NEWSgrist (10 unread)

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  Found Art (Kenmare) Unmonumental 353

  Posted: 21-May-2012, 10:03pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  

  

  
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  Found Art (Soho) Unmonumental 354

  Posted: 21-May-2012, 10:05pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  

  

  
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  Reclaiming Fair Use

  Posted: 21-May-2012, 10:32pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  
  
  

   

  Nice and timely, as usual, from Techdirt.

  Via Techdirt: Here is Part II of our excerpt from Chapter 1 of Reframing Fair Use by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, which is our May selection for the Techdirt Book Club. You can read Part I here. We'll have another excerpt soon, and will be scheduling the author chat in the near future.

  How Does Fair Use Fit Into The Critique Of Copyright?

  from the reclaiming-fair-use dept

  by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi
  Fri, May 18th 2012 6:29pm
  
  Fair use was in eclipse for decades, with judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and creators unsure of its interpretation and convinced of its unreliability. Since the late 1990s, fair use has returned to the scene, and has become a sturdy tool for a wide range of creators and users. This transformation has been remarkable; we discuss it in detail in Chapter 5, and provide highlights here.
  
  It happened in part because of changing scholarship. A generation of legal scholars has developed arguments for fair use as they have analyzed copyright?s effect on cultural expression. At the same time, cultural studies scholars have showcased the relevance of fair use to their work, which often involves analyzing popular culture. Teachers and scholars are beginning to take up the fair use banner, publicly using their rights and encouraging their students to do the same.
  
  Settled, established communities of creators, administrators and users?filmmakers, teachers of English and visual art, librarians, makers of open course ware, poets, and dance archivists--have identified fair use as a necessary tool for them to use to achieve their missions. They have turned to the sturdy tool of consensus interpretation, by making codes of best practices in fair use through their professional associations.
  
  Members of these communities have become active advocates for fair use. Their organizations and representatives have appeared before the Copyright Office to testify about the way that the DMCA, which makes illegal the breaking of encryption on DVDs, limits their ability to employ fair use in their work.
  
  Remix artists of all kinds, working online, have come to adopt the claim of fair use as an anti-corporate banner. They trade information on fair use in conferences and conventions. When they receive takedown notices on YouTube, they issue counter-takedown notices and explain why their uses are fair. Remixers have also gone before the Copyright Office to protest the way that the DMCA impedes their creations, which are often socially critical.
  
  New businesses have flourished employing fair use, and their trade associations have supported them. Google, the Consumer Electronics Association, and the Computer and Communications Industry Association have all advocated for fair use. Legal and professional services for communities of practice, such as lawyers and web developers, have built their fair use expertise to serve their clients better.
  
  Think tanks and advocacy organizations have promoted fair use. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the American Civil Liberties Union, Duke University?s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and the Stanford Fair Use Project have all taken action on fair use. Between the scholars, the creators, artists, and organizations, fair use is emerging out of a twilight existence where, for decades, it had lived. During those decades, many professionals and especially professionals in the corporate media environment?whether broadcast journalism, cable documentary, or newspapers?routinely and extensively employed fair use. But if you weren?t a professional, you might not even have heard of it. That has changed.
  
  The goals of various actors in this resurgence of fair use differ. Some simply want to assert their rights to be able to improve their work, lower their costs and start or grow new businesses. Some want to expand the sphere of freedom of expression, so that copyrighted culture does not become off-limits for new work. Some believe that an expansion of fair use rights is imperative both to keep fair use as copyright policy is tinkered with, and to maintain the crucial principle of balance between owners? rights and the society?s investment in new cultural creation. Some believe that fair use, exercised to the maximum, will provide concrete experience of the limitations of today?s copyright law, and point to more effective change. They all share a common understanding that individual and community action simply to assert their rights has an immediate and long-range effect on markets and policy.

