Money + Audience

Roy,

Holy crap, I started to dash off a reply but realized halfway through that
you've given me about 80 things to think about. So, forgive this e-mail, it'll
really be a bunch of disconnected things that you just sort of brought forth
(and thanks, by the way - I get so frustrated with hearing the same things on
the list that I forget sometimes why I am on it. And the answer is so that now
and then I get a good e-mail like yours that just plainly asks what needs to
be asked.)
———————–
Absolutely. NMA is one of the first arts to be infinitely replicable - and not
just by the artist. Printing 1000x prints off a negative allows duplicates to
be made, but the prints need to be made by the artist herself. NMA (generally)
being in digital form allows the USER to duplicate the work. Pull. Push. In
that regard, the commodification quotient is far lower that previous art.

But - and it's a shame, really - NMA is the first type of art that really has
the ability to move away from the traditional models of patron/artist/*sole
Collector*, yet art has become so entrenched with the idea that that is "how it
works" that NMA is still clinging to vestiges of the system. It still believes
(in its heart, though it echoes hollow words to the contrary) that the only way
art can be Art is by being selective, rare, expensive, and unobtainable -
available only to those select few with the proper
breeding|taste|money|education. The way that such a system is justified is
through the whole romantic "lone, misunderstood genius" phenomena, the idea
being that our art is simply too brilliant for the common person to understand,
but other brilliant souls like ourselves will "get" it and it will thus have a
silent but pervasive influence on all society as it imbues the work of all
these other creative thinkers…in this quiet, humble (but steady) way, it
matters and makes a difference and does what it is supposed to do.

It's crap,
of course - creating the idea that art can only be appreciated by the finest is
the shill we use to sell it (because, despite my complaints that art does not
use the ways of the showman to perpetuate itself, it HAS taken this single
con-mans' lesson very, very, very deeply to heart - owning and understanding
my product makes you a better, smarter, more well-bred person, and we can sell
that backwards and forwards. Read the great classic 'The Emperor Has No
Clothes' if in doubt.)

And then, well, then I couldn't finish it because, after all, what IS the next
system to replace it?
————————————————
NMA has the ability to move away from existing systems of patronage, but to
what? A few thoughts (by no means complete):

The Music Industry scenario - anybody can copy NMA who wants to, so nobody pays
anything for it. In vain, artists try to implement a $0.05 per view system, but
people just laugh in their faces and copy blithely away.

The Rogue Technological Upstart scenario - The art is actually good,
and/or manages to garner interest from a crowd (The Nickelodeon, Ubuntu, $100
laptop, FOSS, dooce, shareware, paper clips to houses, Snakes on a
(motherfuckin) Plane). Many people copy blithely away, as above, (we'll call
these Users) but others become rabid, devoted fans (Supporters). Viral
marketing and/or just damn good art thus generates a base of admirers who
support the art, either monetarily or otherwise, and thereby make it
sustainable.

The Poor Starving Artist scenario - with no one paying for art, making it
becomes a pastime for many and a way of life for few. Those that do it for a
living rely on government grants. Government grants flow like wine. Hell freezes over.

The Out of Left Field/Nothing Ever Changes scenario - Certain techniques/venues
are found to make art non-replicable (Second Life) and individual patrons can
continue to purchase art for themselves at ridiculous sums of money (Second
Life). The status quo is thus maintained.
—————————–
Is there a difference, capitalistically speaking, between measuring the success
of something by the money it brings in vs the size of the (non-paying) audience
it brings in?
—————————
My own personal measure of success is by how well a piece of art "affects" the
viewer. Would that fall into the market-driven mode you describe? My leaning
is to strict interpretation, which would be no, but I can see how it would be
argued yes using a looser reading.
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My complaint about the unsuccessfulness of NMA is two-fold:

+ in many cases the only "effect" it has is boredom…which, really, is a non
effect and therefore it is unsuccessful

+ in the other cases the effect it has is revulsion (this is large scale, not
individual…hence the problem), which, while successful in garnering an
effect, becomes unsuccessful taken on the whole because it turns people away
from the art, thus making FUTURE works less successful.
————–

Apologies.
-Alexis



On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Roy Pardi wrote:

