Art

Please, Leave New York Alone

During my time in New York, I’ve talked with more than a few witnesses to the awful, brutal, and earthshattering events of 9/11. It’s a wound from which many psyches have yet to heal and, for those that have, a lingering sore point. So to Louis Caldera – the executive official who ordered Air Force One to majestically divebomb Manhattan, without informing the populace or even the mayor – shame on you, and good riddance.

No admittedly totally awesome picture is worth causing mass hysteria in a still-nervous populace. For those of you keeping score, yes, we did just critique something done by an Obama administration official.

Contrary to the Associated Press’ Lawyers, Shepard Fairey’s Iconic Obama Image is Unequivocally Fair Use

Just a little bit ago, bloggers identified the photographic source of Shepard Fairey’s iconic image of President Barack Obama: a photo taken by the Associated Press early in the campaign (right). Well, it didn’t take long: the AP is crying foul, asserting copyright and demanding (at least) attribution.

Bad news for the AP: pursuant to established “fair use” doctrine, the iconic Obama “hope” image is undoubtedly fair use. To determine whether an image is “fairly used,” the law looks to four factors (17 USC § 107 (2008)):

(1) The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Part of the law that’s grown up around these simple factors is the doctrine of “transformative” use, whereby a copyrighted work appropriated but utterly transformed in meaning and substance provides the original “artist” with no valid copyright claim. Oddly, to satisfy this doctrine, artistic transformation of an artistic work may not be enough, even if the effect of the transformation is to invert the work’s meaning.  The law requires more than a different perspective and a little hand-coloring. See Rogers v. Koons, 960 F.2d 301 (2d Cir. 1992). ((For those acquainted with the Koons “String of Puppies” case, I actually think it was wrongly decided. But that’s neither here nor there.)) But Fairey’s case is a significantly greater reinvention: here, Fairey took an image intended for neutral description in the news media and transformed it into an inspirational image associated worldwide with Barack Obama’s historic candidacy and unique promise. In the process of creatively altering the image from the purely representational to the artistically abstracted, he added meaning and value, and he crossed expressive genres in the process, depriving the AP of any legitimate claim of lost revenue. This may just be over the border of “fair use,” but fair use it is. The AP should back off.

Manhattan Graffiti

The walls of your average subway station are veritable repositories of the everyday city wisdom of New Yorkers. One example…

For those who can’t see, it reads: “LIBERALS will kill US all!” – “Try anti-psychotics” – “BUSH has already.” A fascinating debate in microcosm. I think participants two and three have the better of this one.

Feed Your Brain: Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCA

In the mood for a road trip? If so, I strongly recommend visiting MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA) to witness the amazing humor and intelligence of Sol LeWitt. We saw a much smaller exhibition at DIA:Beacon last year, but we can’t wait to haul our cookies to MASS MoCA to see this huge exhibit. LeWitt’s drawings will blow your mind. His art plays with mathematics, color theory, random movement … step back and see one thing, come close and see all sorts of new details … sometimes it’s kinda like looking at a crystal … sometimes, a fractal … but always, it’s tons of fun. I cannot recommend LeWitt enough.

Of course, MASS MoCA is a piece of art in itself. Situated in a converted factory, the museum reinvigorated North Adams, which was a typical company town and suffered tremendously when the Sprague Electric Works shut down in the 1980s. PBS’s Independent Lens series presented a documentary on the construction of the museum: Downside Up tells a terrific story.

North Adams, Massachusetts is located in the northwest corner of the state. It is about three hours from Boston, two hours from Poughkeepsie, NY (woo-hoo!), and a little over an hour from Albany.

Celebrating Ignorance

Every now and then I get a little preachy.  This is one of those times.  The new movie, “House Bunny,” really annoys me.  Aside from celebrating ignorance and entrenching female stereotypes (flighty dumb blonde), I had thought that this genre (sorority girl/frat boy/zany college comedies) was dead, aside from spoofing in Futurama.  Wasn’t it better off that way?

Understanding Art & Culture: You’re Doing it Wrong

“Human Events,” the internet’s intellectual toxic waste dump, has a blistering critique of Heath Ledger et al‘s The Dark Knight.  Mindless violence, they say, and there they stop, refusing to even credit, as unredemptive, the movie’s (successful) attempt to convey a message about the nature of good, evil, and how the former ought to fight the latter.

