Microproperty in Flow World
Apr. 1st, 2007 06:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Hello. Today I want to push some ideas past your eyeballs. I've numbered them, and I welcome your comments. They're about the erosion of the idea of property in "Flow World". I want to start with a little quote I lifted -- shoplifted, in fact -- from Streetwear Today magazine yesterday. I think this quote illustrates something we could call "ownership's infinite regress".Streetwear Today interviewer: You also invented something that everyone uses right now, maybe not knowing who was the first one to do it. I'm referring to the small label on the shirt sleeve. People should pay royalties to you. How did you come up with that idea?
Hiroshi Fujiwara: It came from the original Vivienne Westwood shirts. They had a small tag on the shoulder. I really liked the idea... so I came up with the special tag on the sleeve. For shirt royalties I'm a medium (laughs). It somehow became a commodity that is for free, common sense and now it's everywhere.
Okay, the rest of this is numbered. The numbers are tags which will set off the alarm system if you try to leave the store without paying for an idea. No, not really, the numbers are to help you take the ideas away with you more easily, and refer to them in the comments section without quoting tons of text.
1. I ended yesterday's piece on recycling fashion crew Andrea Crews with a parallel. "Andrea Crews shares something with Palais de Tokyo architects Lacaton and Vassal. For Lacaton, 90% of what you need to make a building is already present on the site. In Africa they learned from people’s resourcefulness and how existing materials are endlessly used, reused and hybridised with very little waste."
2. This isn't just crafty, thrifty architecture, it strikes me as a realistic description of what artists or journalists do too. We use the material to hand, give it a twist of our own. That twist might just be 10%, but it's enough for us to call it our own. This is why I'm big on the folk tradition but not big on copyright law. The person who "owns" something is usually just the thief with the best lawyers.
3. This "10% twist on existing material" thing applies particularly to digital culture on the internet, where curation becomes more important than origination. A whole new concept of "micro-property" emerges. For instance, someone will post a link on their blog, and put a little "link via Jean Snow" acknowledgment. That doesn't mean Jean Snow originated or owns the material, though. It goes back to someone else he got it from, and back from that person to another, and so on endlessly. These circles of reference make the internet the ultimate "flow world", a world where content is the reference to other content, in endless huge circles.
4. In Flow World, transformation is more important than origination. Recontextualization is more important than production. The basic conditions are plethora, love-sifting, and the instant, free worldwide circulation of totally weightless cultural goods whose production either cost next to nothing or was long ago amortized.
5. In Flow World, the most important thing is circulation itself. Things must keep circulating. Assigning and asserting ownership is a kind of circuit breaker. It disrupts the free flow of information. It's like a grouchy old man shouting "Kids, you can't make sculpture with that trash, that's someone's private property!"
6. Obviously, something like Viacom's court case against YouTube is a huge drag. Most of the copyright material on YouTube is "garbage", stuff which had its production costs amortized long ago and was, itself, just a 10% twist on something already existing.
7. Okay, this is where we bring in Karl Marx's distinction between Use Value and Exchange Value. Use Value is the value of things to their users, whether they own them or not. Exchange Value is the price of something agreed between a buyer and a seller, whether either of them uses it or not. Exchange value is the domain of traditional economics, because price is something you can easily quantify, attach a number to. Use is subjective, so economics tends to have little to say about it. And yet it's absolutely the whole point of our relationship with commodities. We buy them to use them.
8. Unless, that is, we buy them to speculate. Evan Davis concluded his fascinating four-part BBC Radio 4 documentary The Price of Property with a programme that examined, amongst other things, a phenomenon called "Buy to Sit". In the UK property market, because property is scarce, prices are expected to keep rising. Buy to Sit is Buy to Let -- without letting. You have a guaranteed profit at the end of, say, a two-year wait between purchasing the property and re-selling it. There's no reason to let it out. In fact, let (in other words, used) property is considered "shopsoiled".
9. There's no such thing, though, as a website that's been "shopsoiled" by its users. Websites gain value if they're used. The typical model of a successful website is one that gives away free material from a previous medium (music, television), establishes itself as a brand thanks to millions of users, then either sells itself to a media magnate (MySpace to Rupert Murdoch) or makes money from advertising, or starts charging for the content that once was free (Napster). But the Napster solution is the least satisfactory because, as every husband knows, if you bring your spouse breakfast in bed one day, you have to do it every day, forever. You can't start charging her a fee for it. So, rather than go back to regarding cultural goods on the internet as something that can be charged for, successful companies have made their money using them as eyeball lures, ways to make people look at advertising, which they then get paid for. An "attention economy" is replacing a property economy.
