'Art is theft,’ Picasso once proclaimed, and much of the best and most ‘original’ new art involves an act or two of unequivocal, overt theft. Paradoxically, the law relating to artistic borrowing has grown more restrictive. ‘The plagiarism and copyright trials of the twenty-first century are what the obscenity trials were to the twentieth century’, Kenneth Goldsmith, has observed. ‘These are really the issues of our time.’ Beg, Steal and Borrow offers a comprehensive and provocative survey of a complex subject that is destined to grow in relevance and importance. It traces an artistic lineage of appropriation from Michelangelo to Jeff Koons, and examines the history of its legality from the sixteenth century to now.
Some chapter titles and quotes
Chapter 1 "How Original Are You?"
"The self -- the thing that makes me so uniquely me and you so uniquely you -- is entirely borrowed"
Chapter 2 "Thou Shalt Not Steal"
Chapter 3 "…But You Will Be Taught to Copy"
"Michaelangelo's own originality was of an avowedly imitative kind"
"Copying is the foundation stone of art-making, and the impulse to copy the art of other artists is the progressive motor of art history."
Chapter 4 "A Brave New Multi-Authored World"
Chapter 6, "Remake, Reuse, Reassemble, Recombine: That's the Way to Go",
"Art has become one big stylistic mash-up, then, an orgy of copying and collaging beyond the logic of time and place
"As is only appropriate in a book on appropriating and copying, every word and thought in this text has been borrowed from someone else"
"His record club project, while great fun for its participants I'm sure, (the recording sessions certainly seem like they were a blast)
is perhaps the most damning example of this: track for track covers of
"classic" albums (something that the Flaming Lips have also gotten into
as they've settled down into increasingly less interesting work),
without even the wink and nudge of the Moog Cookbook or Camper Van
Beethoven's version of Tusk. Was this retromaniacal turn an
inevitability for Beck? Hidden in his gleeful appropriation of junk
culture and slacker attitude, was it a time bomb waiting to appear?
Never heard of this "record club".
Was is it that makes talented, in the case of Flaming Lips pretty darn creative, outfits go down this recreative route? (The Lips, in addition to the Dark Side of the Moon remake, have also recently down an interpretation of King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King, titled 'The
Flaming Lips and Stardeath and White Dwarfs feat. New Fumes and Linear
Downfall with Space Face Present: Playing Hide And Seek With The Ghost
Of Dawn'.)
Is it a form of work-as-relaxation? Or even craft as therapy: recreating an existing album, either exactly as possible (Rundgren with Faithful) or loosely, liberates the enjoyable aspects of art-making (the technical, doing-it aspects, which can it's true be challenging but in a specifically practical, technical, how-to-achieve-that-sound way) from the more difficult part which is the en-vision-ing of something new, something that didn't exist before...
Remaking an album means you can have all the demanding fun of making an album, without the pressure of actually contributing anything new to the world. If you make an album that is trying to be new, a valid contribution to a crowded artistic field, the chances are still very good that you'll fall short, add to the redundancy and clutter of music. But if you remake something that already exists, then the redundancy of the project is built-in, pre-accepted. You're off the artistic hook.
This reminds me of something I saw in at LACMA in Los Angeles recently, a retrospective of the work of the ceramics sculptor Ken Price (who turned a craft, pottery, into art). One of his quotations, from 1993, was stenciled on a wall:
"A craftsman knows what he's going to make and an
artist doesn't know what he's going to make, or what the finished product is
going to look like"
So art, properly, involves an element of discovery...
Which chimes with a sub-theme in Retromania, my hunger to be surprised, continually, by music... in a sense Ken Price is saying that the artist should be surprised by what he or she comes up with...
(But perhaps a retromaniacal, or retrolicious, artist -- if there's enough creativity in their recreativity -- can feel that way too, e..g. Ariel Pink "Interesting Results": every time I pick up the pen I get interesting results / every time I sit down and I try I get extraterrestrial results / I get these interesting results")
Craft and art also seem to correspond roughly to the difference between talent and genius.... between skill and generative capacity (the paradoxical proof of which is precisely its tendency to incite, in your contemporary others, imitative work, skilful emulation.... and to invite, for decades to come, retro-replication)
Bourgeoiseaux , again: "Certainly, by Mutations (named after Os Mutantes), Beck's urge to
cite, to curate and to copy, had already begun to overwhelm him, parody
clearly slipping into pastiche (a transformation completed in toto on Midnight Vultures)....""Mutations is about its influences. Not doing anything with them,
not transmuting them, but instead making them very apparent. They are
the surface and the content, the purpose of these songs".
I thought Midnight Vultures was execrable, embarrassing.... I can't even remember Mutations. Perhaps I had stopped listening by then.
Other stuff Beck's done has teetered on the good side of retro-collage aesthetics, the Stereolab/Wagon Christ side
As Bourgeoiseaux argues, Odelay is kind of undeniable, still
And I did find myself surprised to really love Modern Guilt, the 2008 album he did with Danger Mouse, the mash up man.
Particularly this track, titled, funnily enough, "Replica":
It's sort of his Low, this album.... those nervy, jittery drums... he seems hollowed-out, sunk in a malaise... feels like maybe the masks have dropped away, and much of the clever-cleverness too...
It's the sound of the record I like, as much as the tunes (great as several of them are).
Friday, October 5, 2012
In Slate today, a piece by me on "recreativity"
- a critique of the emerging orthodoxy of "everything is a remix" /
"originality is a myth" / "no such thing as genius", in terms of its
relationship to digital culture and to dance music ideas that are frankly a bit stale at this point.
(Reading some of the arguments being made
these past few years from critics, academics, artists, etc you can't
help wondering if these dudes heard a Girl Talk CD and had their minds blown.)
Or, old fashioned modernism versus what is now equally old fashioned postmodernism.