  [read full post]

  

  
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  Prince v. Cariou Appeal: Oral Arguments Heard, Injunction Deemed Draconian

  Posted: 21-May-2012, 11:09pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  
  
  

   

  Via Art in America: [Emphasis is NEWSgrist's]

  Injunction in Prince V. Cariou Compared to Taliban in Appeal

  by Brian Boucher 05/21/12

  Three judges heard oral arguments in the appeal regarding the significant copyright case Prince v. Cariou this morning. The lawyers for Prince seemed to have the judges' collective ear, which could bode well for the appropriation artist.
  
  The case concerns the "Canal Zone" series of paintings by artist Richard Prince (2008), which incorporated photographs by Patrick Cariou from his 2000 book Yes, Rasta (Powerhouse) for a show at Gagosian Gallery. In 2009 Cariou brought a copyright infringement suit against Prince, Gagosian Gallery, Lawrence Gagosian and catalogue publisher Rizzoli. In March 2011, U.S. District judge Deborah Batts ruled against Prince and ordered the defendants to destroy remaining copies of the catalogue and unsold paintings that make use of Cariou's photographs. The case has given rise to extensive debate in the art world over copyright law and provisions for "fair use" of appropriated original material.
  
  Prince's lawyers argued this morning that Batts's decision was based on a fundamental error in finding that an artist cannot make a transformative work using appropriated materials without "commenting" on the original. The works' value and originality, they posited, was proved by the sky-high market for the works.
  
  Counsel for Cariou argued that there was no reason Cariou's work in particular had to be taken without permission when other, similar images existed.
  
  The liveliest moment in this morning's proceedings came when the panel asked Daniel J. Brooks, counsel for Cariou, whether the injunction to destroy the works was in the public interest.
  
  "It seems like something that would appeal to the Huns or the Taliban," Judge Jackson observed.
  
  Brooks pointed out that his client's father was in the French Resistance and that he does not support destruction of any artwork, which is for him redolent of Nazi bookburning.
  
  "The court," Josh Schiller of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, Prince's counsel, later observed, "did not invent the injunction."
  
  The case also deals with whether Cariou's market was harmed by Prince's paintings. The judges seemed unsympathetic to Brooks's claims of a damaged market.
  
  "Bringing up the market is a clear loser for you," Judge Parker said to Brooks, who confirmed that Cariou's prints sold for a few thousand Euro, while Prince's paintings sold for millions. "You sold to a totally different audience, you've admitted that not many of the books were sold, you sold them out of a warehouse in Dumbo, and that the book was out of print. Prince was selling to a wealthier crowd, and on this side of the river." The allusion to a more elevated marketplace in Manhattan brought laughs from the courtroom.
  
  Another key element was testimony that art dealer Christiane Celle had balked at a previously discussed gallery exhibition of Cariou's work because of Prince's "Canal Zone" show. Schiller argued that the testimony of one dealer about a single show does not prove the foreclosure of a market, further pointing out that Cariou is still not listed as an artist on Celle's website.
  
  "I think the key moment today was when Judge Parker said that the injunction to destroy the works was something akin to a decision by the Huns or the Taliban," Amy Adler, a professor of art law at NYU, told A.i.A. (Adler has consulted with Boies, Schiller & Flexner but was speaking on her own behalf.) "The judges could see that the injunction is draconian. And they plainly understood the importance and the artistic significance of this case."
  
  Donn Zaretsky of the Art Law Blog pointed out the high level of interest on the part of the judges. "In the previous cases this morning, it was very businesslike, they kept everyone to their time limits. Here you could see the judges were really interested. They let everyone go over time."

  
  Virginia Rutledge, counsel for The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (which filed a friend of the court brief in the case), told A.i.A., "The outcome can't be predicted based on questions raised during oral argument, but the Court has before it very compelling arguments for Prince's transformative use of Cariou's imagery and the significance of the First Amendment speech interests at stake, and was openly dismissive of allegations of market harm."

  The court now deliberates and decides the case at its own schedule. Observers of the court tell A.i.A. that could take as much as six months to a year.

