He reread the word “chiaroscuro,” the definition of which Cliff had heard plenty too, from the art history students who worked as docents; it meant light and dark, white and black.
“The Work of Art,” Namwali Serpell, Harper’s Magazine, September 2020
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion
Why do you lock your door, Harold, when everything’s free? Because nobody is as afraid of robbery as a thief? Could that be it?
Stephen King, The Stand, 1990
“Our hope is that people will lawfully and peacefully express themselves,” Louisville Police Chief Rob Schroeder said. “We will not tolerate destruction of property.”
“Officer involved in Breonna Taylor’s death charged with wanton endangerment; family’s lawyer blasts ‘outrageous’ decision,” Crystal Hill, Yahoo! News, September 23, 2020
David Shields: The book is a call to arms though, to urge writers to—
David Shields appears on The Colbert Report to promote Reality Hunger, April 14, 2010
Stephen Colbert: Steal other people’s writing.
David Shields: No. Ignore the laws regarding appropriation, obliterate the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, and to create new forms for the 21st century.
Stephen Colbert: So, could I create new forms for the 21st century if I ignore property rights and obliterate my neighbor’s front door? And just go in there and go, you know what would look good in my house? Your things.
Among the most iconic images of our time are the photos taken last Monday of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, armed on the front lawn of their St. Louis mansion as Black Lives Matter protesters pass by. If the McCloskeys, who are wealthy personal injury lawyers, are ever charged with a crime for brandishing their weapons at the crowd (at the time of this writing, it seems unlikely), they plan to invoke the castle doctrine. This legal principle allows property holders to use violence to protect themselves and their possessions from those whom they deem threatening. In the case of the McCloskeys, the castle doctrine has a certain uncanny metaphorical specificity, for the house the McCloskeys defended was designed and decorated to look like a castle, specifically an Italian Renaissance palazzo.
“The Revolution at the Gate,” Walter Johnson, Boston Review, July 7, 2020
Does anyone know what Bush called this in 1980…? Anyone? Something d-o-o economics… Voodoo economics.
The boring history teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
The crisis today reflects the nation’s history. Not much, it turns out, has changed. The country was settled by diverse cultures—the Puritans in New England, the Dutch around New York City, the Scots-Irish dominating Appalachia, and English slave lords from Barbados and the West Indies in the Deep South. They were often rivals, Woodard noted: “They were by no means thinking of themselves belonging to a protean American country-in-waiting.” The United States was “an accident of history,” he said, largely because distinct cultures shared an external threat from the British.
“Is America A Myth?” Robin Wright, The New Yorker, September 8, 2020
3. At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been either a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many nineteenth-century historically specific markers—such as slave, colored, and Negro—from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid, African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well intended), I re-erased the postmodern African-American, then changed those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow that original horror to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, curators, and art institutions have been in participating in—if not creating—this history.
Prologue of Voyage of the Sable Venus, Robin Coste Lewis (2015)
There’s a certain kind of news story that is presented as heartwarming but actually evinces the ravages of American inequality under capitalism: the account of an eighth grader who raised money to eliminate his classmates’ lunch debt, or the report on a FedEx employee who walked twelve miles to and from work each day until her co-workers took up a collection to buy her a car. We can be so moved by the way people come together to overcome hardship that we lose sight of the fact that many of these hardships should not exist at all.
“What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic,” Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, May 18, 2020
Controversy over how the musical glazes over historical inaccuracies, in addition to its glorification of Alexander Hamilton and other founding fathers, has been a subject of discussion between fans and historians since Hamilton first gathered mainstream acclaim in 2015. But put in the context of the current social and political climate — including discourse about the problematic or racist behavior from the “heroes” of American history — the messages and depictions within the beloved work are being given more intense scrutiny.
“Hamilton The Musical Is Taking Over The Internet — Including Its Controversies,” Natalie Morin, Refinery29, July 7, 2020
“Wanting to get paid does not mean that you’re a capitalist,” he writes. “It doesn’t even mean that you assent to capitalism. It only means that you live in a capitalist society.” He quotes the cartoonist and writer Molly Crabapple, who once argued that “not talking about money is a tool of class war.”
…
“Art and artists must be in the market but not of it,” he writes. “And in that consists a tension that cannot be resolved; it can only be endured.”
“How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age?” Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, September 7, 2020
This sort of charismatic confrontationalism underscores all of Wey’s work. His multimedia œuvre comprises writing, videos, and an ongoing series of high-concept events and pop-up businesses that often blur the lines between commerce and performance art. A preferred medium is the price tag: in New Orleans, where he currently lives, he once ran a lunch cart that asked white patrons to pay more than double what he charged people of color, reflecting the city’s racial income disparities. In Nashville, he hosted a series of dinners where hot chicken was free for the neighborhood’s black residents, while white diners were asked to pledge a hundred dollars for one piece, a thousand dollars for four, and the deed to a property for a whole bird plus sides.
