The Factual Age

John Sharp says that we’re leaving behind a “visual age,” shifting from a culture of aesthetics to a culture of play, interaction, and discursive collaboration.

In his On The Media appearance (and in the book he was there to plug), David Weinberger points toward another, equally important historical shift: we’re moving from a culture of indisputable facts and “stopping points” (the culture of books) to one that “includes difference and disagreement as a part of knowledge itself.”

With the Internet, Weinberger argues, “we finally have a medium that is big enough for knowledge,” allowing us to worry less about the place of things in “the order of the universe” and more about the act of constantly, incrementally contributing to collective human understanding. Knowledge has moved from something fixed and immutable to something that necessarily, constantly, and explicitly contradicts itself, “a huge mass of contradictory connections that you travel along forever.”

This new epoch has its drawbacks: nowadays, “facts are not going to settle the issues we want them to settle. There is no conceivable additional evidence to convince Americans that our president was not born in Kenya, yet a sizable percentage of Americans continue to believe that. Facts are not going to settle our disputes.”

But then, the factual age had its share of epistemological bugaboos, too: because the platypus fit so poorly into contemporary taxonomy, it was entirely possible to look at a platypus right in front of one’s own face and say “This cannot be!”

Do give the piece a listen if the above sounds interesting.

Intellectual Property Thought Experiment #1

Tim has been out of school for several several years. When Tim was in school, he hated the high prices of textbooks. So Tim decides that he wants to hurt the textbook industry, and he decides to do so by pirating as many textbooks as he can find.

Tim goes to a BitTorrent tracker, and he downloads 10,000 textbooks. Neither the authors nor the publishers get a cent of Tim’s money, and now Tim has an extensive, interdisciplinary library at his disposal.

But Tim has the sinking feeling that he hasn’t struck much of a blow against the textbook industry.

As we’ve said, Tim isn’t in school anymore, so there’s a fairly slim chance that he would have bought many (if any) of these books. And if Tim does go back to school, he just might get charged for books upfront, regardless of whether he already has the texts he needs. And by the time Tim does go back to school, if Tim does indeed end up going back to school, there will very likely be new editions of the books he needs, and his professors will very likely require those new editions, which may or may not be available to pirate.

So in other words, what Tim has done is acquire for free a bunch of things that he would probably never have paid for, and that he just might end up purchasing anyway, in the end. In short, Tim has failed completely in his attempt to hurt the textbook industry.

Tim has succeeded, however, in disproving the ridiculous notion that an instance of piracy necessarily represents a lost sale. Is there any rational way to argue that, by pirating 10,000 textbooks, Tim has cost someone 10,000 sales? or 5,000? or 1,000? or 10?

Without ignoring the ethical dimension of piracy, we can recognize that what Tim has done here is quite different from, say, stealing crates of textbooks and then hoarding or reselling them. We can recognize the significant differences between piracy and theft, and further, we can recognize that having one’s work pirated 10,000 times does not mean that one has lost 10,000 sales, or even 10,000 potential sales.

Next time, I’ll go into more detail about that last point.

What We Mean When We Say “Art”

This is the fourth post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here, Part Two is here, and Part Three is here.

So. When we say art, and we are not referring simply to paintings and sculptures and stuff, we usually mean one of the following things.

1. Art is something that takes skill to make or execute well

When Julia Child wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she probably meant that French cooking was an art in the pre-Renaissance sense: pies and crepes as “well-crafted functional objects.” We all need food (which the functional part), but it takes an accomplished chef to make truly great food (which is the part that makes it art).

But contemporary readers tend to understand this usage as a metaphor, and indeed, Child herself might have meant it as one. It’s not that French cooking is an art, this argument goes, but rather that if you’re sufficiently good at French cooking, the results can be like art.

2. Art is something that seeks meaning and explores the human condition and does nothing else

When we say that French cooking is like art, but not actually art, this is the kind of art we’re saying it’s like. As discussed in a previous post, this is an extraordinarily and pointlessly restrictive definition.

It also makes very little internal sense. Operating on this definition, we often try to separate art from entertainment, despite the great number of things that explore the human condition while simultaneously entertaining us, from the Shakespeare canon to The Colbert Report. A skilled writer can find time for high-minded ruminations on morality and numerous dick jokes.