  ###

  BONUS: Some Canal Zone related images you may not have seen that show their variety and scale (via Art Oberved):

  

  
  

  
  
  Images via
  

  

  
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  JustLuxe: Joy Garnett's Momentary Explosions are Blowing Up the Art World

  Posted: 15-May-2012, 11:17pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  

  REVIEW

  via joygarnett:

  Joy Garnett's Momentary Explosions are Blowing Up the Art World

  By Carly Zinderman

  Posted: May. 7th, 2012

  New York artist Joy Garnett has introduced some interesting theories into the artworks that have made her popular, by reinventing photos and transforming them into explosive paintings. Although she uses paint and canvas like a traditional artist, her works are created from photographic images of explosions she sources from the Internet.

  In her artist's statements on her website, Garnett explains, "My paintings are associated with the 'apocalyptic sublime,' a metaphysical condition of astonishment and awe. Culling my source images from the Internet while referencing painterly tropes that include Abstraction, Op Art and the Luminist landscapes of the 19th century, my work continues to develop its own pictorial engagement with the vertiginous information explosion that defines our 21st century Technological Sublime Age."

  Using images of destruction and explosions, Garnett translates the images onto canvas for bright bold effects. For Boom and Bust, a solo show of six large paintings at the Winkleman Gallery, Garnett used military explosions set against dark night skies as her inspiration. Without physical groundings like horizon lines or objects on the ground, each image gives the viewer no concept of size or scale, the explosions are somehow even more intense.

  Currently, Garnett is working on a visual memoir entitled "The Bee Keeper," [sic!] a piece about her grandfather, A.Z. Abushady, poet, publisher and an innovative beekeeper in both Egypt and England during Egypt's Ancient Regime, when King Farouk was in power. In addition, Garnett has worked as the Arts Editor of the scholarly journal Cultural Politics and regularly publishes writings on arts, media and related subjects in various publications and on the web, including her blog NEWSgrist.

  Garnett lives and works in New York City and her pieces have been shown in numerous galleries up and down the East Coast. She was most recently part of a group exhibition, The Tool at Hand, at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Visit FirstPulseProjects.com to see more.

  

  
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  Found Art (Kenmare) Unmonumental 351

  Posted: 12-May-2012, 4:16pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  

  

  
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  Found Art (Kenmare) Unmonumental 352

  Posted: 12-May-2012, 4:18pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  

  

  
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  Mark Twain's Copyright Satire (?)

  Posted: 12-May-2012, 4:32pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  

  Image Via

   

  via Techdirt:

  Mark Twain: Copyright Maximalist Who Also Believed That Nearly All Human Utterances Were Plagiarism?

  from the contradiction-or-satire? dept

  by Mike Masnick

  Fri, May 11th 2012 7:39pm

  In copyright circles, Mark Twain's speech to Congress in 1906 is well known as being the point at which he made clear his desire that copyright should be vastly expanded to make sure his kids kept earning money:

  My copyrights produce to me annually a good deal more money than I have any use for. But those children of mine have use for that. I can take care of myself as long as I live. I know half a dozen trades, and I can invent a half a dozen more. I can get along. But I like the fifty years' extension, because that benefits my two daughter, who are not as competent to earn a living as I am, because I have carefully raised them as young ladies, who don't know anything and can't do anything. So I hope Congress will extend to them that charity which they have failed to get from me.

  He later argues for infinite copyright:

  The English idea of copyright, as I found, was different, when I was before the committee of the House of Lords, composed of seven members I should say. The spokesman was a very able man, Lord Thring, a man of great reputation, but he didn't know anything about copyright and publishing. Naturally be didn't, because he hadn't been brought up to this trade. It is only people who have had intimate personal experience with the triumphs and griefs of an occupation who know how to treat it and get what is justly due.
  
  Now that gentleman had no purpose or desire in the world to rob anybody or anything, but this was the proposition--fifty years extension--and he asked me what I thought the limit of copyright ought to be.
  
