Remix the remix of the remix of the remix

Right now I'm working on a remix for Remixin.com. It is an iterative remix project with three original 'parents' and three corresponding 'remix trees.' Now we're in the middle of Round 4. The original three works [including two of John Arroyo's tracks and Charles Dodge's "Canons for Larry (123)"] have generated 36 remixes so far, and the current round will presumably create an even larger number of new tracks than the previous ones. The rounds' numbers of remixes are as follows:

(Originals: 3)
Round 1: 7
Round 2: 12
Round 3: 17

In an interview with Dartmouth's paper, the project's creator, Arroyo, cites a kind of musical Darwinism, in which unpopular remixes will get left in the dust while the better ones will continue to birth new mixes. So far, every track has yielded at least one remix, but with the 17 mixes from Round 3, the current round may begin to reveal the beginnings of musical selection. Some remixers may hear a track they don't like and in fact remix it because they could make it better; in this case, the Darwinism theory doesn't hold up. For now, we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Borrowing/stealing/quoting/reorchestrating/sampling/remixing/etc. are all nothing new in music. Unfortunately, laws that restrict this type of thing have become stricter and stricter in recent years. In remixin's case, we can enjoy the liberties of Creative Commons' NonCommercial Sampling Plus 1.o license, but when it comes time to release an album, things could get tricky.

Taste and Post-Genre

Many folks are talking about the most unwanted song: the 25-minute, schizophrenic work that only about 200 people on Earth are supposed to enjoy. I thought it was pretty cool and cackled to myself quite a bit. But the Zogby Music and Politics Poll (which I found via Avant Music News) on conservative, moderate, and liberal taste in entertainment was a lot more interesting to me. Apparently, conservatives, who favor action films, Fox News, and football video games, hate world music (under 5% would enjoy it), and like, more than any other musical genre, classical music (60% said it was their favorite). While polls are inherently reductionist, we still take them seriously, and the media wouldn't survive without them.

Stats like these make me appreciate even more somebody like Swedish multimedia artist Eric Bünger. In 2002, he put together a fascinating piece called variations on a theme by casey & finch, which I discovered while checking out Icebreaker's myspace page. In this piece for nonet, he emulates a CD skipping on the chorus to KC and the Sunshine Band's "That's the Way I Like It." In picking a disco tune and using a techonological impetus, he's turned on the 'art music' world; to me the piece seems to throw away genre completely, and simply present something that's, well, really cool. Plenty of composers use technology to determine elements of their acoustic music, but I think this fairly simple, direct example is one of the best. Bünger makes all kinds of art, including this neat internet project Let them sing it for you. Here he is (on bass) with his band in action:

Neo-Dada at its best

Disclaimer: I don't support public pie-throwing. But I do support passionate, educated reactions to important issues, especially by 18-22-year-olds. If you want to know why, read the discussion in comments, below.

I was energized today to read that Brown University students launched two green, Cool Whip-topped pies at New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who had just begun an Earth Day speech in one of Brown's largest halls last night. The first pie was right on target, while the second was just shy of its mark. Friedman's talk (called "Hot, Flat and Crowded," after his recent book, The World is Flat) dealt with green technology's economic and foreign policy implications, part of the spring speaker series entitled, “Going Green, Globally: Scientific, Economic and Political Perspectives," sponsored by the school's Environmental Change Initiative. Friedman didn't let the colored whipped cream deter him; after cleaning himself off, he did give the speech. The man isn't too popular with a large contingent at Brown, probably because of his advocacy for questionable petrol alternatives like E85 and his support of the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Believe it or not, YES: there is a video.



The two culprits, calling themselves "Greenwash Guerrillas" (those who oppose greenwashing through action) threw pamphlets at audience members before their attempted escape. The pamphlets read:

Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face…

* because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet

* for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.

* for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged

* for his pure arrogance.

* as the only way to compensate for the ridiculousness of having this fool speak on Earth Day.

On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists — we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman’s “Green” as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face.

