NEWSgrist: *Piracy? Better Dead Than RIAA'd* July 2004 pt.2
============================
Vol.5, no.13 [July 19, 2004]
NEWSgrist - where spin is art
http://newsgrist.typepad.com
Archives
http://newsgrist.net
============================
============================
Sunday, July 18, 2004
Piracy? Better Dead Than RIAA'd
image found recently on x-arn.
Sunday, July 18, 2004 at 08:14 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/index.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Saturday, July 17, 2004
more art talking outside the cube: networked performance blog
an invitation + call for participation from Turbulence.org:
"We're planning a networked performance conference for Spring/Summer 2006 and
invite you to play a role in its development.
"We've set up a blog on the Turbulence web site where you can describe your
performance activities, and give us your perspective on what the important
issues and challenges are in networked performance today. We hope to obtain a
wide range of perspectives and uncover points of mutual relevance that will
help build the content of the conference.
"The conference will bring together practitioners and scholars from all forms
of networked performance – distributed Internet performance (including dance-,
theater-, and music-driven works), avatar theater, online performance art,
multi-user gaming performance, mixed reality performance, and other hybrid
forms."
[…]
"So visit the blog. Tell us who you are. Give us your URL(s) to post in our
links section and the dates of any upcoming networked performances. And please
tell anyone you think might be interested to join us."
read more on their About page.
Saturday, July 17, 2004 at 04:50 PM in Weblogs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/more_art_talkin.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
art talk outside the cube
Sal Randolph has started a new project called INTHECONSERVATION: art talk
outside the cube
quoting her intro:
"The new type of beauty can only be a beauty of situations" Guy Debord
The "cube" in the subtitle is of course the white cube of Brian O'Doherty's
1976 essay "Inside the White Cube" (these days available in book form) – not
just the gallery as a physical space, but the gallery in its role as a temple
for commerce and contemplation, the gallery as a context for art. It's a
context that has changed surprisingly little in the almost 30 years since
O'Doherty challenged it's presumed neutrality. So what does it mean to talk
outside the cube?
[…]
To talk outside the cube means to talk about works of art which don't fit the
confines of the object or the white room. It means talking about works which
take place in more public and social space, works in which there are
participants rather than audiences. It means talking about work which is
relatively neglected by the current critical discourse, and finding a language
for this kind of talk. It also means looking to intellectual disciplines beyond
art history and criticism for inspiration in developing that language.
I invite all readers to join the conversation here – to comment on what is
published if they wish to, and also to send in their own accounts, artistic
statements, and analyses. Write to talk [at] intheconversation [dot] com.
Sal Randolph
New York, June, 2004
Saturday, July 17, 2004 at 04:40 PM in Weblogs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/art_talk_outsid.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
The Relish On the Hotdog Turns the Stomach (re: Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs)
I haven't read Peck's Hatchet Jobs (I may skip it), but I did read and admire
his last novel, What We Lost, which resonated (I have my own Long Island
skeletons) and which I thought was 'generous' writing; not indulgent. Perhaps
one can afford to be a generous novelist and an ungenerous reviewer (better
than the other way around).
via the NYTimes:
[…] Peck devotes more than 30 contemptuous pages to Sven Birkerts, for the
street crime and mortal sin of generosity in literary criticism.
Think of it: with a whole world of worthy targets – Rupert Murdoch, Michael
Eisner, Donald Trump, Conrad Black, Eli Manning, Shell Oil, Clear Channel,
Conde Nast – he mugs a man who has spent the last quarter of a century staying
poor by reviewing other people's books, who has read more widely, warmly and
deeply than the vampire bat fastened to his carotid, who should be commended
rather than ridiculed for a willingness to take on a review of a new
translation of Mandelstam's journals, and who, even though he wrote a
regrettably mixed review of a book of mine in these pages, deserves far better
from the community of letters, if there is one, than Peck's bumptious heehaw:
''With friends like this, literature needs an enema.''