  "Well," I said, "perpetuity." I thought it ought to last forever.

  Some have argued, somewhat convincingly, that Twain as actually doing a somewhat brilliant satire, which not everyone understood. That would be awesome, if true, and there are some hints that it may very well be. However, it does appear that Twain himself was somewhat more conflicted on this particular issue. Siva Vaidhyanathan has an entire chapter (pdf) of his excellent book, Copyrights and Copyrwrongs, devoted to Twain's fluctuating views on copyright. However, he does suggest that later on in life -- from 1898 onward basically -- Twain appeared to be a strong maximalist.
  
  So it's interesting to then discover, via Joe Betsill, that during that same period, Twain argued that "the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances?is plagiarism" and that this wasn't a bad thing. The specifics are that Twain was writing a letter to Helen Keller, who a decade earlier (at 12-years of age) had just gone through a controversy in which she was accused of plagiarizing heavily from another book for her own work, The Frost King. Twain wrote to Keller, with whom he was friendly, after learning about the plagiarism accusations:

  Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul?let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances?is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men?but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing?and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite?that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
  
  Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well as the story itself? It can hardly happen?to the extent of fifty words except in the case of a child; its memory-tablet is not lumbered with impressions, and the actual language can have graving-room there, and preserve the language a year or two, but a grown person's memory-tablet is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase. It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed on a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long enough to turn up some time or other to be mistaken by him for his own. No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "Innocents Abroad" with. Then years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass?no, not he; he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your "Plagiarism Court;" and so when I said, "I know now where I stole it, but whom did you steal it from," he said, "I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anyone who had."
  
  To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn't sleep for blaspheming about it last night. Why, their whole lives, their whole histories, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid rock of plagiarism, and they didn't know it and never suspected it. A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they've caught filching a chop! Oh, dam?

  That was sent in 1903. Yet just three years later, he was arguing to Congress that ideas were property and should remain in the possession of those that created them forever:

  So if I could have convinced that gentleman that a book which does consist solely of ideas, from the base to the summit, then that would have been the best argument in the world that it is property, like any other property, and should not be put under the ban of any restriction, but that it should be the property of that man and his heirs forever and ever, just as a butcher shop would be, or--I don't care--anything, I don't care what it is. It all has the same basis. The law should recognize the right of perpetuity in this and every other kind of property.

  Now, plagiarism and copyright are not exact equivalents -- though there can (and often is) significant overlap. But it's difficult to see how the same person can reasonably argue both points. Perhaps that lends some credence to the claims that the Congressional hearing was, in fact, satire. Either way, I think I like the 1903 Mark Twain waxing poetically on how all ideas are plagiarism much more than the 1906 Mark Twain whining about how his children are too useless to do anything and need to keep making money from his books long after he's dead.

  23 Comments |

  

  
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  Worldwide Parody & Satire Industries Collapse

  Posted: 12-May-2012, 4:41pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  
  Image Via

   

  via BalloonJuice:
  

  Worldwide Parody & Satire Industries Collapse
  By Betty Cracker May 11th, 2012

  NEW YORK ? May 11, 2012 ? Roiled by a lengthy Republican primary that featured sickly-wife dumper Newt Gingrich in the role of family values advocate, prissy uterus invader Rick Santorum as a small government champion and multimillionaire vulture capitalist Mitt Romney shedding Armani suits in favor of mom jeans and ?work? shirts as he positioned himself as a regular guy (with a car elevator), the global parody and satire industries utterly collapsed Friday.

  The market sector had teetered on the verge of collapse this week following an accusation from thrice four-times-married drug addict Rush Limbaugh that President Obama had attacked the institution of marriage by coming out in favor of same-sex unions. But some analysts had thought the sector was positioned for recovery.