10. Even in a property economy, the profits you make are only meaningful when you convert them into things you can use. For instance, many home owners are under the impression that they're rich because the house they live in has doubled its price. But if every other house in any neighbourhood you might want to live in has also doubled its price, you won't be able to buy a better house when you sell yours. Use value hasn't doubled, only exchange value. And you need somewhere to live.11. The internet might be making us think in a different way about things in the real world. If we're moving away from an ownership and exchange model and towards a flow and use model, perhaps we'll look at all property and think, "Hey, that's a bit fishy. That thing was free, and it passed around, and at some point someone said it was their property, and put a price on it. And then every time it changed hands, there was a price, and markup to cover costs and give someone a profit motive for passing it on to the next owner."
12. Things cost so little to pass on in a digital environment that we no longer need to give them a price, or a markup. Online -- except on auction sites like eBay which mimic markets in the atomic world -- we've all become dealers without deals, sellers without prices, resellers who don't mark up. We curate, and the internet is very like an art gallery. It changes all the time, for a start, with new "exhibitions" changing its look, its decoration, its layout. And if I think of my experience in art galleries or museums, what mattered to me was Use Value. That I could see works of art, use them. What didn't matter to me was who owned them. That would only matter if the owner withdrew the works from public view, putting them in a vault to accumulate value before being sold. As long as they were circulating in public exhibitions, ownership was pretty irrelevant. Just like it is online.
13. In the 80s and 90s record labels discovered they could make a killing by re-releasing back catalogue (amortized old material with all its production costs already recouped) in the new CD format, for ten times its old price. The public bought the CDs, but were aware they were way too expensive, and took their revenge when music became free on the internet. Now we all re-release amortized old material -- on the internet. We've all become record labels. But when we do it on our blogs, we don't charge anything. It's beautiful -- we have the re-release schedule, but not the prices. Instead of money profit (property, exchange) we do it for "attention profit". And for love.
14. But really, really, the whole concept of property was flawed from the start. Take a pop song. Take its most important constitutive elements. A 4/4 beat, for instance. Who really owns that 4/4 beat? Nobody. Everybody. It's the common property of humanity. A public asset. Nobody would have the nerve to say they invented it, or needed royalties every time someone else used it. That person would be the biggest bugbear of Flow World. And, you know, go through the whole song and it's all made up of stuff like that. Who invented harmony? Who needs to get paid for the minor third? An E chord? The word "love"?
15. Some people say we're living in a time of unprecedented greed, a time when even plant genes are said to belong to somebody. But we're also living in a time when some kinds of property are -- refreshingly -- in huge crisis, eroding and becoming rapidly irrelevant. In the wallet-free Flow World of the internet, new forms of "payment" (a tip of the hat, an acknowledgment of the source of a link, a useful comment) are emerging, new ideas about contingent or temporary or contextual or micro-property. Something's only mine for a while, or mine in the context of my blog, or mine to use (and that's all that matters). But the best form of payment is no payment, and the best form of property -- the emerging form of digital property -- is no property.
16. The images on this page were all shot the same day in Berlin, a city that really likes the idea of recycling, the idea of squatting, the idea of not-for-profit, the idea of repurposing and recontextualizing trash, the idea of thrift, and the idea of flow for its own sake. The city loves this free flow thing so much, it's almost digital.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 04:44 am (UTC)That notion may reflect the zeitgeist, but I disagree with it 90%. As someone who used to be an architect and is now an artist, I've seen firsthand how much more mileage one can get out of a clever and/or transgressive appropriation (from Duchamp to Koons) than from something far more original in its conception and execution. The sole exception seems to be with artists and architects who are given some notoriety for seemingly being throwbacks (Odd Nerdrum, et al).
I believe that our society is going through a creative drought right now, and it heavily over-values conceptual cleverness. After all, it's far easier for an artist or architect to pimp an idea, far easier for the media to present it as a vid-bite, and far easier for a lazy-minded and largely ignorant consumer base to hail it, consume it, and move on to the next shiny gadget.
drought
Date: 2007-04-01 05:05 am (UTC)Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 05:50 am (UTC)The design community has long been preoccupied with novelty, visual statements and visual branding, and that seems to have not only been the gateway to the fine arts for many people, it's become an end in itself for artists. Pop reflected consumerism. Nowadays, many artists simply repackage consumables.