It's the relish on this hotdog that turns the stomach. He promises never to do
it again, but the very title ''Hatchet Jobs'' reeks of market niche, an
underground service like fumigation or garbage recycling. His alibi for being
unfair is that he's a novelist, and they lie a lot. But his reputation would
have long since earned him the right at his various pillboxes and lemonade
stands to review any book he chose, out of hundreds of good ones needing
discovery among tens of thousands cynically published, and yet he almost always
seems to pick a punching bag, or draw his own bull's-eye on the passing chump.
This is lazy, churlish and even demagogic.
> snip! <
from 'Hatchet Jobs': Smash-Mouth Criticism
By JOHN LEONARD, NYTimes. Published: July 18, 2004
Saturday, July 17, 2004 at 03:47 PM in Books | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/the_relish_on_t.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Periscoping it Out
Pictured: still from a clip showing Julianne Schwartz's Can You Hear Me
periscope on the Bowery.
Download the clip here
[thanks to Mica via Rhizome - also checkout Mica's moving images blog: Hello?]
via the New Museum site:
Counter Culture
July 10 - August 14, 2004
Tuesday - Saturday, Noon - 6PM
At various locations on and around the Bowery
A seek-and-ye-shall-find exhibition for the adventurer in all art lovers,
Counter Culture partners contemporary artists with shopkeepers near our future
home on the Bowery. Through site-specific installations by six New York based
artists, visitors will be taken on a journey to examine the zones of exchange
and cultural diversity surrounding this unique neighborhood. A self-guided
walking tour will take people on a path to the "interventions" installed
throughout the bodegas, kitchen and restaurant supply stores, Noho boutiques
and other local businesses that make up this historical area of Manhattan.
Participating artists include Flux Factory, Ricardo Miranda Zuiga, Jean Shin,
Julianne Swartz, Marion Wilson, and Raul Vincent Enriquez, who has created a
narrative-based walking tour for the exhibition that is available as a
downloadable MP3 on the New Museums website. see schedule.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at 11:28 AM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/periscoping_it_.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Under Fire On Fire
Under Fire is a project by Jordan Crandall that explores the organization and
representation of contemporary armed conflict. This book, part of the projects
first phase, involves discussions between artists, political scientists,
critics, activists, and journalists on a wide array of issues around warfare
and representation. Topics covered in this volume include battle simulation and
news programming, democracy and violence, the privatization of the military,
and the militarization of the civilian realm. Contributors include Akbar Ahmed,
John Armitage, Asef Bayat, Ryan Bishop, Benjamin Bratton, Susan Buck-Morss,
Hamid Dabashi, Manuel DeLanda, James Der Derian, Joy Garnett, Salwa Ghaly,
Chris Hables Gray, Brian Holmes, Alice Hunsberger, Thomas Keenan, Mary Keller,
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Saba Mahmood, Gema Martn Munoz, Loretta Napoleoni,
Amir Parsa, Bernard Roddy, Harel Shapira, P.W. Singer, Ana Valdez, and Eyal
Weizman. The complete archive of the discussions, along with further
information, can be accessed at http://www.wdw.nl.
Under Fire 1: The Organization and Representation of Violence
Editor: Jordan Crandall; Publisher: Witte de With, Rotterdam
ISBN: 90 73362 61 X
Price: 17 $
Distribution USA: D.A.P. New York
Distribution Great Britain: Cornerhouse, Manchester
Distribution all other countries: Idea Books, Amsterdam
Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at 11:02 AM in Books | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/under_fire_on_f.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
New York Museums' Bizarre Critic Moment
Regarding the Sunday NYTimes bitchiest Kimmelman piece yet, Modern Art Notes'
Tyler Green blogged:
"After reading the piece ask yourself a supremely simple question: How is this
moment in NYC any different than any other moment in the last five years? The
last 10 years? The issues Kimmelman raises could have been said about any of
those museums any time in the last decade, give or take a couple years."