We could say that some entertainments contain art, or that they contain art-moments, but at that point entertainment and art are officially intermixed anyway. It’s too late to take the chocolate out of the milk–and what would be the point of doing so, anyway?

3. Art is something that well-educated people respect, and that people of good taste enjoy

I have several friends who become angry when they see conceptual art of pretty much any kind, and I suspect that their anger stems from this definition. They always want to say “That’s not art!” or “You’re telling me this is art?” because they have internalized the idea that art means something they have to respect (which is a hard sell where stolen urinals are concerned, which was sort of Marcel Duchamp’s point).

As I’ve said before, this makes it impossible to talk about bad art, dumb art, art that tries and fails, or art that you can understand and even respect without liking. If only the really successful attempts get to be included in the conversation, then we miss out on a whole lot of really interesting work, and that’s a shame.

4. Art is something that is meaningful and important without being enjoyable

This is appreciating art as a synonym for eating your vegetables, and the arts as a blanket term for those entertainments that we should probably keep around even if no one really finds them entertaining.

It’s this definition that leads people to sit quietly with their hands folded at the opera, nodding off occasionally and glaring at anyone with the audacity to applaud too often–despite the fact that opera was as rowdy and lowbrow a popular art-form as any in its heyday. The more you respect opera, the less you expect to enjoy opera.

And in galleries, when visitors encounter visual art that is overtly playful, or layered with historical meaning, or salacious and moronic, they tend to regard it all with the same sort of uniform, glassy-eyed seriousness. Nothing sufficiently respected has the opportunity to mean much of anything.

So enough with all the stultifying respect already.

Art has to be something that we all have permission to love, hate, kinda-like, kinda-dislike, laugh at, cry over, intellectualize, or engage viscerally on a case-by-case basis, or else there’s very little point in talking about it.

What I’m trying to ask is whether the word art is really worth hanging onto, given all of the above. It’s a term that means at least five different things, none of them all that useful, most of them highly problematic, and at least one of them actually nonsensical.

But even so, I think we’re sort of stuck with the word, at least for the moment–and in my next post, I’ll discuss how running an online art gallery has lead me to that conclusion. If we can understand what makes the word necessary right now, we can better address the goal of making it less necessary in the future.

Non-Gallery Art and Inexact Music

This is the third post in a series on the limits of art as a term.
Part One is here and Part Two is here.

When we say art, we’re often referring to paintings and sculptures and stuff–those well-established visual arts that are generally found in galleries, and that I therefore refer to as gallery art here on this blog. It’s an improvement over just calling those things art, I think, because it doesn’t lazily imply that film and television (and books and games and music and clothing and so on) are somehow not art.

It’s kind of like classical music. We generally understand that term to mean Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky and such, even though Mozart’s music is the only one of those three that is Classical-with-a-Capital-C. Bach’s music is Baroque, Tchaikovsky’s Romantic. But colloquially, classical music just indicates that Bach and Mozart and Tchaikovsky have more in common with each other than they do with Duke Ellington, The Beatles, and The Roots.

So fair enough. An imperfect term, but a fairly clear one, at least. Leonard Bernstein once tried to come up with a better, clearer, more accurate one, and he settled on exact music–as in, music that is supposed to be performed exactly as it is written on the page, as distinct from improvisation-heavy forms such as jazz, blues, and rock and/or roll.

But of course, Baroque music includes a fair bit of embellishment, interpretation, and improvisation. And it wasn’t until Beethoven that sheet music habitually included metronome markings, so it would be disingenuous to say that tempos were all that precise or uniform prior to the early 1800s.

Besides which, Bernstein could not have foreseen Techno. We now have multiple electronic forms that are more regular, more metronomic, and indeed, more exact than any “exact” music. So we may as well stick with classical music for the sake of clarity.

Because if we referred to that music simply as music, we’d be suggesting (with more than a hint of snobbery) that only “exact” music qualifies as music. Which would be supremely unproductive, for reasons that are hopefully self-evident.

So for the moment, gallery art. I’ll go with that, even if it’s unlikely to supplant art, despite art’s many problematic alternate definitions, which I’ll unpack in my next post.

Ice Cold: André, Cee Lo, and the Bravado Epidemic

The first question, when listening to Cee Lo Green’s new album The Lady Killer, is a simple one: Is there anything on there that bests his viral pre-release single “Fuck You?” There isn’t, but that’s hardly a mark against the album; there’s no shame in being beaten by the best.

