NYC Junta

Some good links to check out before Wednesday night:

CaptainCrawl is THE music blog index, type in an artist name and check out what comes up, you should be able to find links to blogs with full albums to download.

Radiobutt was the best music blog around, dude put up all the newest indie albums, had a really good site. It was hit hard by the music industry cops, relaunched and then mysteriously went down again. If you click on the link for it you’ll can read the guy’s farewell, he doesn’t say anything about the industry, but I’d bet the constant threat of legal action finally put him off. This interview between radiobutt and captaincrawl is essential reading for Wednesday night, CC says so many things that mirror what I think.  radiobuttmusic-vs-captaincrawl

I also wanted to link to Patch, which is one of our people’s current gig, a local community news sources that I think is an example of one of the ways people are trying to make a buck off news in a creative way these days.

(From Rindy):

For ideas about the future of journalism, it’s worth reading some of the work of NYU media critic Jay Rosen. He writes often about the ills of the national press today, who believe in what he calls “the Church of the Savvy“:

To the savvy, the center is a holy place: political grace resides there. The profane is the ideological extremes. The adults converse in the pragmatic middle ground where insiders cut their deals. On the wings are the playgrounds for children.  But to argue directly for these propositions is out of the question: political reporters don’t conduct arguments, they tell us what’s happening!  Instead an argument is made by positioning the players a certain way while reporting the news and doing “analysis.”

Another lament of his is He Said, She Said Journalism, in which “balance” is created by reporting what both sides say about a dispute (there are always two sides, never three or four) without bothering to fact check the obvious clashes of truth in the arguments. It’s practices like this that have readers seeking out new outlets for journalism. Where the news has traditionally given us the View From Nowhere (the myth of objectivity), we’re more interested now in reading honest analysis from writers who are upfront about their own opinions and who document their work thoroughly for others to follow.

For a great example, read what Mac McClelland has been reporting on the oil spill, and the heinous way in which BP has been treating journalists.

Friday’s Junta on contemporary art was one of the best yet and a lot of fun for everyone involved. We had a lot of good feedback: thanks to everyone for coming out.

JohnJ started us off with a quick overview of artistic movements in the last 140 years, with an emphasis toward trying to explain how we got to the present moment, not just in terms of movements and periods, but in terms of the modern way art works: galleries, openings, agents, etc. It wasn’t always this way, but there is a pattern. Certain “tastemakers” – those with money or influence – determine what is relevant and what gets promoted, and these people are not all artists. They are curators and patrons and customers, from Lorenzo d’Medici to modern hedge fund collectors.

But that is the “art world,” separate from art itself, where an artist must make a living using his work – and often himself – as a commodity. When did art become a path to celebrity? Some argued that it was with Picasso and other painters around the turn of the 20th century – essentially that celebrity came with the rise of the mass media. But wasn’t Shakespeare’s name known throughout England in his day? Well, yes, but he had a technological boost as well; he wrote in the wake of the invention of the printing press.

There were some interesting sidenotes about writing, with the question being raised whether it should be included in a discussion about “art.” Of course! said I, and some others, although a painter disagreed and it was painting that dominated the conversation. What about poetry, does anyone still write it? Yes, said a poet who was with us, and brought up Mary Oliver, who is indeed prolific, but who is also part of an earlier generation (b. 1935). I pointed out that Twain grew massively wealthy and famous by his writing (although he died a pauper), and until recently it was still possible to become a celebrity by writing (although if it’s fame you’re after, you’d better stick with crime or romance novels and skip the poetry.)

Damien Hirst is “the first billionaire artist.” Which is absurd on its face, but it brings up good questions about authenticity. If Hirst puts a shark in a glass case full of formaldehyde, what makes it different from you or I doing the same? DC wanted to know why a urinal, when placed behind a “velvet rope” by DuChamp, suddenly became art. The question becomes one of context: the place where one views the art, the background of the artist and how much of it is written next to the piece, and of course the title of the piece can change interpretations easily. DuChamp called the urinal Fountain.

DuChamp said that anyone could be an artist; that anything could be art. This was the precursor to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame, and today it is really happening. Art is life, art is expression, art is commodity. The thing and the representation of the thing now overlap so heavily as to be nearly the same thing. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy DeBord wrote “All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.” That was 37 years before Facebook. Today it presents a paradox: if everything is art, then nothing is art. So how do we know what’s good or bad?