“The Case For Letting the Restaurant Industry Die,” Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, May 22, 2020
Appropriation has always played a key role in Dylan’s music. The songwriter has grabbed not only from a panoply of vintage Hollywood films but from Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. He also nabbed the title of Eric Lott’s study of minstrelsy for his 2001 album Love and Theft. One imagines Dylan liked the general resonance of the title, in which emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they do so often in Dylan’s songs. Lott’s title is, of course, itself a riff on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, which famously identifies the literary motif of the interdependence of a white man and a dark man, like Huck and Jim or Ishmael and Queequeg—a series of nested references to Dylan’s own appropriating, minstrel-boy self. Dylan’s art offers a paradox: While it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan’s Modern Times. Dylan’s originality and his appropriations are as one.
“The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” Jonathan Lethem, Harper’s Magazine, February 2007
Here, finally, a thing one might audition as a source for sculpture. Some portion of this bar or pedestal might give formal joy—to R., at least—if he envisioned it isolated from the whole configuration and sealed over with his distinctive green-gray oatmeal polymer. Yet how could he get far enough back to see it in its entirety? Hopeless. Anyhow, now that he bent to examine its join to the floor, the object was flagrantly, remorselessly uninteresting.
“The Afterlife,” Jonathan Lethem, The New Yorker, May 11, 2020
He should quit thinking this way.
Matta-Clark responded by developing his own art form, called “anarchitecture,” which initially consisted of chainsawing sections out of derelict buildings and presenting them as sculptures.
“David Hammons Follows His Own Rules,” Calvin Tompkins, The New Yorker, December 9, 2019
The problem with scientific power you’ve used is it
Chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park (1993)
didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read
what others had done and you took the next step. You
didn’t earn the knowledge yourselves, so you don’t take
the responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders
of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you
could, and before you knew what you had, you patented
it, packages it, slapped in on a plastic lunch box, and
now you want to sell it.
It’s been said…that the present is to the past…like a dwarf…on the shoulders of a giant. If the dwarf holds his seat, he can, indeed, see further than the giant. But beware. If the dwarf
The intimidating history teacher in D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996)
should grow careless…and forget his place.
[ Slams Book Down ]
History is a giant. Get ready to ride.
Primed by my online reading, I began to discourse. The photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, I explained in jerky gchat rhythm, had been an index of an actual event. Those men had been brutalized and hung and burnt (had they been burnt? I googled: yes), and that violence had left its mark on a strip of film—real light had hit real people, then a real chemical composition of silver halide. That photograph had then been reproduced in the form of a postcard. Nearly a century later, Sonia Middleton had rendered that reproduction in an elite, organic medium: oil paint. Did this reversal of reproduction sanctify the event or displace it? The paint on her canvas had not touched those bodies, not even transitively. Worse, this lynching postcard had already been reproduced in art several times over now, by Abel Meeropol in his poem “Bitter Fruit,” which became Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”; by Claudia Rankine in Citizen; by David Powers, whose 2007 mural, American Nocturne, which omitted the lynched bodies, had been protested and taken down, though you could still see it online, in digital photos, another form of mechanical reproduction, whose aura, because of JPEG degradation, is also always already fading . . .
“The Work of Art,” Namwali Serpell, Harper’s Magazine, September 2020
Viewers who encounter these songs through such accounts often have no idea where they came from. …
As slowed and reverb grows more popular across TikTok, it isn’t the music itself that’s drawing the backlash; it’s the excision of DJ Screw from its narrative. ….
“The Whitewashing of Black Music on TikTok,” Sheldon Pearce, The New Yorker, September 9, 2020
The blunder may seem innocuous, and attempts to redress it feel earnest, but many immediately saw the explainer video for what it was: the early signs of erasure, or the perversion of a cultural hallmark.
For two years, he researched African history and mythology, constructing the foundation for a fantastical vision of the continent that would invert the monolithic “Africa” invented by the West. He drew on oral epics, like the Epic of Sundiata, which some people believe was the basis for “The Lion King,” though the filmmakers have called it an “original story,” while admitting some parallels with Shakespeare. (“I felt like these stories had been stolen from me,” James said at Comic Con. “People say that ‘The Lion King’ is based on ‘Hamlet.’ Please.”)
“Why Marlon James Decided to Write An African ‘Game of Thrones,'” Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker, January 21, 2019
But now the shacks are gone. They are erased, and nothing is left, not a stray biscuit wrapper, not a bottle that once held water, nothing to suggest that they were once there.
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie (2013)
Andy Warhol’s life may be better documented than that of any other artist in the history of the world. That is because, every few days or so, he would sweep all the stuff on his desk into a storage box, date it, label it “TC”—short for “time capsule”—and then store it, with all the preceding TCs, in a special place in his studio. As a result, we have his movie-ticket stubs, his newspaper clippings, his cowboy boots, his wigs, his collection of dental molds, his collection of pornography, the countless Polaroids he took of the people at the countless parties he went to—you name it.
“Untangling Andy Warhol,” Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, June 1, 2020
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture.
copy on the copyright page of books published by Penguin
The explosive growth of print-on-demand technology is quietly challenging the decades-old laws that govern the use of intellectual property on the internet. A 1998 law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) shields online platforms from liability for copyright infringement for merely hosting user-uploaded digital content. That means rights holders typically must request platforms remove each item they believe infringes on their intellectual property. Moreover, print-on-demand companies often transform—or help transform—digital files into physical products such as T-shirts and coffee mugs. Some experts say that places them in a legal gray zone. And the DMCA doesn’t apply to trademarks, which cover names, word marks, and other proprietary symbols, such as the Nike swoosh.
