Some of my favorite quotes (appropriately?) pulled from Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence” from Harper’s:

Heidegger believed that art had the great potential to reveal the”thingness” of objects when damn near everything presents itself as familiar-it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange.

Jefferson’s vision has not fared well, has in fact been steadily eroded by those who view the culture as a market in which everything of value should be owned by someone or other.

For a car or a handbag, once stolen, no longer is available to its owner, while the appropriation of an article of “intellectual property” leaves the original untouched.

This is the reason why even a really beautiful, ingenious, powerful ad (of which there are a lot) can never be any kind of real art: an ad has no status as gift; i.e., it’s never really for the person it’s directed at.That a language is a commons doesn’t mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole.

(I think the above is a wonderful analogy, and maybe hints toward a difficulty in this article that I have’t  come to any conclusions about: language is an effortless construction on the part of its owners/users, whereas art/creative endeavors mentioned take labor and, also, have a limited origination [the author or authors].)

We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good.

If we devalue and obscure the gift-economy function of our art practices, we turn our works into nothing more than advertisements for themselves.

On Garnett and  Meiselas “On the Rights of the Molotov Man” also from Harper’s:

I have to comment first on how impressed I was with the  narrative structure of this article: that it was coauthored by the two artists involved, and that it hinges on the reveal of the striking photograph of the man whose image is in question. This structure visually represents the shared nature of the image (perhaps all images?).

The whole article brought to mind an another examination of iconicized images I read last year sometime, a letter from the person whose image was memed into forevertude as Scumbag Steve to another person of the same fate, Annoying Facebook Girl. I don’t mean to trivialize the Molotov Man by equating him with either of these characters; obviously Meisela’s original photograph was meant to serve as an homage to the historical context of Pablo Arauz, yet…I think she sort of undoes her own argument when she makes it clear that she didn’t originally know Arauz’s identity either. Meaning, in her photograph he was more like a variable (woah, too much programming on the mind?) assigned to “Sandanista Revolutionary.” So, big deal, now he’s been generalized even more to “Man throwing a Molotov Cocktail.” Basically, it comes down to this: a sign is not its referent. Which is why it can be re-appropriated.

Maybe my favorite reading of the week was the Drew Christie Op Ed from the NYT, mostly because while I agree everything that both of the speakers are spitting out at each other, I appreciate the ominous tone of the (not?)chaotic quotation battle at the end, which to me points to an issue of remix culture: that the sources drawn from must be varied (which is to say, we can’t all make art by quoting the same wikipedia article) and unexpected, and that drawing too much from the same canon (like 90′s movie rehashes) isn’t really an interesting form of re-appropriation. Also, I really liked the animation itself.

Annnnnd my least loved reading from this week, the Kirby Ferguson TED talk. Now, most likely this is because this is because of my recent somewhat unexplainable aversion to the TED talk format (blehhhhhh!) but also, I just feel like this was… nothing new. Is that ironic, or what? I mean, I think that maybe what this talk missed, and maybe what an inherent problem in thinking of everything as a remix is: it’s obvious. At least to this generation. So, instead, I think focussing on the converse side of that is a much more important territory to explore: if everything is a remix, why do some ideas seem to be visionary? By no means do I believe in some kind of holy personal genius: I am by all means a proponent of the idea that any creation simply builds off of prior external influences, but simplifying it is…oversimplifying it. Meaning, Kirby Ferguson is just rehashing ideas I’ve heard like umpteen million times. Now, obviously I’m not saying that means he should be suppressed from saying what he wants to say by a broken system of copyright laws, but it sure doesn’t make for a compelling lecture, either. To return to the very first quotation of this blog, it’s about “making the familiar strange.”