A day later, Artnet's Walter Robinson summed it up … and then continued on
bitingly to report:
MET DIRECTOR LOGROLLS FOR NEW CRITERION AUTHOR
The gang of esthetic goobers over at The New Criterion magazine – the wingnut
art monthly edited by Hilton Kramer whose website currently boasts a defense of
religious fundamentalism, a defense of U.S. policy at Abu Ghraib and an attack
on affirmative action – has a new ally in their culture war: Metropolitan
Museum director Philippe de Montebello. The august art historian contributes an
encominium to an ad for a new book by New Criterion managing editor Roger
Kimball with the unfelicitous title of The Rape of the Masters: How Political
Correctness Sabotages Art. A brilliant essay aiming to repair the damage
wrought on art history by the likes of Derrida and Foucault, opines the Met
chief. Roger Kimball discredits todays politically correct art historians whose
aim is to impose on works of art their political agenda of sexuality, feminism,
race and whatever else is exogenous to them.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at 10:38 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/new_york_museum.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
High on the High Line
Here's my pick (pictured) for the High Line preservation/regeneration project
– a concept by the teamed-up firms TerraGRAM and D.I.R.T. Studio which
speciallizes in reclaiming toxic environments. The artist James Turrell would
create lighting where the High Line enters buildings, etc. The idea is
postindustrial romantic: light and dark, buttercups and grit.
via the NYTimes, Elevated Visions: (check out the slide show)
THE High Line is an abandoned 1.5-mile stretch of overgrown railroad viaduct
that runs from the Meatpacking district to Hell's Kitchen and straight into
the imaginations of a growing number of New Yorkers who see it as proof that,
even in an urban jungle, the forces of nature are still at work.
The idea to turn the old freight route, once condemned to demolition, into a
public park has gained momentum over the past five years, culminating in a
design competition that attracted 52 entries. On July 16 the proposals of four
finalists will go on display at the Center for Architecture on LaGuardia Place
near Bleecker Street.
[…]
Last year, the Friends of the High Line, a group of artists, writers and
concerned neighbors, invited architects, designers and homegrown visionaries to
submit blue-sky ideas for the track's future. It attracted 720 entries from 36
countries, including one proposal to turn the entire length of the railroad bed
into a swimming pool. After that, a $15 million commitment from the City
Council and a rezoning proposal helped catapult the High Line's revival from
long shot to a viable scheme, and a more selective competition for a workable
master plan was undertaken.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004 at 10:14 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/high_on_the_hig.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Mumford's Baghdad
Intrepid itinerant artist Steve Mumford is back in Baghdad.
Read his latest installment of Baghdad Journal on Artnet.
"After checking in at my hotel, we spend the day wandering around downtown
Baghdad. Im trying to gauge how much things have changed since I was here last,
back in March, before all the violence with Muqtada Sadr and in Falluja. Were
hanging out in the park, underneath the massive sculptural mural in Tarir
Square when Esam notices that someones got a gun underneath his shirt. We
leave, but in fact, I cant shake the impression of a certain optimism pervading
at least this area. Businesses are open; the streets are relatively clean and
bustling. People seem as friendly as ever. One shopkeeper kisses my shoulder
when I tell him Im American. Esam advises me to tell Iraqis that Im Canadian. I
find myself oddly resistant to telling this lie. I havent yet encountered overt
hostility. Ive met a lot of Iraqis while out drawing. If they havent been happy
about my nationality, theyve politely kept it to themselves. Yet it would be
foolish to imagine that Im safe here."
Thanks for the heads-up Tyler (Modern Art Notes)
Tuesday, July 13, 2004 at 10:10 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/mumfords_baghda.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Monday, July 12, 2004
A Scanner Darkly
[graphic by Andy Rash, courtesy NYTmes : this image could mean oh so many
things.]
