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Tonight I'm going to hear jenghizkhan performing live at The Psychasthenia Society, Galapagos Art Space, 70 North 6th Street Williamsburg, Brooklyn (between Wythe and Kent). I did an interview with him here, and am curious to hear the new music he's been writing. He goes on first at 10 pm. It's free.
Tomorrow night (Thursday, December 16, 6 pm) Cory Arcangel is speaking up at Columbia U in a series called "Open Source Culture: Intellectual Property, Technology, and the Arts." Previous speakers included Joy Garnett and Jon Ippolito. Cory is strongly advised to phone this lecture in from an undisclosed location.
Everything foul about the current copyright regime is summed up in Eric Fensler doing slam-bang satirical mashups of GI Joe PSAs and getting a letter from Hasbro's lawyers telling him to remove them from his website. Hmmm, just revisited my earlier post on "Making art in the age of abusive copyright enforcement" and find that only two options for artists are still viable. Here's what I recommended six months ago to avoid the lawyer letters:
1. Stay poor. The humorless twit who sued Jeff Koons over that "string of puppies" photo would never have done it if Koons hadn't been an "art star." Very few people sue to make a point (except RIAA); it's too expensive. [Whoops, post-Fensler this now seems excessively optimistic--strike this one.]2. Record live versions of other people's songs, or song fragments, for the sole purpose of sampling them--you avoid the "master recording" fee for the sample and only have to pay the "publication" fee. Just kidding: this is actually done by the big-bucks hiphop performers, as described in the Chuck D/Hank Shocklee interview, but it sounds fake as hell--essentially having a lawyer as a creative partner.
3. Stay several steps ahead of the shysters by mutating the sounds so they're virtually untraceable. A lot of drum and bass producers do this. You don't get that bang of recognition ("Oh that's Richard Dawson in Running Man!") but the texture of the sound is yours to play with. [Dicey after the 100 Miles and Runnin case, which applies to snippets of samples. Strike this one, too.]
4. Make completely original art. No more samples, no more collage, it's back to the Modernist dictate "make it new." It's always possible you heard or saw something subconsciously that crept into your work and could get you sued, but creativity isn't just about mixing up other people's stuff. (Dumb, I know; I just put it in in case Jed Perl stumbled across the page).
I missed La Superette this month, the annual artist mega-merch table event organized in New York by Tali Hinkis, and I'm sad because I would have been interested in (among other things) these Perler Bead floppies by Kate Pemberton:
More Perler iron-and-fuse bead work is depicted here in my writeup of the Mondo Mondo Trading Post. I found the Pemberton image via Your door to explore, a good collection of links to the kind of komputer kraft stuff I periodically post about here (including links to here, but that's not the only reason I mention it, and also some typical dumb LiveJournal fodder, like "what type of _______ are you" quizzes). I also learned there about Mr. Ministeck (Norbert Bayer) who makes pixeled images with Ministeck, another brand of fuse beads first made in Bavaria in the 70s. I had seen his Pac Man image but didn't know what it was.
Awesome. Related topics of interest from the blog vault:
Joe Beuckman bead works; Jason's Pokemon bead designs drawn in MSPaint.
Bill Davenport needlepoints 1
Bill Davenport needlepoints 2
And one more relevant item from La Superette, by FLUORESCENT F and SISTAZ 4EVER (Frankie & Katie Martin):
Ni-i-ice. Just noticed this: the generous folks at Hasbro sent Eric Fensler a cease and desist letter telling him to remove his hilarious, remixed GI Joe public service videos from his website. Citing copyright and the usual crap. Millions have enjoyed these vids but we can't have people laughing at GI Joe, can we?
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