::Interesting discussion that has only teetered a bit over the line at times.
::To add something to the mix that has only been referenced indirectly: what
::about the impact of MONEY (or lack thereof) on NMA since there is little or
::nothing that can be bought and sold (there are exceptions of course but
::speaking in general). We have a market driven culture - both high + low -
::and the money generated by cultural production is news and fuels further
::consumption: film revenues are reported as if we all owned stock in
::production companies, auction prices are reported as benchmarks of an
::artist's worth and influence curatorial choices for museum exhibits, often
::underwritten by collectors of those artists.
::
::That's a thumbnail sketch but no doubt recognizable. I'd be interested to
::hear what people think about the commodification quotient of NMA and it's
::impact on audience.
::
::–Roy

Gene Youngblood's book from 1970, "Expanded Cinema" is available as a .pdf from ubuweb:

http://www.ubu.com/historical/youngblood/youngblood.html

Worth a read, especially since it's free, because Youngblood addresses the question of audience in the first chapter after the lengthy intro by Buckminster Fuller. As for money, nobody expected to make money so it wasn't a question. Artists found other ways to survive than selling in galleries. Some of the most famous artists now didn't make any money from their artwork until they got older, artists like Warhol, Nauman and Paik. Warhol's Factory was as much a warehouse for all those Elvis and Marylin silkscreens that now go for millions as a studio. And there weren't a whole lot of collectors lining up to buy videos of Bruce Nauman bouncing his balls and walking around his studio.

The book is also interesting because it's about NMA before personal computers and the Internet. Youngblood predicted that computer programmers would become obsolete as computers became more sophisticated and complex and could program themselves. He did predict that we would have handheld devices but didn't seem to take telephony into account or see that P2P like napster would be important.

There's a lot of "new age" language in the book, which takes me back to my high school days of reading Herman Hesse and Carlos Castenada. It's all so groovy, I think I'll download Derrick and the Dominoes. It amazes me that that R. Buckminster Fuller is almost totally forgotten now. My god, he was everywhere when I was a student. His most famous student, Edwin Schlossberg, is married to American princess Caroline Kennedy, and is still influential among museum exhibit designers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Schlossberg

We somehow lost the concept of Expanded Cinema in the US though it remained an important influence in European media – Jeffrey Shaw and ZKM. Ditto Radical Software and Systems Aesthetics from the same period. It's not being nostalgic to look back this period and ask what happened because the same questions they asked then should be asked now.

rm

At 5:50 PM -0700 9/12/06, Robbin Murphy wrote:
>Gene Youngblood's book from 1970, "Expanded Cinema" is available as a .pdf
>from ubuweb:
>
>http://www.ubu.com/historical/youngblood/youngblood.html
>
[…..]
>We somehow lost the concept of Expanded Cinema in the US though it
>remained an important influence in European media – Jeffrey Shaw and ZKM.
>Ditto Radical Software and Systems Aesthetics from the same period. It's
>not being nostalgic to look back this period and ask what happened because
>the same questions they asked then should be asked now.

Thanks for that - haven't looked at it since my film school days. While
reading your comments I was also reminded of the whole "cyberpunk" and
"virtual reality" buzz of the early 90s and the energy that surrounded all
that. Yes, it was a turgid mess and in part a media creation but there was
an aspect of inquiry that was usable and of value. I have wondered why it
evaporated or more accurately vaporized so suddenly.

Perhaps it's the culture (and market) simply moving faster than NMA. When a
third of the people you see on the street are 'jacked in' to their cell
phones, and another third entraining themselves through their iPods, the
whole VR/augmented reality thing becomes transparent. On occasion I turn
off the ad blockers in the browser I use and am shocked at the fragmented
and concurrent narratives occurring on each page. YouTube, MySpace et al.
Isn't that NMA for the masses? Google Earth, NMA? Sure.

–
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Studio Blog: http://www.roypardi.com/
Exhibit Announcements: http://www.roypardi.com/announce.htm
Gandhi - "Be the change you want to see in the world"

> Perhaps it's the culture (and market) simply moving faster than NMA.

The art market in NYC is absolutely insane right now and probably reflects the input of vast amounts of global money into real estate and hedge funds. Galleries are building huge second and third spaces in Chelsea turning it into a brick and mortar simcity where any available space is enclosed for exhibition, to exhibit space in an urban gated community. William Gibson does come to mind but even more JG Ballard.

After going to all the openings last week when the streets and galleries were packed and then taking a second more leisurely look around this week the phrase that popped into my head was "depleted resource". The work being shown in galleries is almost uniformly mediocre if not just awful. Are we seeing the result of globalization here in the otherwise unregulated art market? The rise of a predominant thin culture friendly to capital and new media free of the obsticles inherent in thick culture with its messy religion, art, politics and science?

NMA may actually be the last refuge of art, which is why there seems to be so much interest in a time, 1970, when it all was converging.

rm