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imomusIs it my agenda, or is it wishful thinking? As our societies move from manufacturing to information and services, we're moving from material to postmaterial values. As the internet and new folk forms make trad copyright look increasingly irrelevant, we've made the transition from a culture which was all about the ownership of physical property to a culture which is more about temporary experiences and spectacle. If property is involved, it's rented, or collectively owned, or microproperty in flow world.
At a certain point in the 90s I noticed that, whereas I'd once have wanted to buy things I saw and liked, I was content to snap digital pictures of them and put them on a website somewhere; that was just as satisfying. With this realisation comes the idea that the public and the collective, so long neglected because of a Thatcher-Reagan-style emphasis on ownership, are once more becoming important. Why own a house in the suburbs when you can rent one in a revitalized city centre full of public amenities? Why own a pool when you can visit a nice public one?
These shifts, and the ongoing transition of culture to the digital realm, have changed what I do as an artist. Once the CD -- a plastic object owned by one set of people and bought by another -- was everything. You toured to "promote" this plastic object, which means you performed approximative versions of the songs on it in front of a group of people who'd -- with any luck -- buy it, thus making the people who owned it (including yourself, a kind of minority shareholder in the process) richer. Now, CDs promote live shows, experiences. The premium -- the thing people are willing to pay money for -- has become a unique personal appearance, a collectively-shared event, something that can't be digitized and sent out over the internet. In this postmaterialist, spectacular new world, artists are freed up from the rote chore of plugging CDs by performing songs off them. The kind of appearances and spectacles they concoct can be much more various.
Is it my agenda, or is it some dates in my diary? As a result of the changes featured on my ideological agenda, my date agenda over the next few months is a hell of a lot more interesting, diverse and downright weird than it would have been a few years ago. Next month I'll be showing some visual field recordings, singing a song at the unveiling of a planned gigantic necropolis near the Bauhaus, and traveling to Prague to do a spoken word performance at a gallery hosting the whispering piece I've shown in London and New York.
In April I'll be singing improvised new lyrics to old standards from a balcony inside the MUDAM gallery in Luxembourg. The artist Candice Breitz, who's organised Call and Response, is interested in a post-property idea of art: "A central premise of this series of events," she explains, "is my belief that all creative acts are responses to other creative acts, all creative thinkers are in dialogue (consciously or otherwise) with other creative thinkers, and all works of art (subtly or otherwise) feed on and reflect existing works of art. It is therefore somewhat nonsensical to imagine that only certain artists are recyclers and samplers, as defined against those who continue to produce ‘original’ works of art."
May sees me singing songs at the 5th Poprevo Festival in Aarhus, Denmark, giving a spirit medium ghost tour of Richmond Library at an event called Libraries Aloud, and being a singing installation at the Vienna Technical University, incanting chemical formulae while vibrating tuned bowls of water (ideally played by Tomoko Sauvage, if they can afford to fly her in).
Then in June it looks like I'll do a piece at the Hide and Seek festival which turns London into Tokyo (I can't tell you how at the moment). Later in the year French and German publishers will publish my Book of Jokes, and I hope there'll be a new Momus album too. But, whereas once that piece of plastic would have been the sun around which everything else orbited, now it's a somewhat peripheral relic of a much more formatted, materialistic time, a time when everything you did was oriented to property, not experiences.
Of course, there are paradoxes galore. Central London, like central New York, has become prohibitively expensive, a playzone for the super-rich. And yet, although I can't afford to live there any more, it's become ever-cheaper to fly in for "the London experience". I don't need to own property in London or New York to enjoy them -- I just need projects to do there, games to play, experiences to share. Similarly, the reason the art world is booming is that the super-rich buy art as an investment. But at the same time, you can "consume" art as a series of experiences (biennials, for instance) without ever buying a single piece. Materialist and postmaterialist ways of seeing -- having and being -- co-exist, for the time being. We play while others work, we look at what others own. Despite different mindsets and mentalities, somehow our agendas sync up.
At a certain point in the 90s I noticed that, whereas I'd once have wanted to buy things I saw and liked, I was content to snap digital pictures of them and put them on a website somewhere; that was just as satisfying. With this realisation comes the idea that the public and the collective, so long neglected because of a Thatcher-Reagan-style emphasis on ownership, are once more becoming important. Why own a house in the suburbs when you can rent one in a revitalized city centre full of public amenities? Why own a pool when you can visit a nice public one?
These shifts, and the ongoing transition of culture to the digital realm, have changed what I do as an artist. Once the CD -- a plastic object owned by one set of people and bought by another -- was everything. You toured to "promote" this plastic object, which means you performed approximative versions of the songs on it in front of a group of people who'd -- with any luck -- buy it, thus making the people who owned it (including yourself, a kind of minority shareholder in the process) richer. Now, CDs promote live shows, experiences. The premium -- the thing people are willing to pay money for -- has become a unique personal appearance, a collectively-shared event, something that can't be digitized and sent out over the internet. In this postmaterialist, spectacular new world, artists are freed up from the rote chore of plugging CDs by performing songs off them. The kind of appearances and spectacles they concoct can be much more various.