I don't see a mere 10% of originality in the work of say, James Turrell or Anish Kapoor or Richard Deacon or Richard Long, for that matter. But their work is far more difficult to post a catchy little blurb about on an arts blog than say, Damien Hirst or Christopher Wool.
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 10:36 am (UTC)You've misunderstood this 90/10 thing. When Lacaton says that 90% of the material you need to make a building is already present on the site, he doesn't mean that you can get lazy in your creative thinking. Quite the contrary. Thinking in terms of what's there is very fresh, contextual thinking. Lacaton and Vassal are some of the most original architects anywhere. There's a parallel, in what they're saying, to Rem Koolhaas' longterm project to learn from Lagos. Learn from the situational intelligence of people who don't start each time from scratch, and claim to own every brick and shingle tile in their construction, but use their ingenuity more for conceptual detournement of existing materials -- and help save the planet by reducing the environmental footprint of their buildings while they're at it.
There's also the undeniable truth that 90% of what I make when I make a pop song is common material, owned by no-one: an E chord, an English word, a harmonic interval. It's only the way I put them together (the 10% twist) that stakes a claim to "originality", and to a property right. I'd say exactly the same thing applies to Turrell, Kapoor, Deacon or Long. They use sculptural forms -- masses, apertures, and the context provided by site. I'd say Richard Long's works actually parallel Lacaton and Vassal's architecture very closely. He makes use of what he finds on his walks, adding a twist to elements already present.
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 05:15 pm (UTC)My disagreement is with the leap you made from #1 to 2 and 3. It seems to me that it condones the uses of appropriation and recontextualization emblematic of the creative laxity we have today. And I entirely disagree that Richard Long "makes use of what he finds on his walks, adding a twist to elements already present"; the environment is merely his medium, not his message. Long's work is unique in its concept (other than Hamish Fulton, whose work is somewhat similar). But rather than the small concepts that people like Hirst keep trotting out, Long's concept is epic in its scale, providing plenty of scope to explore for an entire career(as is Turrell's). Again, he's not doing a little something with his environment, he's doing a big something with himself (and us, vicariously).
Who is the more creative or progressive architect -- Koolhaas or Buckminster Fuller? Koolhaas perfectly reflects the zeitgeist in all its vapidity and self-satisfaction, but offers little more than a mirror and some novel forms and surfaces -- formal Postmodernism. I used to live about a mile away from OMA/AMO in Rotterdam, and have been in and around many of his buildings; they are, IMO, among the worst architecture of their kind. Fuller, OTOH, thought of architecture as a utopian toolbox, scalable for any environment or budget. His work of 60 years ago will be still be modern in another 60 years, by which time Koolhaas' work will be as dated as Michael Graves' aesthetic Postmodernism of the '80s. Where is the 90% of "available material" in a geodesic dome? Only in the raw aluminum (or plywood or whatever), and the material is the smallest part of the thing.
That underscores our philosophical differences better than anything else, I think. I am in favor of big, slow, quiet ideas, developed hermetically over a lifetime -- ideas as glaciers. It seems to me that Postmodernism advocates little, novel, ephemeral ideas (and particularly being satisfied with twists on other people's ideas) -- ideas as fireworks. You see hundreds of them go up in the space of 15 minutes, and they all look more or less the same. Briefly entertaining, but forgotten by next month.
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 06:41 pm (UTC)Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 07:35 pm (UTC)Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 09:55 pm (UTC)People like to frame Long's work as Conceptual because they see dislocations between the idea, the execution, and the documentation, through which most of his work is encountered (in galleries, museums and books). Nevertheless, I've read and looked at Long's work for almost 20 years now, and I've never found any reason to think that he's a Conceptual artist, nor a Postmodernist. Long himself recently wrote "You could say that my work is a balance between the patterns of nature and the formal ideas behind human constructs like lines and circles. It is where my human characteristics meet the natural forces and patterns in the world. That is really the subject of my work."
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 10:40 pm (UTC)As for Postmodern, I'm fairly dogmatic about this. Anyone who's been making art between about 1956 and the present is a Postmodern artist, because this is the Postmodern era.
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 11:42 pm (UTC)"Anyone who's been making art between about 1956 and the present is a Postmodern artist, because this is the Postmodern era." So, does that mean that you would classify every artist between say, Manet and 1956 as "Modernists"?
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-02 05:29 am (UTC)Find me a quote where Long acknowledges that his work is Conceptual and I'll be swayed; otherwise, everything I've read in his words (including the quote above) has suggested otherwise.
Artists wriggle away from every category and box. This proves nothing. Find me a quote where Johnny Rotten calls himself a punk rocker!
