down; it couldn’t be read as vandalism.
Aside from the curtains and flowers at Western Front, I also placed shoes just outside the building entrance. The flowers were based on something I saw a few blocks away where somebody had placed flowers on the boulevard where an accident had occurred and the shoes were based on the dance studio at Western Front where I saw people leave their shoes outside the dance studio. I repeated that in the entranceway. After leaving a few pairs of shoes there, visitors to the gallery would remove their shoes before entering the building.
So at Convenience I was thinking about hurricanes and the Harper government’s policy towards the environment. So there’s a reference to boarded up windows before hurricanes where people write things like “Earl blows” [referring to Hurricane Earl] on the boards. In this case, with the election, I spray painted “Steve blows” on the boards, which had another kind of resonance with [Toronto mayor] Rob Ford being against graffiti. Then there’s also reference to homophobia, which with Scott and Flavio [proprietors of Convenience Gallery] was also provocative. And there’s a reference also to funding cuts to the arts: the idea of the gallery being boarded up. And also to the G20 when downtown shop windows were boarded up with sale signs spray painted on them. And then I’m also interested in the story of the Big Bad Wolf, “I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down.”
RL: I saw the work for the first time when I was riding my bike over to visit my friends who live just down the street. I always look forward to seeing the gallery window on my way there but this time when I saw the wood, I said to myself “Oh no, somebody has thrown a rock through the window.”
AA: At first my urge was to cover up the window from the outside, but that is too literal, it’s not implicated, so I put the boards directly behind the glass. You go through this sort of editing process. It’s about being in a visual relationship to protest, not a literal one. I put posters on the inside and also on the outside hoping that other people might poster the windows. I don’t know what it needs to do in order to explain to people what it’s doing. It’s a bit confrontational I guess.
RL: It’s not a megaphone broadcasting a message, but it’s carrying a meaning. It’s low tech. Anybody paying attention to the gallery would get what it is, that it’s an art exhibit.
AA: We aged the sign for the show that’s beside the doorway so it looked like it was from an older show, months ago, the last show before the gallery closed.
RL: Yeah, that definitely gave rise to doubt; it made me think twice. It was so faded and curling, it looked like a sign for a show from some months ago, so that is when I got very clearly that it was the idea of the closed gallery. Within this iconoclasm, I wonder why artists don’t go all the way; if you are against art then why don’t you just stop making it?
AA: I am not against art but I’m totally against the spectacle of it. I am interested in the lowness of the work. Often I’m not interested in high tech. For this kind of work it is important that, like Martha Rosler says, you don’t use a video camera to its full capacity, you use the media for your own purposes and not the other way around.
RL: There are many clues in the work that there’s something else going on.
AA: There’s a kind of iconoclasm. We might read it as “no image”, “no art,” “no window,” like “post no bills.” A woman came off the bus at the stop beside the gallery and she paused, then she went up and touched the glass. There was like some kind of slippage. She had to see if it was real. And that’s when the work is still ‘art’, and not the real thing. A friend phoned me to tell me that my work had been vandalized after she saw spray paint on the window.
My interest is in the specific situation. I can’t ever reshow this work. I like doing site-specific work and I think it can be read as anti-careerist. Even for applications, it takes so much to explain the work. There are so many micro-politics that inform the work. Typical applications give you no space to explain, they are designed according to conventions of what art is supposed to be, like painting, no context, just title, dimensions, and medium.
RL: Speaking of grant applications or applying for exhibitions, this raises another question: how much do you write? All MFA graduates today are educated to write. It’s a peculiar post-1970 part of art practice. At the time of the Group of Seven, nobody wrote much about their work. It’s kind of shocking to learn that artists just didn’t do that in those days. It’s too bad because nobody’s alive today to recount the history. Somebody should have been doing the research in the 40s and 50s but it’s taken until today and now it’s very hard to reconstruct what was happening then.