This is reason #1 why we don’t give conservatives full control over the censorship boards, and reason #1 why the law’s ban on obscenity law features an exception for “works of legitimate artistic, political, or scientific value.” Sometimes art reduces to an interesting way of expressing an interesting idea, and sometimes violence, as here, serves the useful purpose of illustrating the price of fighting evil.  But to go this deeply into the issue requires one to stop & think that, possibly, a categorial ban on expression you don’t like might not be the answer.  And we can’t trust “Human Events” to think that far through.

Mount Soledad’s Cross: Religious Monuments Revisited

California courts have been nothing but trouble lately: this time, they’re playing with the first amendment’s establishment clause, and the intersection between religion and public monuments.

Last Tuesday, Judge Burns of the Southern District of California ruled that a 43-foot tall cross on top of Mount Soledad was a secular monument to “military service, death and sacrifice,” and not a Christian monument – despite the cross’ alternate name, the “Mt. Soledad Easter Cross.” Surprisingly, I concur.

I retain my deep suspicion of religious monuments.  The goal of a national symbology should be to include and cultivate the national myth, rather than exclude and raise one sect above the other.  Washington, D.C.’s romanesque monuments succeed wildly under this rubric, from the Pantheon-style presentations of Jefferson and Lincoln, to the post-modern Vietnam Memorial, to the over-stylized and much-criticized World War II Memorial.  On the contrary, religious monuments to secular events – wars, triumphs, historical figures – appropriate the event to the group rather than the whole, and exclude rather than draw together.  Obviously, the first amendment is the vehicle by which we may express our displeasure with such exclusive monuments.

Nonetheless, a religious monument may vindicate the goal of the national symbology, while also avoiding sending a nasty exclusionary message, under two conditions: first, if the monument’s history dominates its religiosity, and second, if the monument’s modern cultural context dominates its religiosity.  I’ve discussed both exceptions before, and despite my initial surprise at finding myself saying this, the Soledad cross fits both exceptions.

The cross enjoys great antiquity in military circles, and not just as a blazon for murdering crusaders’ shields.  A field of small crosses has long been understood to represent the honored dead.  As the planted cross becomes synonymous with military sacrifice, the religious importance of the same dilutes and becomes more reliant on context: the symbol becomes equivocal, dependent upon its surroundings and its history for meaning.  A cross in front of a church is not the same thing as a cross surrounded by bronze name plates and flanked by flags, like the Soledad cross.  In a case like this, there’s good cause to doubt the religiosity of the message being transmitted.

Further, the complicated history of the Soledad cross belies the claim of its religious history, and supplies an innocent context vindicating the perceived religiosity of the Soledad cross.  While the monument may have begun its life as a privately-owned Easter memorial to the fallen, the religious origins of the cross seem to have faded and been replaced by the narrative of its current usage, as a memorial.  Especially where the government had no hand in the religious origins of the monument, the state’s intervention to preserve the landmark becomes less suspicious: obviously, the state may save an antique church owing to its antiquity.  Just so, the state may save a respected monument for its contribution to our cultural heritage.

Admittedly, the idea that a cross may be “secular” seems to fail the laugh test.  If I say “cross,” 90% of the time, the first thing that comes to mind will be “Jesus.”  But to reduce the establishment clause to a legal Rorschach test, by making first impressions determinative of a symbol’s meaning, ergo its legality, ignores the richness of political and cultural symbols, from which their power derives.  A cross may be religious 90% of the time, but the Soledad cross falls within that last 10%.

Selling Sin: Why Obscenity Law Fails

First amendment jurisprudence, a judge-made doctrine of recent invention, steeped in 20th-century values, proves that the Constitution works – and works well – when interpreted to accommodate changing values. It also firmly proves the inadequacy of originalism to produce a stable constitutional foundation: early first amendment law, and constitutional history, were alternately contradictory and overbearing, requiring judges to improvise over the years. While the judge-made first amendment doctrines have managed to adequately define the outer limits of protected speech (protecting subversive advocacy, distinguishing between viewpoint and subject-matter neutrality, etc.), it does have one failure. Our nation’s best judicial minds have utterly failed to define and control “obscenity,” despite recent attempts at judicial necromancy.

Why? The answer is simple: the public’s taste changes, for the worse, faster than obscenity law can define and prosecute. And, sin sells. While we can debate the problems the profit motive creates in the free marketplace of ideas – by squeezing out politics for sensationalism – capitalism surely ensures that the profitable will find its way into the marketplace, and obscenity is profitable. Given a venue for expression – any venue really, but the more widespread and unregulated the better (hint hint: internet) – the profit motive and secret desire for the forbidden will trump free speech law, those that want obscenity will get it, and the subculture will desensitize the broader society to what it once abhorred.