On to the second question, then: Does The Lady Killer put “Fuck You” into a more interesting context? Here the answer is a resounding–and to me, a disappointing–kinda.

It’s only disappointing because The Lady Killer is so close to being such an accomplishment, and I wanted very much for it to get there. I wanted the title of the album–and the intro, and the outro, and two intensely creepy, stylistically incongruous tracks, called “Bodies” and “Love Gun”–to mean something. I wanted Cee Lo’s casual conflation of male sexuality with violence, and romantic conquest with murder, to be a comment on masculinity as such.

But all of that would require a little vulnerability, which Cee Lo’s persona emphatically precludes. As a freestanding song and a viral video, “Fuck You” is the exception, since it places Cee Lo on the receiving end of romantic rejection. But in the song’s second, more traditional music video, the story gets a new ending: Having attained wealth, power, and omnipotence, Cee Lo returns to the woman who rejected him and rubs his infinite success in her face.

It gives the song a nice narrative arc, but it also makes Cee Lo less a sympathetic protagonist and more a dime-a-dozen hip-hop self-aggrandizer. The dude can’t get through a four-minute song about being rejected without celebrating how awesome–and wealthy; let’s not forget wealthy–he is.

The “fuck you” of the song can’t be mere emotional catharsis. It must also be a statement of material, clearly demonstrable superiority. There can only have been a time when Cee Lo was a humble Atari if, by the end of the song, he has transformed into a diamond-studded Xbox.

Cee Lo aspires to be cooler than cool. And there’s a term for that, coined by André 3000 on his half of OutKast’s 2003 double album, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. What’s cooler than being cool? Ice cold.

Throughout The Love Below, “ice cold” stands for the aloof, untouchable, hyper-masculine posturing–the epidemic of bravado–that hip-hop requires of its luminaries. When André thinks he’s falling in love, he reminds himself: “Don’t fall for her, though. Don’t fall for her. Be cool. Ice cold.” In response, some male voice far from the microphone screams the line back to him: “Ice cold.”

“Alright now, fellas, now what’s cooler than being cool?” he asks a semi-imaginary crowd during “Hey Ya!” And they answer, with the same inflections as the psychomachia guy from earlier: “Ice cold!” This after André has spent two verses wondering whether his lover stays with him out of love, or just out of a fear of being alone:

My baby don’t mess around, because she loves me so, and yes, I know for sure. / But does she really wanna, but can’t stand to see me walk out the door? / Don’t try to fight the feeling, ’cause the thought alone is killing me right now.

If “nothing is forever,” he asks, then “what makes love the exception?” And after all this brooding, André declares, “Y’all don’t want to hear from me. You just want to dance.” And then comes the bit about improper treatment of Polaroids and all–and of course:

Don’t want to meet your daddy,
Just want you in my caddy.
Don’t want to meet your momma,
Just want to make you comma.

So by the time André says “I’m just being honest,” we have good reason not to believe him. In a very real and very important sense, The Love Below is about the impossibility of being truly honest when your audience just wants to dance.

But with that clearly stated caveat, André still wants (and deserves) to be the one to make you dance. He loves his mask. He just feels the need, now and then, to let it slip.

Cee Lo’s mask, on the other hand, now seems bolted to his sunglass-sporting visage. I can’t shake the feeling that, for all of the effortlessly soulful sting in Cee Lo’s voice, and for all of the old-school craft in his arrangements, The Lady Killer could have been so much more. It could have been the album that made André 3000′s danceable mask-slipping on The Love Below feel like a rarity in good company, rather than an out-and-out anomaly.

Cee Lo, take off your cool. I wanna know you.

Toxic Media

One of my very first posts on this young blog had to do with the death of Michael Jackson. In the days since, the sad end to the King of Pop’s life has been reported again and again and again and again and again. (The links are just there so that I have some textual support for my statement. You will gain nothing from reading these articles).

My intention was certainly not to participate in the surreal, exploitative spectacle that this event has become (that last article uses the unintentionally apt phrase “death probe” to describe the proceedings), but simply to share some thoughts. And now, having watched not only pop culture bottom-feeders but also supposedly reputable news outlets devote huge amounts of time to morbid sensationalism, I would like to share just one more thought:

For all of this endless talk about Michael Jackson, we’re hearing very little about the exploitative non-news cycle that was, at least in part, responsible for the man’s decades-long hermitage. We’re hearing very little about the misinformation and perversions of justice that inevitably result when an accused criminal is tried in the media rather than the courts. We’re hearing very little about the bleak futures that await most child stars, or the toxicity of the Cult of Celebrity, or anything else worth hearing about.