The global bar code standard trumps the old US bar code – soon to be declared
extinct. It's all about that 13th digit.
Via the NYTimes:
Europe won this one. The global bar code standard will be the European Article
Numbering Code. It turns out that the American Universal Product Code - which
turned 30 years old last month - was never so universal after all.
Monday, July 12, 2004 at 03:06 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/a_scanner_darkl.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Stay inside, here comes the GOP
here's the official memo, via The Village Voice.
Stay inside: The Republicans are coming
The Voice got its hands on the memo that was apparently left on the doormats of
residents of Penn South, a
3,000-unit coop located near Madison Square Garden… Part of the memo reads:
"If at all possible, stay inside during the times the convention is in
session." via RNC Watch.
Monday, July 12, 2004 at 12:25 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/stay_inside_her.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Clear Channel Bombs Billboard
Rejected image (+ bomb) vs. accepted version (+ dove) via Common Dreams +
NYTimes.
[Note: grab the rejected image and post it on your site in solidarity with
Project Billboard.]
via NPR:
Clear Channel Nixes Anti-war Billboard
Project Billboard, a fledgling non-partisan group whose mission is to stimulate
public debate, files a preliminary injunction against Clear Channel in a New
York court. The group is trying to force the media giant to run its ad on a
prime billboard in Times Square. Clear Channel allegedly rejected it because of
its anti-war political message. Hear NPR's Steve Inskeep.
via NYTimes:
A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of
the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans,
of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of
the war in Iraq.
The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words
"Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next
month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from
across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a
second term.
other articles:
CNN [Money]
Newsday
New York Daily News
San Francisco Chronicle
The Sydney Morning Herald
Monday, July 12, 2004 at 10:22 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/clear_channel_b.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Sunday, July 11, 2004
Passerby…
this performance was part of public.exe: Public Execution, at Exit Art, NYC.
via thickeye::
"Michelle Handelman will spend one day in Bryant Park clandestinely documenting
visitors to the park, recording their conversations, photographing them, and
taking note of their location/time in the park. During a single performance,
entitled Passerby, she will work with performers to recreate five of the
situations she observed in the exact locations at the same time they originally
occurred. Handelman's project addresses the possibility for or lack of privacy
in public space as well as the prevalence of and high tolerance for
surveillance…"
Check out the cool pics and commentary on Tom Moody's site as well as at
thickeye (who participated in the performance):
via Tom Moody:
"The pale surrogate humans of Michelle Handelman's performance work Passerby
infiltrated Bryant Park today, mingling with late lunch crowd. Resembling a
cross between "living statue" mimes, Duane Hanson sculptures, and nerds who got
lost on the way to a DEVO reunion…"
thickeye includes a full schedule of summer screenings + pieces/performances.
public.exe was reviewed interestingly by Holland Cotter in the NYTimes (June
18, 2004) and which I blogged earlier here: War & Peace (Politics, Art + Exit
Art)
Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 05:55 PM in Art Exhibitions | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/passerby.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Outting FOX
"How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary"
NYTimes Magazine article on Robert Greenwald's latest documentary, Outfoxed:
Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism (via greg.org)
from NYTimes:
''Outfoxed'' has been made in secret. The film is an obsessively researched
expose of the ways in which Fox News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its
coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media
tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features interviews with former Fox employees, leaked
policy memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage from Fox News,
which Greenwald is using without the network's permission. The result is an
unwavering argument against Fox News that combines the leftist partisan vigor
of a Michael Moore film with the sober tone and delivery of a PBS special. A
large portion of the film's $300,000 budget came in the form of contributions
in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn and the Center for American Progress,
the liberal policy organization founded by John Podesta, the former chief of
staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who is not looking to earn any money from
the project, provided the rest.