“The Freewheeling, Copyright-Infringing World of Custom-Printed Tees,” Roger Sollenberger, Wired Magazine, March 16, 2020
You and your client, Beck, have nothing to fear from this sort of work WHICH IS IN NO WAY CO-OPTIVE OR COMPETITIVE WITH THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL! This is so patently obvious in the work itself, it is a little embarrassing to have to point it out to a lawyer. All artists have nothing to lose and everything to gain from allowing work such as this to exist, free of anti-art litigation based purely on economic turf presumptions. The legal profession’s continuing perverse and careless refusal to distinguish between whole and unmitigated theft for profit and the fragmentary re-use of our common cultural artifacts in the creation of new work is the best reason we know of to keep lawers out of art. Generally, they appear to have no interest in or understanding of what artists actually want to do or why they want to do it. These are exactly the wrong people to be controling what gets made and what doesn’t. For the sake of intelligent art, PLEASE cease and desist! Your protective efforts WILL be appreciated when they are applied to whole work bootlegging and piracy, not to harmless, creative experiments like this in which you can only achieve foolishness by protesting.
email from Negativland to Beck’s lawyer and Geffen Records, April 3, 1998
I need to see everybody’s contracts at Universal and Sony
I’m not gonna watch my people be enslaved
I’m putting my life on the line for my people
The music industry and the NBA are modern day slave ships
I’m the new Moses
tweets from Kanye West on September 16, 2020
This is because that baby was never just a baby, and this story was never really simply the human version of Simba’s journey into manhood, much less kingship. On the surface, this river bed scene is an update of that Old Testament story in which Jochebed, the mother of Moses, placed him in the Nile River to protect him from being killed. But, the waters here also invoke the Middle Passage, with each ripple break recalling the fateful journey in which New World slavery, and America itself, was born.
“What We Think of Beyoncé’s ‘Black is King,'” Jason Farago, Vanessa Friedman, Gia Kourlas, Wesley Morris, Jon Pareles and Salamishah Tillet, July 31, 2020
“Look, I know you been having a hard time, all right? I know it. But
it’s been years since it happened…”Years? That can’t be true, Simone thinks, but it also feels as if it could
be the truest thing she’s ever heard. “Ms. Norman, you don’t need to say
anything. You’ve been so nice and understanding…”“Let me just say this—”
“I’m all right, really.”“Let me just say this, and you listen, OK? Listen to me very carefully.
“Comfort,” Jamel Brinkley, Ploughshares, Summer 2020
Grief is a journey, and time heals all wounds. But you have to let it do
its work.”
Simone stares into the two wide circles not covered by the mask, up
at the eyebrows and down into the copper-flecked eyes themselves. She
opens her mouth to say something, but closes it. Her hand slapping
this old woman’s face—this is all Simone can imagine—cracking the
mask open at her cheek and watching it fall away.
Putting a mask on these inanimate objects shifted them to a new context: the present, rather than the historical past. The act suggested a kind of solidarity, a symbol that we are all in this pandemic together. Yet Farber, who is the artistic director and senior curator of Monument Lab, a public art initiative that creates new monuments, saw the masked statues as an accusation, a reminder of how official systems had failed us.
“The New Monuments That America Needs,” Hua Hsu, The New Yorker, September 15, 2020
We are now so used to the association of identity claims with descriptions of harm that any questioning of the reigning ideology is assumed to come from a place of immense privilege. Yet if I wished to portray myself as disadvantaged by current standards, I could do so on at least five counts. But don’t expect me to play the scripted role of the victim. Those of us who have suffered socially for conditions we had no control over—that is, the majority of us—should not be entrapped a second time and forced to think of ourselves as defined by harm.
“Nonconforming: Against the erosion of academic freedom by identity politics,” Laurent Dubreuil, Harper’s Magazine, September 2020
“Baudrillard might argue,” Chip said, “that the evil of a campaign like ‘You Go, Girl’ consists in the detachment of the signifier from the signified. That a woman weeping no longer just signifies sadness. It now also signifies: ‘Desire office equipment.’ It signifies: ‘Our bosses care about us deeply.’ ”
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001)
“When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.”
“Jonathan Franzen: E-readers are ‘damaging to society’,” Husna Haq, The Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 2012
“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”
One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin (1935)
Last December, he made an unauthorized remix of “The Black Album,” the most recent (and reportedly the final) record by the rap superstar Jay-Z. This is a common hip-hop practice: up-and-coming producers take the vocals from a hot record and reattach them to new backing tracks. Burton’s remix sprang from a simple pun: he decided to lay the vocals from “The Black Album” over a musical bed created entirely with samples from the Beatles’ “White Album.” The result, as any finger-painting kindergartner might guess, was “The Grey Album.”
“The Mouse That Remixed,” The New Yorker, February 2, 2004
-SCR
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