AA: I have a confession. I’m a really bad reader and writer. I mean I do read and write but it’s more like I enact research. I read but mostly it’s a time for daydreaming, and I walk a lot and that’s when I think through things, or I learn through talking with friends. Reading and writing is just a small part of my research.
RL: Do you have an ambition to write, as in art history or theory or criticism?
AA: I don’t have that kind of intelligence. I’d like to write criticism but I don’t do that. I do give artist’s talks. I talk about other artists’ work. But I do wonder where’s the critical writing these days; it’s all like catalogue essays.
RL: There is no critical writing right now. Writers seem to think their job is to explain the work but also to validate it. This is understandable because it validates the writer’s position academically or within curatorial circles.
AA: But it’s too often like a sales pitch.
RL: Yeah, but within the historical idiom. I used to think this was more of an issue than I do now because it’s hard to imagine a context in which criticism would be meaningful right now. If you go back to the days when Don Judd was writing criticism for Arts Magazine and Art International, he’d see all the shows in New York and he wouldn’t pull punches. He’d say, for example, something like “this work has been done before, it’s not that interesting.” But it’s problematic because that kind of journalistic criticism is often completely wrong, dismissive, and over time turns out to be irrelevant. From an artist’s point of view, what would you want criticism to do that’s it’s not?
AA: If the work is rich enough, the criticism should be a window to other things the work wants to talk about as opposed to just what the work is about. So much criticism is just descriptive of the work. Somehow the curator-artist relationship overshadows everything. The closest thing I can think of to explain what we don’t have is food critics, people who are willing to put their reputation on the line.
RL: What about curating?
AA: I don’t do that either. Despite my schooling, I am not of the Vancouver school that writes, curates, shows, critiques, etc. Sometimes that can be fruitful, but sometimes that can be read as an assertive self-insertion into multiple discourses, multiple histories – giving way to master narratives.
RL: I find that I can’t really relate to the Vancouver school either, despite their strong conceptual underpinnings. I don’t understand it really.
AA: During a talk in Vancouver, Martha Rosler described Vancouver as the land where artists have become stars, and progressively moved onto becoming kings, millionaires, empires, and so on.
RL: I wouldn’t want to criticize artists for whatever success they can achieve. But I’m interested in the art economy, how artists make a living or don’t. For example, in the book I’m working on I’m hoping to do a chapter comparing sports to art because athletes experience the same kind of precariousness artists do.
AA: For athlete’s it’s about exhausting the body, and it does expire. I’m not sure it’s the same for artists. Artists can (hopefully) keep making work into old age.
RL: Persistence used to mean more than it does now. I think it used to be that if you hung in there and at 50 or 55 or 60 you were still making art, people would pay attention. I’m not sure it works like that anymore. There are so many artists. How much do you think about these things?
Abbas Akhavan, Islands, at Third Line, Dubai, 2010
AA: Every day. I come from a poor family. I have student debt. I have mixed feelings about commercial success. I have a dealer, Third Line in Dubai, but most of my work is shown in artist-run-centers and museums. And when I did my last show at Third Line, they were incredulous that I wanted to do an installation that seemed impossible to sell. It was a map of Dubai done with imitation gold leaf on the gallery wall. The wall was priced relative to Dubai property values and the prices increased as more sections sold, just like real state. We basically sold sections of drywall, removing each piece as it sold. As the show progressed and sections were removed, the work changed, giving way to another map, one showing the desired areas of Dubai but also revealing the shows success or failure. So the economy of gold, the land, the gallery, and the art market was all woven into the structure of the show. I did other work for the show, photocopies of images showing the pre-oil economy of Dubai, date farming, sheep herding, etc. Each photocopy had parts gilded by hand with 22 Carat gold, however the images were made in endless multiples. I was interested in the artist as gilder rather than originator but also reflecting on the economy of the photocopy. People didn’t like the repetition, didn’t think the work was unique enough and as I predicted, the multiplication devalued the work.
RL: The legacy of art against the economy goes way back and the question raised by people like Isabelle Graw is that every effort to oppose the institution or the spectacle or the economy gets absorbed.