The pamphlet also contained an excerpt from Raymond Lotta's critical review of Friedman's book.

Mozart's prophecy

While feeding my sci-fi addiction, I came across this internal monologue in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

...he wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time...This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name "Mozart" will vanish, the dust will have won.

Dick (1968), through bounty hunter Rick Deckard (2021), may underestimate recording technology's productivity, and surely the internet's storage potential (though I'm sure he predicted the internet); still, one has to agree with the prophecy in the end. I wonder when it will prove true, and if the process of destruction has already begun.

Politicians' Open Mic!

I posted not too long ago on John Ashcroft's beautiful patriotic crooning, so I decided to put together a U.S. politicians' virtual concert and review! Recently, the conservatives seem to have the edge on the music scene, though my knowledge of performing politicians is about as extensive as my knowledge of molecular biology. Perhaps this is a decent metaphor, though, because right-wingers tend to have more cash, as do the most visible musicians.

Up first is Governor Mike Huckabee. While campaigning over the past year, he's played with lots of rock and blues bands, and a surprising number of high school bands. I only wish he's had his now best bud Chuck Norris choreograph some of his stage acts. He's got a taste for the classic rock hits and the down home blues. In this clip, he exposes his chops by playing some blues basslines in one of those many stores that line the walls and floors with electric guitars and amps, and nothing else. His rhythm's a little vague at times, and his fingering's a little sloppy, but he's not bad on the whole.



Unfortunately, I can't find much footage of Condaleezza Rice playing piano. Apparently, she's kind of a bad ass. She played a Mozart piano concerto with the Denver Symphony when she was 15. (She graduated from college at age 19 Phi Beta Kappa - some people just get shit done early, I guess.) Now she plays with a chamber group in D.C. It's probably easy to guess she's more partial to Schubert and Brahms than Sciarrino or Rakowski. In fact, here are her picks for the "Ten Best Musical Works" of all time. If you're patient enough, you can watch/hear her rehearse with her quintet in the middle of this video, below.



Everybody's heard of Bill Clinton's sax chops. Let's see him in action.



He's pretty rusty, with a pretty loose embouchure and an old school style, but you can tell that if he wasn't running the country, he might have been pretty decent.
Now, check out this version. He seems to span two totally different styles in almost identical settings!



We can thank Zamzar Bob for this wonderful overdub; perhaps he's a Santeri Ojala fan? The Clapton video on that panopticist post is hilarious. This one, also from Zamzar, is too great not to post. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony:



Check out this Jimmy Kimmell show, in which the Finnish prankster Ojala interviews and then plays live over a Slash video. (Alternatively, see Slash's 1993 fan site. I think that was the year I first went online, where I used Altavista and Webcrawler.) The real live Slash then joins him on stage.



With Obama's margin against McCain slimming down to 0.2% in the last couple weeks, he should probably start thinking about pulling out a middle school band instrument or something. "B-Rock" has some good stuff to say about current hip hop (below). Despite his criticism of much of hip hop's content, he's definitely well-liked among major hip hop artists. Hilary Clinton also scored some support from Timbaland last year, when the star hosted a controversial fundraiser at his Miami home, netting 800 grand for the candidate.

Performance and the Alphabet of the Brain

I recently posted on newmusicbox on music's slow, idealogical shift away from virtuosic performance. I believe we're in the middle of a long transition away from affirmed virtuosity; part of this shift is caused by a parallel shift in compositional ideals: the 'layman-as-artist,' repetition, computer software, etc. Another angle from which to examine future virtuosity is that of human-machine interaction. Perhaps this interaction will result in 'the return of the virtuosic.'

Duke University professor Miguel Nicolelis placed electrodes in a monkey's brain and represented the electric currents produced from its thoughts in computer code - the 'alphabet of the brain.' He later programmed a computer to use this code to control a robotic arm that moved just like the monkey's real arm. Then, he mapped the monkey's real-time thoughts onto the robotic arm's motion, so a live organism was controlling a machine.