My personal date for the start of Modernism is "on or about December 1910".
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-02 07:44 am (UTC)If I recall correctly, Sol LeWitt was the first to define Conceptual art, back in the mid-'60s. He wrote "I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman."
Far from wiggling out of a category or box, LeWitt proclaimed himself a Conceptualist, as did Weiner, Hubler, Haacke, Kosuth and a slew of others. Contrast LeWitt's definition with what Long actually does: the concept is not the most important aspect of the work; the journey is. The execution is not perfunctory, it is the essence of it. Craftsmanship is at the fore with his work as well, whether it's in installations, photographs or the careful placement of stones along his path.
Long writes "My work is not conceptual in the sense that it can be an idea only. The fact that for another artist work can exist only as an idea, or a proposition, of language, is fantastic. But for me, the rationale of my work is that the ideas are always realized. It is always physical engagement." "My work is real, not illusory or conceptual. It is about real stones, real time, real actions." "I consider my landscape sculptures inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making 'monuments' or conversely, of 'leaving only footprints'."
So, I'm afraid that I'll take the words (and in my opinion, the works) of the artist over what some curator at the Guggenheim says when it comes to assessing Long's position; we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. However, I'd still like to know -- since you say that Modernism existed between December of 1910 (citing Stansky reflecting Woolf, I presume) and 1956 -- whether all artists who produced work within that period are de facto Modernists?
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-02 04:34 am (UTC)that definition is so broad i doubt it can actually mean anything. I basically agree with you saying that Islam today is a 'post-modern' Islam and you could use a similar logc for these artists but does it really help? isn't this a case of mixing the genus and the species ?
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-02 05:38 am (UTC)Above all, though, it's a historical period, and none of us is bigger than history.
Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-02 07:51 am (UTC)Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-01 09:02 pm (UTC)the PYTHAGOREANS
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 06:43 am (UTC)i was in Bucharest in 95 or so and there was an architectural contest to do something with the dictator's palace. All plans were grand , if some 'deconstructive' as well as unfeasable. looking at the items i became convinced that the only sensible thing to do would be to open the space up into markets, skate-parks, cinemas, use it as if it was a natural element (a hill, a mountain). this wouldn't have been impossible in a country that, though traumatized, still had the memory of (good) living socialism. as it turned out the building has become, in all its attrocity, the site of the new parlament.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 07:32 am (UTC)that would have been the most interesting, to use the building like some kind of large indoor park. The problem with shelter though is that it is a dwelling, people squat and they don't want to share. Boundaries are drawn. You can have a Christiana in Denmark, but I don't think it would work in Romania. They've been waiting too long for a chance to grab some material possessions.
One process that is easily observed in Eastern Europe is the commercialisation of space. The socialist commons is cut up and parcelled out. Like Old Town Square in Prague where half of the square is filled now with cafe chairs. To be a tourist means going and looking at other tourists .. oh joy
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 06:34 am (UTC)I mean if you are going to post all your images twice ...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 06:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 09:06 am (UTC)Who gives a crap? The internet's as boring as a phone or a steam-iron.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 10:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 03:04 pm (UTC)¢ (http://members.aol.com/joeyknow/jk7.html)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 11:38 am (UTC)My dear! How very sadistic. Will you make pain the price for what you give us ?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 03:13 pm (UTC)copyright prohibited ¢ (http://members.aol.com/joeyknow/jk7.html)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 03:23 pm (UTC)The Era of the Exclamation Mark
Date: 2007-04-01 04:14 pm (UTC)this was a great invention,
Take for example the combination of l and a
la
it is a city,
it is half a song (Hot Love by T.Rex)
it is al spelled backwards,
it is the announcement of something female in spanish, french and italian culture
it is no in Morocco, but they use a different alphabet.
But in a time of materialized onomatopoems, it is the enthousiasm that counts.
One could wonder about this enthusiasm. It is so full of feelings of joy and liberation.
Is it that life is split into two reservoirs? The internet as the storage place for opinions and other stress bearing items; and the outside world as a place to celebrate the liberation of moral/religious/psychologizing context?
I don't know. I once had a publisher who stated that enthusiasm was the one and sole premise to publish a book. I was rather pissed with the editor. And that was how we all got pissed at each other.
(La la la lalala la, la la la lalala la, la la la lalala la, la la la lalala la )
Fact is that in order to sell something that no one needs, a climate of enthusiasm is the best you can have.