We have to learn for ourselves what feels authentic and original. And those tastemakers are important. They perform a real function, by paying constant close attention. They watch the ticker of the art world go by, and from the great flow deduce the zeitgeist. Only over time do patterns emerge. But like Jeff*, a painter in attendance, said, “You come to New York as a young person painting still-lifes, with a traditional background, and you see what’s happening here, and you stop doing that, because what you’re doing could have been done 300 years ago.” When John Cage wrote “4:33″ it was revolutionary. But writing a silent song today is not relevant, because it’s not moving the needle.

Towards the end, we spoke of art which lives but is not commoditized – the work of the undiscovered or unappreciated. Henry Darger lived alone in a small apartment, having little social interaction, yet was busy producing lengthy novels and paintings. Van Gogh was never famous in his lifetime and died penniless. And for some, dressing up like superman is a path for “fame and fortune.”

Like JohnJ said, “We could talk about this all night, and no one is going to leave here saying, ‘Yes, we’ve got it figured out now.’” With that in mind, I’ll end here and say thanks again to everyone who came out. It was a great night. Look for the next Junta to gather near the end of May…

* I originally attributed this to Sam. Apologies.

As we were planning our Iran session, Jeremy and I discussed whether we would be able to find someone with direct experience of Iran – well, that is, find someone and get them to accept our invitation – given the difficulties of traveling there. Today the LA Times published a piece about the costs and benefits of reporting on Iran from inside the country. Its title sums up the analysis: “Inside view is worth risk, reporters in Iran say“. [hat tip: Cyrus Farivar]

Despite the threat of arrest, despite the government shutting down newspapers and explicitly warning the media away from certain topics, the journalists quoted (mostly anonymously) all agreed that it was still better to be there on the ground than to cover Iran from afar. Which I suppose is rather unsurprising, since if they felt differently they obviously wouldn’t be there.

Journalists have to find a balance between doing their jobs – which requires that they independently investigate the government’s claims – and preserving the access they must have to do their jobs. Even in our own country, where no journalist would ever be imprisoned for a story, think of the run-up to the Iraq war. Government claims which were being easily debunked by independent journalists and bloggers were published uncritically and repeatedly by the Washington press corps.

Valid comparison? Discuss in the comments.

Our colleague’s piece in Harper’s concerning John Zorn elicited a reader’s letter to the editor. The reader said Cohen’s articles was “appropriately polymathic” but that his history of music was “curiously garbled.”

The full text is freely available at Harpers.org, though you need to scroll to the bottom of the page – it’s the fourth letter.

There’s a story in the NY Times today about accusations that the writer Milan Kundera collaborated with the Czechoslovak secret police in the early 50s and ousted a western intelligence agent. These accusations are oddly similar to his first novel, “The Joke” and the story is definitely worth checking out.

Living in Prague, I was always struck but how many Czechs disliked two of their most well-known countrymen, Kundera and the dissident/playwright-turned-President, Vaclav Havel. Havel was disliked because, at least in my mind, he symbolized the reality of post-communist life after the utopic dreams stirred up by the Velvet Revolution (which go back to Prague Spring in 1968). But Kundera was generally disdained by his fellow Czechs because he found success abroad and is now a French citizen. The Czechs are some of the most gloomy, brooding people around and they can hold a grudge like no other nationality. Kundera’s recent book “Ignorance” talks about the return of a Czech exile from France and the frosty reaction she receives from her friends after several decades away. These friends don’t really want to hear about her life abroad, finding her life a threat to their conception of themselves and how they have lived. I think anyone who has spent time abroad, or at least far from their home, can relate to these sentiments.

I probably wouldn’t posted just based on reading this story, but I spent last night with a friend of mine who just moved back from Prague after a dozen years there, and a friend who just moved back from Paris after seven years there. I actually talked with the post-France friend about “Ignorance” last night and recommended it to her as we talked about adjusting to life back in the US, which includes the weird experience of slowly beginning to blend into the crowd after having spending years of constantly standing out in any room just because you were foreign. Aside from the questions of identity that go into where we are from and how it defines us, the story about Kundera–and so much of his writing–have to do with reckoning with the past. There are so many parallels to that, both personal and on a larger level (national/global, related to conflicts or the recent horrors of the past).

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/18/world/europe/18kundera.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Kundera&st=cse&oref=slogin