AA: I think it is nearly impossible to negate the art market when you show in a commercial gallery and live as a full time artist, but I think one can complicate that relationship or render it visible or at the very least be critical of it.
RL: But isn’t it the case that there is a gain in your cultural capital as an artist in proportion to the critique or resistance in your work. Isn’t that the gamble?
AA: I know a lot of artists that are trading in critique and doing really, really well. If you make digestible work, like all the current “Middle Eastern looking” art works that cater to the market – the aesthetics of politics – they do really well. Carpet factories… a demand-supply relationship. It’s really easy to slip from jester to clown. Ideally you want to be wedging the circle open, not occupying the space assigned to you.
RL: I don’t think most artists preconceive their work that much, as if there’s a space there for me to occupy so I’m going to go there. But you are more conscious of that kind of contrivance than most and of the art world as a market, so you are working harder not to fit into the conventional spaces.
AA: I’m not interested in being a curator’s artist, doing work that makes other work look good.
RL: That brings up the idea of the artist’s artist. There used to be artists who were appreciated by their peers but didn’t fit into any of the current trends but I’m not sure that exists anymore.
AA: There are artists who are like that for me, like Marina Roy, who lacks a signature style and is not making a brand. She chose to teach and make work. She is a great artist and a great teacher. I taught at Emily Carr and liked it, but then I had this dream of being a full time artist, so I came to Toronto with no money. And since I could not find a job, I just became an artist; it was like jumping in and then learning to swim.
RL: Paul Butler once told me, if you take the plunge people respect that. But it’s hard. I don’t know that I have the discipline. You’ve done a huge number of shows since graduating. You must be very self-disciplined.
AA: There is no blue print or structure, so I make it up as I go. I don’t spend that much time making work but I am working all the time in that when I am not making, I am thinking. If I take on a project, it’s intense. I won’t sleep to get the work done in like six days. You talked about the suffering artist and I was prepared for that, but I woke up one day and I was just scared. I didn’t expect that.
LINKS RELATED TO THIS INTERVIEW
Abbas Ahkavan
http://www.thethirdline.com/artist_details.php?id=42&cbo=2
http://theagyuisoutthere.org/everywhere/?p=594
Marina Roy
Donald Judd: The Complete Writings 1959-1975
NSCAD Press http://www.artbook.com/0919616429.html
John O’Brian and Peter White, Beyond Wilderness
McGill-Queen’s University Press http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=2158
Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art between the market and celebrity culture
Sternberg Press http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1263&l=en&bookId=158&sort=year%20DESC,month%20DESC
Reading Art review of High Price: http://www.readingart.ca/blog/?p=743
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The politics of campaign literature design
It may not quite be ideology made visible but for visual learners there’s something to be read in the design of campaign literature. Each of the three main parties competing in the 2011 Canadian election campaign have designed the covers of their election platform documents to reflect values they purport to represent.
The Conservative party document cover shows party leader Stephen Harper leaving the Canadian flag behind as he strides into the blue light of… fiscal responsibility, one imagines, something he keeps saying even while spending gazillions of taxpayer dollars on prisons, which people understand from a fear perspective, and jet fighters, which nobody really understands from any perspective, but which is an expenditure of such jaw-dropping magnitude that one just sort of gives up and prays the dude knows what he’s doing. Ccommercial or sports-type typography completes the picture of the unassuming “everyman” Harper has inhabited, so far successfully.
Liberals have the good fortune to have claimed the most powerful colour, red, and the bad fortune that it has been tainted in the 20th C as representing, of all things, Communism. Tough luck; too late to change and generations before that history is eclipsed. The graphic silhouette of the 2.2 child heterosexual family is to the point in terms of the Liberal’s urban professional demographic. That the family is submerged in a sea of red is another unfortunate metaphor of our times. Interestingly there’s no trace of party leader Michael Ignatieff on the cover and the slogan “… Your Canada” speaks to an interesting idea: getting the best people to Ottawa and letting them work not just for the people who voted for them, but on behalf of all the constituents of their ridings. It’s a complicated message but like the colour red, it’s got passion going for it. If only it were true.