Now here's the craziest part: the monkey realized that it didn't have to move its own arm in order to move the robotic arm. It continued to move the mechanical arm with its brain while keeping its own arm stationary. The monkey had essentially become a computer, motionlessly controlling a machine's movements by means of self-produced code. [The monkey had actually been trained to use a joystick to play a video game, so at this stage, the monkey was playing a video game with its mind only.]



Scientists have also approached the organism-machine connection the other way around. One example is the 'roborat,' a rat similarly wired but controlled remotely by a scientist.



What would improved human-machine interfacing mean for music? It would certainly cause a reevaluation of virtuosity. If we could power machines to play instruments with our brains in ways our physical bodies couldn't, why not? If machines could power our bodies to play what our own minds could not initiate, why not? Ensemble Robot at MIT has been programming robots to play acoustic instruments for a few years now, which is really cool, but as far as I know, they haven't done anything with human brain impulses. Of course acoustic music produced by machines goes back to player pianos/pianolas, maybe even further. But maybe future advancements in electro-brain technology will start a trend back to the virtuosic ideal.

Check out this article on how a brain in a petri dish controlled a flight simulator.

NonPop with Scott Unrein

What does nonpop mean? Is it some kind of value judgment, like the term 'high art'? Wikipedia's tiny entry calls it a meta-genre, whose classification originated in 2001.

Its originators, Dennis Bathory-Kitsz and David Gunn, likened the term to the fiction/nonfiction duality. In doing so, they're calling nonpop everything that is not pop, in the same way that nonfiction is everything that is not fiction. In thinking about it, it seems to make sense to classify text the other way around, giving 'the real' one term, and the fictitious its negative. Regardless of which way you frame it, this brings up all kinds of questions as to what is real, to which Baudrillard, Hal Foster, and many others would have compelling theories. Most grade school English classes don't get too deep into these types of questions, when they probably should. The nonpop term is problematic because of its enforced binary between pop and everything else; in affirming this duality, it undermines its original intent to describe a meta-genre that may or may not find influence in popular music. In the end, I don't think nonpop constitutes a value judgment but is a transitional term meant to describe the utter genre synthesis happening today. Perhaps in the future a better term will come about, an earlier term will be reawakened (fusion), or (in the best case, I think) the need for such a term will dissolve.

Scott Unrein hosts a great podcast/blog called NonPop. Its name is thought provoking, as is its music, and is thus appropriate.

50 Cent and the National Symphony

Apparently, this brilliant Vitamin Water commercial aired last year, but I saw it for the first time tonight while watching UNC's painfull loss in the semifinals of the NCAA basketball tourney. I don't watch too much TV outside of March Madness. 50 Cent 'conducts' the 'National Symphony' in a mashup of Beethoven's 9th and his 'In Da Club.' A great way to impose their useless product on the young scene also proved a great way to comment on the esoteric, aged, and anachronistic orchestral tradition. It's pretty awesome. Rappers like 50 Cent are today's Beethovens, because performance/spectacle/bling took over compositional prowess long ago. This commercial hit the blogs a while back, so there are posts like this one, from an offended classical devotee. While seeming to favor the preservation of the orchestra as it stands today, which I am opposed to, he makes great points about the numerous racial stereotypes within the ad, and about 50's image. In particular: "...50 Cent, in the commercial, is only understood, only becomes truly himself, when he upends the great symphonic tradition, and inserts his voice." Much like graffiti, which is often associated with hip hop, it's an abrasive interruption, or superimposition, of one voice on top of another. I think part of the commercial's success is showing this process - how current pop music is entirely more powerful than even one of the most lauded classical composers in history. But at the same time, even these god-like pop figures are subject to major stereotypes and racism.

I love it when they show DJ Whoo Kid make the first viola take a hike. Whoo is the self-proclaimed 'Mixtape King', DJ of the group G-Unit (myspace), and host of his own radio show at Hot 97 in New York City. Whoo's myspace page features songs such as "Fucked Your Girl."