A week after its New School premiere, the film will be shown throughout the
country in hundreds of small local screenings, arranged by MoveOn, where people
will be able to watch and discuss it. Though the existence of ''Outfoxed'' has
been quietly publicized, its particular nature and content have been closely
guarded for fear, Greenwald says, that Fox would try to stop the film's release
by filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Nobody has ever made a critical
documentary about a media company that uses as much footage without permission
as Greenwald has, and the legal precedents governing the ''fair use'' of such
material, while theoretically strong, are not well established in case law.
from greg.org:
Greenwald set dozens of DVD recorders to capture Fox News 24/7 for about six
months. MoveOn orchestrated volunteer monitors to watch the network and note
the exact time of footage that showed any of a dozen or so distortion
techniques that Greenwald wanted to document. Then teams of highly paid editors
became teams of low-paid editors to sort and structure the narrative.
All this was done without obtaining clearances from Fox. I guess when Larry
Lessig's your permissions guy, you get a little crazy on the 'fair use.'
Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 09:33 AM in Film | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/outting_fox.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Friday, July 09, 2004
The CIA's Anonymous
Read the excerpts over at our new blog, I'm Voting Bush OUT, of Michiko
Kakutani's excellent review of Imperial Hubris, by Anonymous. My favorite
horror quote:
"U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic
world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but
incomplete success since the early 1990's," he writes. "As a result, I think it
fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only
indispensable ally."
more:
If current American policies toward the Muslim world are not changed, Anonymous
writes near the end of this harrowing and often deliberately provocative
volume, America will be left with only a military option for defending itself
an option he says that should be used not "daintily," as it has been in recent
years, but with the sort of bloody-minded ferocity used "in France and on
Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden" during World War II.
The war on terror, he warns, "has the potential to last beyond our children's
lifetimes and to be fought mostly on U.S. soil."
Friday, July 09, 2004 at 07:12 PM in Books | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/the_cias_anonym.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Street Art to Swoon over…
[this image from rion.nu]
via Furd Log:
Street Art in NYC [8:59 am]
Rasing [sic] an age-old policy question when does making something illegal
increase disobedience? And how does that relate to our notions of creative
expression?
re: Lawbreakers, Armed With Paint and Paste
By KIRK SEMPLE NYTimes, July 9, 2004
Swoon frontloads her days with caffeine and works on her art late into the
night. It can take her two weeks to produce a series of the large, intricate
paper cutouts and hand-pulled block prints that have gained her considerable
renown in one particular sector of the art world. When she is done - her arms
aching and her clothes and skin speckled with paint and ink - she takes her
pieces outside, slaps them up on old walls around the city, then disappears on
her bike.
That is when her work, now left to the mercy of the elements and public taste,
comes alive. "You know, it's weird, but I love it," she said. "I don't feel
they need to be kept in a vault as precious art."
Swoon, 26, is a luminary in a movement known, at least among many of its
proponents, as street art. Two decades after the heyday of graffiti, the spray
can has given way to posters, stickers, stencils and construction tools, and
the streets of New York and other cities around the world vibrate more than
ever with the work - some say the destruction - of guerrilla artists like her.
> snip! <
see "street art tour" courtesy NYTimes.
Friday, July 09, 2004 at 12:52 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/street_art_to_s.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Only The Shadow Knows…
Here's how to join the Shadow Protest as a Phantom Volunteer, and cause trouble
in general for the RNC… and beyond.
via RNC Watch:
"Is it really true that the GOP can barely get anyone to sign up for its 8,000
volunteer slots at this summers RNC? If it is, it does a lot more than open the
door for a herd of sneaky troublemakers to infiltrate the Convention and wreck
general havoc. What it really does is show how unwelcome the Republicans are in
this city."
Wednesday, July 07, 2004 at 01:37 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink:
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/07/only_the_shadow.html
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
============================
NEWSgrist - where spin is art
http://newsgrist.typepad.com
Archives
http://newsgrist.net
NEWSgrist: *Piracy? Better Dead Than RIAA'd* July 2004 pt.2
-
Type: discussion