The New Democratic Party steps out by using landscape format, a smart choice in terms of adaptability to web browsers, and friendly if a tad laid back. One wishes it might Rise Up! as the Liberal leader said recently. There’s good use of unassuming photographs of leader Jack Layton with regular folks, a nice contrast to the lonely Mr. Harper and less reductive than the Liberal’s 2 dimensional family. That the photos are huddling at the bottom of the page says something about the party’s self-image and their demographic. I’ve always thought it was unfortunate the NDP chose orange as its colour when green was still available, though in either case they’re doomed by a secondary colour. And what is one to make of that expanse of white above the orange dividing line? Is that space for the policy they might write if elected? Or is that the middle class majority the NDP is so equivocal about claiming?
Is the well of copyright dry? or poisoned?
Like poor Charlie Brown we are doomed to keep charging the copyright ball only to have it yanked away at the last minute by the remorseless Lucy.
Three new Rewriting the Cartoons comics show a few of the ridiculous dilemmas that currently mire copyright reform in permanent debate. You could draw comics like this for every conceivable position on Bill C-32 (in fact, to mash up your own just copy the blank strip below), which suggests to me that IF there’s something broken in how content gets from creators to consumers, it’s not something that can be fixed by copyright.
Publishers vs. Authors - click to enlarge
Big Media and You - click to enlarge
The Collecting Societies - click to enlarge
But it will be a shame if Bill C-32 is never passed, for two reasons, neither of which ironically has to do with the substance of it. The first is that the preamble to the Bill proposes that the Copyright Act be revisited every five years. That’s an important idea given how quickly technology is changing how content is created and delivered. It’s been 14 years since the last round of amendments and each added year makes the existing Act more antiquated and the changes needed more drastic and more difficult to get agreement on. The second is that there has been more consultation during this round than ever before. Even if nobody really understands what the fuss is about, we are all more aware than ever that there is such a thing as copyright and that it affects our daily lives. Having been engaged, people naturally want to see something happen.
It’s pretty clear at this point that copyright as a regulatory regime – a system of rules to guide how content moves from creator to the public – is over. It’s now all about the market, who controls flow and access, and the Bill wants to let the market work it out while also taking a few important steps to balance public access against the skew towards creators and publishers the Act was given by the Brian Mulroney government in 1988.
It’s often said that something nobody likes is probably achieving balance and that is certainly true of Bill C-32: everyone has something to gain but also to risk. That’s good enough for me. Let’s get it done and move on. Please, let Charlie kick the ball Lucy!
If you want to make your own mash up using this classic Schulz strip, click to enlarge the pic with the partly blanked out word balloons below. If you do, please send me a copy and I’ll post it here.
If you want to read the original Peanuts strip, click to enlarge the one labeled “original.” Sorry, I do not have the date or location for this; clipped it ages ago.
Original strip - click to enlarge
Flag that.
Kristina Lee Podesva's Brown Flag questions the symbolic capacity of distance communications.
Kristina Lee Podesva’s recent work at Open Space, Victoria, part of the exhibition Like Some Pool of Fire throws the messaging capabilities of flags into doubt. Had she chosen a different colour like green or yellow or blue there might be clear associations – ecology, cowardice or optimism for example – but brown?
Podesva developed a distinctive colour palette some time ago with the project Colour School (which has its own Facebook page) and has spun it throughout her work ever since, for example this globe or this poster. If the palette were less unusual, you might say she was creating a brand. Instead, it’s more… a parody of branding, a wry reflection on communication, something sublime.
Download the beautiful exhibit catalog for Like Some Pool of Fire. (27mgs)
Art is all about interpretation and this blog is about how we interpret or "read" art. It's also about arts policy, which tells us something about how others think art is to be read, and about the art economy, which no matter how you read it, matters a good deal more to us individually and collectively than we care to discuss. I started this blog initially to review books about art and there's still quite a bit of that sort of thing too. Read on.