Is it my agenda, or is it some dates in my diary? As a result of the changes featured on my ideological agenda, my date agenda over the next few months is a hell of a lot more interesting, diverse and downright weird than it would have been a few years ago. Next month I'll be showing some visual field recordings, singing a song at the unveiling of a planned gigantic necropolis near the Bauhaus, and traveling to Prague to do a spoken word performance at a gallery hosting the whispering piece I've shown in London and New York.
In April I'll be singing improvised new lyrics to old standards from a balcony inside the MUDAM gallery in Luxembourg. The artist Candice Breitz, who's organised Call and Response, is interested in a post-property idea of art: "A central premise of this series of events," she explains, "is my belief that all creative acts are responses to other creative acts, all creative thinkers are in dialogue (consciously or otherwise) with other creative thinkers, and all works of art (subtly or otherwise) feed on and reflect existing works of art. It is therefore somewhat nonsensical to imagine that only certain artists are recyclers and samplers, as defined against those who continue to produce ‘original’ works of art."
May sees me singing songs at the 5th Poprevo Festival in Aarhus, Denmark, giving a spirit medium ghost tour of Richmond Library at an event called Libraries Aloud, and being a singing installation at the Vienna Technical University, incanting chemical formulae while vibrating tuned bowls of water (ideally played by Tomoko Sauvage, if they can afford to fly her in).
Then in June it looks like I'll do a piece at the Hide and Seek festival which turns London into Tokyo (I can't tell you how at the moment). Later in the year French and German publishers will publish my Book of Jokes, and I hope there'll be a new Momus album too. But, whereas once that piece of plastic would have been the sun around which everything else orbited, now it's a somewhat peripheral relic of a much more formatted, materialistic time, a time when everything you did was oriented to property, not experiences.
Of course, there are paradoxes galore. Central London, like central New York, has become prohibitively expensive, a playzone for the super-rich. And yet, although I can't afford to live there any more, it's become ever-cheaper to fly in for "the London experience". I don't need to own property in London or New York to enjoy them -- I just need projects to do there, games to play, experiences to share. Similarly, the reason the art world is booming is that the super-rich buy art as an investment. But at the same time, you can "consume" art as a series of experiences (biennials, for instance) without ever buying a single piece. Materialist and postmaterialist ways of seeing -- having and being -- co-exist, for the time being. We play while others work, we look at what others own. Despite different mindsets and mentalities, somehow our agendas sync up.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 01:48 pm (UTC)Besides! CDs cost too much. I was being held hostage. It was a fucking plastic disc, with digital data on it.
You know how much it costs to hire just four string players for 4 hours? About $1,000. Imagine what a full orchestra would cost. But now that nobody is making money off CDs, we won't have to hear that kind of thing anymore. That kind of sound had run its course, anyway. Besides, for the past couple years I've only really listened to trickling water and insect noises.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 07:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 07:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 01:50 pm (UTC)You're probably aware of the fact Yaohan Plaza is due to be demolished (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6158376.stm) and replaced with a new complex with a school and apartments. The businesses are all guaranteed a place in this complex once it's built but they're all worried they won't last the 2 or 3 years it will take.
These are the new apartments that have been built behind Yaohan Plaza in NW London. I'm not sure if theyre part of the redevelopment or part of a separate build but you'll notice they're not your usual London apartments -- the architects have obviously gone out of their way to orientalize this structure. There are wooden slatted screens everywhere on this building, and a lot of the doors are solid, untreated wood. I really hope this is the general theme of the redevelopment, and that they intend to orientalize the entire complex to reflect the ethnic community here.
I asked the owner of うつわの館 what she and her staff were going to do during the redevelopment. She said she was leaving the area in may 2008 but planned to come back once the place was rebuilt.
Yaohan Plaza isnt what it used to be in the early days under the Japanese management. It's slowly fallen into neglect, and I hope the redevelopment changes this. My only hope is they don't wipe this place clean of its character.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:20 pm (UTC)ps: i like your tableware.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:52 pm (UTC)Yaohan is now full of over-priced tat from Hong Kong... if those shops die off I won't be too bothered, as long as the supermarket, utsuwa no yakata and the food court are still there.
ps. you should try to pay Utsuwa No Yukata a visit before May, theyre having a massive clearence sale.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 03:35 pm (UTC)I don't know how long it's been since you went there but they've expanded the Japanese food section, it even has its own attendant.
I saw something in utsuwa no yakata that reminded me of you (for some odd reason):
They had these cute terra cotta clay cups in the haniwa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haniwa) style, with haniwa style faces and limbs on them.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:03 pm (UTC)what?
Date: 2008-02-26 02:15 pm (UTC)sounds like you were forced to have off spring though
Re: what?