(La la la lalala la, la la la lalala la, la la la, lalala la, la la la lalala la)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 04:14 pm (UTC)It's just too easy for anyone to make art these days, why should some people get paid? There are too many people who make beautiful things but don't want money, we just won't be willing to pay for beautiful things any more
I wonder, if I'm right, which I'm probably not, what will happen to those whose entire investment portfolio comprises rare works of art? I suppose they will be okay, because their pieces, no longer valued because they are art, will be valuable as antiques, just like books
Artists in Recovery
Date: 2007-04-01 04:17 pm (UTC)whut?! I have trouble with that one. Not every artist is a whore
Re: Artists in Recovery
Date: 2007-04-01 05:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 04:28 pm (UTC)"buy to sit" happens on the internet, people buy domain names when someone hears rumors of a new product from a major company.
And in (12), we become "sellers without prices" is an awesome concept, but how do you feel that it's supported by advertising from major companies? Basically we couldn't make money from advertising without a major source of money coming from somewhere. This model needs to have companies making money the traditional way.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 05:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 05:56 pm (UTC)As a gleaner I find I like this post.
As they say in the land of torrents, "Bookmarked till I get this ratio sorted".
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 06:01 pm (UTC)Curation is only as good as the curator's filters, and I have yet to see much evidence of really important filters. You have among the better filter sets I've seen on the internet, but still, ClickOpera's curation isn't as important as the original sources; sorry.
Curation is to the 2000s what DJing and sampling were to the '90s: the practice of selecting of other people's actual work, most often by those who cannot produce work themselves. (Note: this does not apply to your production of music, which you do very well indeed.) But curating is too often a tactic for opportunists to get creative mojo by association. Art, music and original web content do quite well without curators; curation is worthless without the sources; I merely favor cutting out the middleman, or at least not elevating his status beyond what it deserves.
Having said that, some of my friends have curated, and I've been curated by others, but I try not to hold that against them, or myself.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 06:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 10:10 pm (UTC)A gourmand may bring together a great buffet from different caterers; it doesn't make them a chef. They may write an article about food for a magazine; it doesn't make them a chef. They may even cook a fine meal; it still doesn't make them a chef. Saying that the lines between gourmand, chef and critic no longer hold is just so much gerrymandering, and it's seldom to benefit the chef.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 10:28 pm (UTC)The first argument isn't a good way to distinguish artists from curators, since they both pursue exactly the same activity in many cases (framing parts of culture). The second I'd have more sympathy with -- it's the sociological argument -- except that many people spend all their time in the art world playing games with exactly such boundary definitions, and "subverting" them. Marcel Duchamp casts a long shadow.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 11:25 pm (UTC)"...many people spend all their time in the art world playing games with exactly such boundary definitions, and 'subverting' them." Of course they do, and at the same time I do whatever I can to avoid such games. Nor am I a fan of debating solipsism or answering knock-knock jokes.
"Marcel Duchamp casts a long shadow." True -- thanks to him, we've had 80 years of intellectual masturbation about appropriation. I find it astonishing that so many artists today can still get attention by covering that same old ground.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 11:34 pm (UTC)It doesn't take a "legitimizing authority" to determine whether or not another person is an artist, but it does take an understanding of artistic principles and the aforementioned qualities. A chef doesn't have to be classically trained any more than an architect or artist does; many have learned their craft through other channels. But they would surely have to have a grasp of the techniques and materials, a gift for invention, significant standards of quality, and a knowledge of what has come before them so they don't end up following paths that have already been thoroughly explored. I can cook a couple of dishes very well, but there's no way I'm a chef.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-02 04:04 am (UTC)(Big fan of both Turrell and Long, btw.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-02 04:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 07:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 08:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-01 09:00 pm (UTC)Re: drought
Date: 2007-04-02 03:57 am (UTC)“I think luxury is not related to materiality, it’s just some incredible situations. And as architects, you have to produce incredible situations.”
I very much like Vassal's notion of luxury as described here: modest, serene, and incorporating the natural.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-02 09:32 am (UTC)Isn't this simply the business model of free-to-air radio and TV, which has been around for many, many decades? Rather than creating a new business model, it seems to me a lot of media corporations, desperate to work out how they can "monetise" their content, have fallen back on an old model. And it's questionable how successful they're being with it. I know someone who works high up in The Guardian, and she tells me that despite the fact that the Guardian website is one of the most visited news resources on the Internet, it actually loses money. And that the industry is starting to have second thoughts about whether the "attention economy" model will really work on the Internet. I suspect we're living in something of a golden age vis-à-vis the Internet, and that in a decade's time we'll find sites like The Guardian's are no longer "free-to_air".