  Those hopes were dashed early Friday when parody and satire futures were bludgeoned by the publication of an opinion piece by 21-year-old single mom Bristol Palin. The daughter of failed vice-presidential candidate and serial quitter Sarah Palin criticized the president for allowing his daughters to influence marriage equality policy, decried the persecution of conservative Christians and urged the president to direct his children since ?dads should lead their family.?

  ?Parody and satire were already on life support thanks to Rush,? said analyst Seymour Butts of the Under the Bleachers Report. ?But when Bristol let loose, even hard-bitten industry veterans who had survived the Nixon and Reagan years threw in the towel.?

  Most experts were unable to articulate a scenario under which parody and satire could recover. However, at least one long-term analyst envisioned a resurgence contingent upon a direct asteroid strike on the earth that wipes out all existing life, after which single-cell organisms might once more emerge and evolve to acquire language skills.

  [X-posted at Rumproast]

  

  
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  Now Out: VIRILIO AND THE MEDIA, by John Armitage (Polity: 2012)

  Posted: 12-May-2012, 4:53pm CEST by NEWSgrist

  

  Cover image by Joy Garnett.

   

  NEWSgrist is pleased to announce the publication this week, in Polity?s Theory and Media series, of VIRILIO AND THE MEDIA, by John Armitage.
  
  ~~~~
  Polity

  Amazon.com

  Amazon.co.uk

  ~~~~

  Description 

  In books such as The Aesthetics of Disappearance, War and Cinema, The Lost Dimension, and The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio has fundamentally changed how we think about contemporary media culture. Virilio?s examinations of the connections between perception, logistics, the city, and new media technologies comprise some of the most powerful texts within his hypermodern philosophy.
  
  Virilio and the Media presents an introduction to Virilio?s important media related ideas, from polar inertia and the accident to the landscape of events, cities of panic, and the instrumental image loop of television. John Armitage positions Virilio?s essential media texts in their theoretical contexts whilst outlining their substantial influence on recent cultural thinking. Consequently, Armitage renders Virilio?s media texts accessible, priming his readers to create individual critical evaluations of Virilio?s writings. The book closes with an annotated and user-friendly Guide to Further Reading and a non-technical Glossary of Virilio?s significant concepts.
  
  Virilio?s texts on the media are vital for everyone concerned with contemporary media culture, and Virilio and the Media offers a comprehensive and up to date introduction to the ever expanding range of his critical media and cultural works.

   

  Reviews

  'If Paul Virilio is the essential guide to understanding the digital future that is the 21st century, then John Armitage's brilliant account of Virilio and the Media explores the essence of Virilio's intellectual vision: its aesthetics, new media critique, political theory, cinematic analysis, and creative technological disturbance. Here, the writing of Paul Virilio becomes a vivid, haunting reminder of that which has been lost and gained with the disappearance of culture, society and politics into the language of new media.'

  ~Arthur Kroker, Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory, University of Victoria, Canada

   

  'Paul Virilio is a canary in the mine of contemporaneity. For him, new communications media have remade the world as speed, accident, ubiquitous militarisation and the loss of the dimension of the real. Armitage is uniquely positioned to articulate the richness and urgency of Virilio's media critique.'

  ~Sean Cubitt, University of Southampton

   

  'John Armitage proves himself the leading English-language interpreter of Virilio's unique body of work. Focusing on Virilio's pioneering understanding of the transformative impact of media technologies, Armitage establishes a cogent and clear-sighted trajectory, and makes a powerful argument for both the strategic and ethical value of Virilio's thought.'

  ~Scott McQuire, University of Melbourne

   

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1 The Aesthetics of Disappearance

  2 Cinema, War, and the Logistics of Perception

  3 New Media: Vision, Inertia, and the Mobile Phone

  4 City of Panic: The Instrumental Image Loop of Television and Media Events

  5 The Work of the Critic of the Art of Technology: The Museum of Accidents

  Conclusion

  Guide to Further Reading

  Glossary

  References

  Index

   

  Author Information

  John Armitage is Professor of Media at Northumbria University.

  --------------------