Advertisers even bank on the allure of the forbidden:

In case you can’t tell, that’s “Gossip Girl” proudly advertising the disapproval of the Parent’s Television Council (“Mind-blowingly inappropriate,” NRW downtown platform, 5th Ave & 59th).

In this sense, obscenity law is and was always more aspirational than anything. We can pretend to hate the sexual filth pumped into our living rooms, and many of those protestations will be made in good faith, depending on how bad it gets. But more than a few will protest just because they think they should, while secretly buying into the dirty stuff they pretend to hate. We want to be shocked. The market’s equilibrium between tolerance and disgust is a lot lower than the censors would have us believe, and the law ultimately cannot divorce itself from the people it governs.

Dead babies, dead cows, and an odd juxtaposition

Ames is off gallivanting around Kansas City, so here with your regularly scheduled Friday post is guest blogger Matt Fairchild.

Two very different things catch my attention every day as I drive to work. The first is a daily outdoor gathering of local Christians. The second is a local art gallery owned by a prominent Dallas couple.

Hey, let’s play the Stereotype Game!

If I told you that the art gallery shows edgy, often subversive artwork by Young British Artists, would that change your expectation as you drive by? How about if I mention that the owners are gay?

As for the Christians, the group usually consists of two diminutive, elderly ladies, bowing their heads in prayer. On occasional Fridays, the group expands into a throng of teenagers, young and energetic and excited to help make the world a better place.

I ask you, gentle reader: which one of these Dallas, Texas fixtures would you expect to offend you by forcing you to look at a grotesque image?

The answer is group number 2, the docile Christians. They’re protesting an abortion clinic.

(Warning: graphic images after the jump.)
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After Sherry Levine… (Or, Rephotographing the Whitney)

Modern art museums don’t always work for modern art.  At least, where the point of the art is subversion, heavy-handed critique, or commentary that’s more contextual than can be reduced to wall text, the atmosphere of the museum doesn’t always serve the art well.  The New York Times comments – and I agree – that, no matter how awesome the Met’s rooftop gallery exhibition of Jeff Koons may be, it loses the imposing and threatening meaning that Koons intends.  Koons’ pieces become familiar and lovable in their own right.  It’s like trying to cuddle with an intellectual bear (and somehow succeeding); it’s not natural!

But that’s not to say it’s not good in its own right.  I think Koons does well in his new context, with its new meaning, and my heart isn’t so hard as to turn my back on a scenic cityscape and a comforting atmosphere just because it offends my inner art critic.  But, some recontextualizations of modern art are a little more damaging to the artist’s intent, and cut off the entire dialogue between art and audience that the artist intends.

For example – the Whitney doesn’t let you take pictures in the galleries.  Obviously, that didn’t stop me, but to ban the photographing of modern art is to interrupt its “train of thought.”

"After Walker Evans, After Sherry Levine" (2008), Pixels on iPhone Flash Memory

Photography is an obsession of modern art.  Much better minds than my own have wondered aloud about the meaning of this new art form, and what “creativity” means in the post-photographic art world.  Sherry Levine, on display in the Whitney and rephotographed to the right, is one of the artists who poses that very question, while also questioning what “art” is if “creativity” is so muddled.  Levine “rephotographed” Walker Evans’ iconic images of the Great Depression and, without the slightest modification, published them sub nom “After Walker Evans.”  Levine suggests that the meaning of creativity, and consequentially of art, is simply the inflection of the artist upon the work, rather than any “kick galvanic” of creativity.  Thus, by interacting with Evans’ original, and capturing that interaction in her new photograph, Levine creates (at least under this definition) new “art.”  And since I think rephotography is silly – a thought experiment, rather than a new form of art – I’ve rephotographed Sherry Levine’s piece, in violation of the Whitney’s rules.

Ideally, a modern art museum should pose the question posed by the artist, and allow viewers to answer, encouraging viewers to do as much as possible, short of damaging the pieces.  At least for Levine’s work, allowing viewers to photograph the piece would facilitate the piece’s meaning.  Even if you don’t know the context of what Sherry Levine is doing, there’s a certain self-consciousness associated with photographing a photograph in a museum that Levine would probably appreciate. By framing and holding inviolate Levine’s “authentic” rephotographs, the Whitney cuts off the message, and misses the point.