Date: 2008-02-26 02:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 04:36 pm (UTC)By replying (to something he didn't say) with what people you know do just underlines what he did imply, namely that you only know people who are like you. (Except of course that probably most of the people you were referring to with "just about everyone I know" are 20 yrs younger than you.)
der.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 05:18 pm (UTC)Absolutely not the case. The people I mentioned are all in their 40s except Eric, who's late 30s. They live in inner cities very happily, with children. Amazingly enough, children use public facilities -- schools, libraries, swimming pools, parks -- which are much more abundant in such places than out in the sticks. There's no rule saying that when you reproduce you suddenly have to switch to a suburban, private property-oriented lifestyle.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 05:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-27 04:29 pm (UTC)Anyway, "city centers" come in all sizes. I think that the Paris/New York/London model probably is a little too dense for most family living. And the Western US-style "cities" like Los Angeles and Phoenix are barely urban in character.
A good balance is a city like Washington, DC, which is dense enough to support a metro system, but has a mix of neighborhoods and where it is possible to find a place with a yard within metro distance that's affordable.
For that matter, you can in NY, too, if you are willing to live in Staten Island, north Jersey, or Queens.
Niche creating and Momus' many pies.
Date: 2008-02-26 02:09 pm (UTC)The idea for example of starting a business in order to work less may seem an oxymoron but that's what I chose to do seven years ago.
Similarly I bought a small house in the country - the payments on which are half that of Dublin rents.
I thus have more time to live and the money saved allows me to visit (more interesting) other cities rather than making a buck for the rapacious serial property investors whose greed has pushed rents here into the stratosphere.
At a juncture in which the music media seem to believe pop is dead and buried (this month Observer Music Monthly with it's balance sheets and stock retro being example), it is inspiring to read an article by a pop musician indicating how there are other means of being and doing.
Re: Niche creating and Momus' many pies.
Date: 2008-02-26 07:31 pm (UTC)Re: Niche creating and Momus' many pies.
Date: 2008-02-27 04:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:16 pm (UTC)Similarly with the art world. Yes, there are biennales and other means of experiencing art without buying it (there always was; it's nothing new). But that doesn't mean that what's really fuelling the art world is the enormous sums being thrown at it by a new class of super-rich who really do want to "own" art, for whom the owning is in fact the experience.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 02:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 03:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 03:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 06:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 08:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 09:51 pm (UTC)yeah, along with huge lines of people queueing up for their government rations of pomegranate juice and organic asparagus.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 10:25 pm (UTC)(http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/62-knowing-whats-best-for-poor-people/)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 03:57 pm (UTC)Or, perhaps, "we can play, because others work"? Looks to me like an awful lot of what you enjoy, especially in Berlin, and what allows you to have your lifestyle, is funded by taxation of other peoples' income.
der.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 03:58 pm (UTC)It's wishful thinking. Here in Angloland, we're more obsessed with the ownership of physical property than ever. Maybe 'property v spectacle' is a false opposition - for every TV channel pumping out hours of pointless spectacle and pretend experiences, there's one showing non-stop marathons of "buy to let in Slovenia" programmes.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 04:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 04:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 10:43 pm (UTC)...Hmmm, we need a bit more in depth study of this. I don't yet see the rich slowing down in their consumption of property, of luxury goods, etc. In fact, the banks here made record profits last year. They still own most of the country, directly or indirectly, as in most capitalist societies!
As long as we live in a society where class identity depends on one using consumer goods to project an image of oneself, (from the latest gadgets like phones, cameras, personal stereo players etc. through to those awful yuppie-mobile 4x4s), I think there's still a bit to go before post- materialism sets in on any kind of scale. Add to that the fact that world industrial society still depends on the production of surplus of goods....
It's even possible that in the current scenario, abandoning property ownwership actually might be dangerous. You get many people renting property, but then who rushes in and buys up the properties? You may have a few savvy corporation who are accumulating capital (and hence power!) by renting out flats and at the same time paying their mortgages or even living off the profits....then again abandoning ownership means fewer mortgages and less income for the banks, so its a complicated situation. still, bring on that revolution, I say!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 10:44 pm (UTC)In the music world surely people still want to possess the songs they previously bought on CD. Just because they can now, largely illegally, download MP3s, I don't see why you would conclude that interest in ownership has declined.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-26 11:49 pm (UTC)But in fact, decommodification is going on all the time. Things we expected to pay for are becoming free. Music in its physical form has been decommodified, and it's just the beginning; all intellectual property which can be uploaded to the net may soon follow suit. Decommodification is the beginning of a society where attention is more important than money, so you make as much as possible free to gain mindshare. Sound familiar?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-27 03:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-27 03:57 am (UTC)as an aside, can't somebody make an annual, or a triennial? why always the bienniale? or are they actually holding bienniales 3 times a year and hoping that artists really don't know what month/day/year it is?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-27 05:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-27 10:19 am (UTC)