Check out some great outtakes:









Also in the world of hip hop media, watch this alternate take of Kanye West's new single, "Can't Tell Me Nothin," featuring bearded comedian Zach Galifianakis on lipsinc and Will Oldham on, well, being bald and in the background. Galilfianakis is from Wilkesboro, NC, and one of his two homes sits on the 60-acre farm where they filmed this video. The song is about money and motherfuckers and stuff like that. I'm not even gonna start analyzing this one right now. You can watch the original 'Can't Tell Me Nothin' video here.

Let the Mighty Eagle Soar...from rocky coast to golden shore.

I had to bring it back. It's just too good. It seemed an appropriate contrast to the current plummet of America's coveted eagle. I think I'm going to apply for a Javits grant to study composition with Mr. John Ashcroft.

"Let the mighty eagle soar, soar with healing in her wings, as the land beneath her sings. Only god, no other kings. Let the mighty eagle soar."



And a wonderful 'fast' rendition:



Oh, and why not backwards?

Exploitation or Empowerment?

In my former home of Providence, RI, this recent ad for restaurant Chinese Laundry appeared in the Providence Monthly magazine. One of my first thoughts was why would a Chinese restaurant, presumably staffed and managed by Chinese people, use Western, patriarchal hyper-sexualization of East Asian women to bring in business? Then I looked up its owners, who form the Chow Fun Food Group. They own five restaurants in the city. My presumption of ownership was wrong: Chow Fun's three owners are John Elkhay, Teddy Newcomer, and Nicholas Raber. These names don't sound Asian American, and they're not. Mr. Elkhay claims this ad, like the numerous scandalous photos on the restaurant's walls, is a celebration of the female figure. More like exploitation.

A nude, headless representation of an East Asian woman is quite appropriate in terms of the Chinese Laundry restaurant - it sits on the site of an actual, long-time laundry business owned by Chinese Americans and forced out about six years ago because of urban gentrification and the resulting rent increases. Much like the powerful, white businesses that smothered the laundry, this powerful, white, objectifying and fetishistic image of an Asian woman covers up any remnant of her own voice.

Click here to sign the petition against these racists!

Elkhay has recently proceeded to release a new version of the original add. He obviously just doesn't get it, or is happy with his racist/male chauvinist public image.


But let's get back to my initial thought, that an Asian American was using the mute, sexualized stereotype to promote his/her business. In classical music, perhaps something along these lines is happening. As a white male myself, I can't begin to analyze things with any kind of accuracy; I can only present possibilities. But our visual culture has always congratulated those who embody the day's constructed qualities of physical beauty. Let's take a look at Tina Guo, a 22-year-old cellist who performs Romantic-era concertos and in a metal band.


Is she succumbing to the Western white male fetishization of East Asian women in order to gain acclaim? Is she recasting this fetish and using it as a kind of reverse-exploitation? Is she just free with her body? Or are her band mates exploiting her? They are, like the Chow Fun Food Group, three men. Different waves of feminist theory would have different interpretations; some would accept her empowerment, and others would negate this empowerment because it only functions within the patriarchal discourse from which it originated. Some are advocates of the cyborg as the empowered woman (Donna Harroway), and others support androgyny as the prime method to subvert the socially constructed gender binaries. Here are Guo's words:

"When I play my cello, I am completely pure, naked, and open. I long for the moments when my outer shell no longer matters. I hunger for every genuine tear of sorrow, joy, or understanding shared. When you can hear me for who I am, and see me in a way that doesn't involve looking at me, but rather looking through me, only then can I be satisfied."

It's touching, but hmm...it might be a bit easier to look through her, as opposed to at her, if she tried to look just a little less sexy, and less naked. Her photo on the first page of her site kinda reminds me of Christina Aguilera's 2002 Rolling Stone cover:

NECKFACE BEGINS!