As early as 1987, our bleak fascination with Michael Jackson’s personal life had already become an overblown spectacle. Even then, this stuff had been going on for much too long.

And as I recall, there were one or two other events worth discussing last week. But those stories didn’t get nearly as much play, because they were not likely to scare us (like this recent Swine Flu nonsense) or to make us feel morally superior to persons wealthier than ourselves (like virtually all reporting on the personal lives of celebrities). This systemic dismissal of anything that does not either frighten or titillate is common not only to what we generally call the “tabloid media” (TMZ and the National Enquirer and the like) but also to all 24-hour news networks.

It’s just that it’s irresponsible to talk about anything so much while thinking about it so little. There are all sorts of important issues implicit in the life and death of Michael Jackson, but I have not seen a single one of them getting any serious attention in the mainstream media. All that we’ve gotten is a reprise of the same crass oversimplifications we’ve been seeing for years and years: “He’s an unassailable genius!” or “He’s a despicable criminal!” or “He’s an unrelatable weirdo!”

What exactly does that kind of thinking–or that method of refusing to think–accomplish, aside from selling advertising space for unethical media entities? Nothing, that’s what. There is nothing wrong with talking about Michael Jackson, but there is a fairly serious problem with talking about anything when one has nothing useful to say.

The Last Last Superstar

For those of us who care about pop culture, this past week has raised the question: When Michael Jackson died, did the age of the superstar die with him?

As Kyle Ryan of The A.V. Club points out, Michael Jackson would not be the first last superstar. Ryan quotes Lester Bangs, who had this to say when Elvis Presley died: “But I can guarantee you one thing; we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.”

The comparison is worth making–on an emotional level, at the very least. The way that I feel about Michael Jackson dying must be something like what Elvis fans felt in 1977, when their King died: Is this really how it ends? There was no comeback, and now there never will be. More than anything, what’s so strange is the knowledge that one of the greatest entertainers of all time will now be remembered more for his personal bizarreness than for his professional accomplishments.

But here’s the rub: Although I feel that way about Michael Jackson, I can’t even imagine feeling that way about Elvis Presley. Elvis, to me, is defined by his sad decline first and foremost. His music is catchy, and it’s creolized–and it was wildly popular in its day, so it’s an important cultural artifact–but otherwise, who cares? His rise seems significant primarily because it facilitated his fall.

And of course, there are plenty of people to whom Michael Jackson is defined primarily by his sad decline. Trying to explain to anyone born after 1990 that Michael Jackson was once a universally beloved pop star is like trying to explain to anyone born after 1985 that O.J. Simpson was once a prominent football player.

That I personally like Michael Jackson’s music much more than I like Elvis Presley’s music is, for the moment, beside the point. The important thing is that neither of these supposed flash points of cultural consensus is as universal as we’d like to think. The consensus existed way back when, but it doesn’t exist now.

So the fact that everyone more or less agreed on Michael Jackson in the 1980s, and on Elvis Presley in the 1960s, has at least as much to do with the times as with the artists. That there hasn’t been another Thriller–another album that everybody bought–does not mean that every album recorded since 1982 has been inferior to Thriller. The splintering of pop culture has just as much to do with the Internet, and the recording industry’s collective suicide pact (beginning with the scam that was the CD–buy your whole music collection again!–and continuing on through the RIAA’s latest misadventures).

All of which means, essentially, that the superstar didn’t die this week. Superstardom, as a job description, was downsized years ago. No one is currently employed in that position, nor has anyone been for quite some time.

And it’s high time we realized that, and let the concept of the superstar go the way of the wax cylinder. It would be hard to argue that our antiquated conception of what fame should be (conspicuous consumption, quickie marriages, and so on) has done any favors for, say, Britney Spears. Hell, it would be equally hard to argue that the superstar ethos was ultimately a good thing for the King of Pop, or for The King before him. Things didn’t end well for either of those celebrated pop monarchs.

So go ahead and mourn Michael Jackson, but don’t mourn superstardom. I mean, for God’s sake, look what superstardom did to Michael Jackson.