Many artists impose on themselves a moral system. Banksy only mounts shows in "warehouses, war zones, or places full of live animals" - a gallant policy which I respect. Neckface, my second favorite graffitist, regards his art with an almost opposite mentality, a mentality I respect equally; he tags billboards, puts on shows in numerous galleries, and designs T-shirts and shoe lines. Neckface seems to transcend a self-fragmentation that often occurs when artists engage in different mediums - take Johnny Greenwood, for example, whose Radiohead songs are nothing like his film score to There Will Be Blood - everything blends together in one continuous mode of expression. One could easily critique the graffitist for an old-fashioned organicism, but I wouldn't go so far. I think he just figured out a provocative, transmutable style - that of a 'very naughty boy' - and stuck with it. He can operate on a very small scale (this is the coolest shoe I've ever seen):

And a very large one:


The basic hypocrisy of a graffiti artist's work appearing galleries is the negation of graffiti's power: to evade the canonizing, self-affirming museum culture. At the same time, if someone can do both quite well, I say what the hell. Interesting tidbit: it's rumored that Neckface's cousin is serial killer Richard Ramirez - perhaps why his imagery is pretty morbid. A few more great tags:



Delta (Boris Tellegen) is another fantastic graffitist/gallery artist. Based in the Netherlands, he combines an industrial design background with a polished aesthetic. Two of his outdoor examples:

Classical Music Spring Fashion Show - Part 2 (BIG Hair)

In Part 1 of this potentially never-ending 'classical music fashion' exposé, I referenced Herbert von Karajan's white, shiny beacon of hair, and Evgeny Kissin's embarrassing disco 'fro. Apparently, Karajan had an assistant hold a brush offstage at every concert so he could tend to his prized sculpture between pieces. Let us continue to admire the revolting 'dos within classical music, this time exclusively conductors.


Perhaps conductors today are inspired by one of the first great baton-wielders caught on film, Arthur Nikisch. He had a cute part and dashing mustache, to be sure. While contemporary conductors can't match Nikisch's facial hair, they certainly outdo him. (I'll go with that pun, though originally unintended.) Let's take a look at just a few examples, spanning the continents:

Japanese Seiji Ozawa (Wow.)


American James Levine (I think Kissin's got him, but just barely)


Italian Riccardo Muti (with bangs that rival Nikisch's)


27-year-old Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel: the younger generation carries the torch. See the link for a gushing NYT article.


Pop parallel: Kenny G?




And how about jazz icon Pat Metheny (seen in a common, intimate moment with his guitar)? Though obviously approving of his hair, Metheny purportedly spoke out against G for his version of "What a Wonderful World" in which he superimposes his own sounds over Louis Armstrong recordings (see/hear video above).

Classical Music Spring Fashion Show - Part 1 (all black)

What is it with all black? Really. I thought contemporary classical music was all about being progressive. I thought new music meant something new, not more of the same. New music group counter)induction appears above. Let's see a few more:



Get the point?
















Granted, few go to new music concerts to see a preview of next year's fashion trends. Black clothing can guide listeners away from the surface and towards the sound, away from the ostentatious hair phenomenon - from Karajan (above left) to Kissen (above right) - or the soloist in the bright dress (Anne-Sophie Mutter, below). But whenever I think about donning black pants, black shirt, black socks, black shoes...I just can't do it. Everybody does it. And like it or not, we live in a visual culture. All black sticks out just as much as a yellow dress. It's the idea of newness, which I hope the music I write and perform embodies, that makes me turn away from the widespread normalcy of playing in black.


So, who do all these uber-hip performers want to look like? Trinity, Morpheus, or Neo from The Matrix? I can understand that. I do, too.

But maybe they just wish they were in a Metal band (see photo of Kamelot, top). I do as well. Real bad. But I play the clarinet.
Perhaps they're all closet bikers. I guess I could get into that, too.


The monk thing, though, I don't know if I'm into. But they go well with this blog's black background.

The Adès Craze

Almost on cue, when I tell other composers I'm into fusing classical with techno, they respond: "Oh, have you heard Adès' Asyla??"

Adès is a talented composer. Many Brits have latched on to him because he's good, and probably also because they want another Elgar or Britten. Regardless, his attempt to incorporate techno pulse into Asyla's second movement is not so good. I admit, it's pretty funny watching grey-haired string players or contrabass clarinetists jerking their bodies to the beat. But his use of a giant concert bass drum, played with the regular soft mallet, just doesn't work. In the youtube video below, you can see the percussionist trying to muffle the sound's decay with his left hand, but without much success. A couple improvements could be:

a) amplifying a kick bass drum; or...(gasp!)
b) using electronic percussion

The off-beat cymbal sounds are also lame, for lack of a better adjective. I like Thomas Adès' music more or less. Just not his technoclassica.

So why doesn't he try out an electronic beat? Will he? No way. Here's his answer: "I love the idea of computer music...I’m saying that with a half-raised eyebrow. It makes me think of cute sounds, such as when you turn on your computer, there is an F major chord. Those things are very charming in a way, but I can’t imagine being that interested in sitting and having someone press ‘play.’" Adès also writes everything out by hand, without computer software - a man of the old school. Vivien Schweitzer stretches a bit far in her NYT article from today, describing conductor Simon Rattle as "a shaggy-haired D.J., exhorting his tuxedo-clad clubbers to frenzied heights of illicit exuberance." He looks like a typical conductor to me: old, melodramatic, and in desparate need of a haircut. I think we've gotta look to a younger generation for genuine hipness.

Dear Thomas, I'm so glad that my pieces which incorporate computer sounds will always be cute!!



About a year and a half ago, while perusing the internet, I came across Mason Bates. Finding him was bittersweet; I was thrilled that someone was doing what I wanted to do - combine classical chops and electronica - and people were digging it. But he got there first. I think our tastes in electronica are pretty different, though, and maybe his breakthroughs will allow composers like me, with a little luck, to find acclaim as well. On February 1, The San Francisco Symphony, with money from the Craig Capital Foundation, put on a cool show they called Mercury Soul with Bates at club Mezzanine, which featured works by composers such as Webern and Ligeti, DJ sets by Bates (aka DJ Masonic), and the premier of Bates' Seismology (see the program here, and a preview article).

They tried pretty hard (see this promo photo, in which the tuxedo/track jacket juxtaposition reminds me more of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure than the present; also Bates' giant headphones that lead nowhere are a little silly), but hey - I wish I'd been there. As easy as it might be to critique this 'classical meets electronica' evening, it seems like damn good progress to me. They chose a solid composer, who brings beats (electronic, at that) together with 'classical' much better than Adès, and a great club venue, which beats the pants off any concert hall. Check out pics of the event.

The genetics of sound

Computers are starting to hear just like we do.

I learned about Melodyne software from Andrew Hearst's great site, panopticist. Melodyne is a piece of sound editing software made by the German company, Celemony. It's good for things like high quality time-stretching and pitch shifting, processes other software can also accomplish. Probably, Melodyne does it a little better than most. However, this fall they're planning to release Melodyne plugin 2 (full version plus plugin will go for $399), which many say is gonna revolutionize the sound studio. I think it's gonna revolutionize music, period. View their promo video if you want.


I've said "holy shit" a lot more than I normally do on a Friday morning. Melodyne's new feature, Direct Note Access, is the ability to analyze polyphonic audio content and separate notes within a chord. Once they're separate, you can alter each individually, shifting, stretching, muting little parts of the audio, not the whole file. And it really does. About 11 minutes into the video below, creator Peter Neubacher moves a trumpet melody around without changing a thing about the (minimal upright bass) accompaniment. Right now, the software might be hard pressed to pick a flute line out of a giant orchestral texture, but based on what it can do now, they'll surely advance the software in the next few years. Even within solo lines over accompaniment, glissandi are harder to deal with as opposed to straight pitches.



Mashups have become wildly popular (and sadly illegal). Those who adhere to antiquated value systems don't think Girltalk is artistic. They say the software is meant for altering one's own recording, but this new program will inevitably make the complex mixing and editing that Girltalk does a lot easier, and will therefore explode the genre. It will make more disparate songs easier to mold together. If more people can do what he does, then he'll have to step it up. This is great for DJ culture. Now we can change chord progressions, add dissonance, or any number of other things to existing recordings instead of just juxtaposing unrelated songs. It could be a great way to comment on other artists. Maybe a mashup explosion will push people to reevaluate what they consider original in music and--way, way, down the road--when a giant consumer market presents itself that would outweigh profits from untouched originals, the legal system will adapt to what people want to pay to hear.

Celemony may have deliberately called this plugin Direct Note Access because of its acronym, DNA. Much like the discovery of smaller and smaller parts of our genetic code, this audio DNA is pulling out smaller and smaller parts of audio information, and altering it. In biology, a genetic mutation usually means a catastrophe, but in digital sound, it can be quite the opposite.

Usually, theories are theories, and often evade reality. I like Neubacker's reversal of this norm: "the more I pondered the subject [of DNA], the more I began to see that what doesn't work in theory can still work in reality." This post seems like an advertisement for this company. It's not. I'm just excited.

Museumification

Lately I've felt nauseous on account of the academy, or institutionalized art. I guess it's kind of funny that the institution where I study is paying me to try to tear down its walls. The status quo often feels like a giant bowl of jello that you'll float in for the rest of your life if you're not careful--maybe a little flexible at times, but on the whole, pretty fixed and relatively transparent (translucent, I guess). However, for some artists, it's pretty easy to smash it all to hell.

I could begin a long diatribe against the authenticity, unity, and individuality that modernism adopted from its predecessors, dating back at least to Kant. (See Richard Taruskin for a fantastic example, a book review turned testimony subtitled "Defending classical music against its devotees.") And I'd like to. But for now, let's enjoy two artists who let their work speak for itself.

Banksy could be today's most relevant artist. Check out his drawing, above, that depicts his opinion of high art and museum culture. He's daring; he's visually stimulating; he's hysterical; and he's campaigning against real (but perhaps unsolvable) problems like war, greed, etc. According to the artist, "None of the print and painting exhibitions in proper art galleries are anything to do with me, it's all stuff they bought previously. I only ever mount shows in warehouses or war zones or places full of live animals (I'm aware the pictures don't stand up on their own)." Check out his whole site, but especially the films page, where you can view the guy in action at a zoo, and in the news after having somehow designed a giant exhibition of his work on the wall that separates Palestine from Israel in the West Bank. Here's a great youtube news clip:



Pierre Pinoncelli is a neo-Dadaist and a Marcel Duchamp devotee. You might wonder why, then, he pissed into his idol's most famous work, Fountain. Oh, and he hit it with a hammer. On two different occasions. Fountain, a urinal signed by Duchamp as "R. Mutt," was given the Turner Prize, by 500 "art experts," for being the most influential work of modern art. Duchamp's piece satirizes museum art, and the museum world embraced it for just that reason, to show that it does allow self-critique. Pinoncelli argues that the institution of art has commodified the work and muffled its meaning; that's why he whipped it out in 1993 while the urinal was on display in Nimes, and why he took a hammer to it in 2006 at the Centre Pompidou: to free Duchamp's spirit from "museum bureaucracy and art establishment, with its snobbery and its cliquishness and its shiny invitations and champagne receptions and art-denying money values."


A close friend wrote a brilliant paper on Pinoncelli and the avant-garde in college, and I owe any real discussion of the man's performance art to this friend. When he publishes the paper, I'll be the first to post a link.

Another priceless excerpt from the Infoshop article:
"He did, in fact, once appear as Santa Claus outside the Nice branch of the Galeries Lafayettes department store. He emptied a sack of toys on the pavement and smashed them to protest against the commercialisation of Christmas. Children burst into tears. Their parents pursued him down the street."

Do we have to risk arrest to make provocative art or truly challenge the institution? Maybe, but hopefully not. For now, I'm just glad these two dudes exist.