ratings systems are terrible.

While perusing potential sources of new information on tumblr, I came across a post which included this tidbit:

I know it’s impossible, but it would be interesting to see how much more money this movie is going to make because it’s not rated R.

This caught my attention because rating systems are (always) a negative thing for creative products.  Frank Miller (creator of 300, Sin City, etc) has had a lot to say about this, but I can summarise his argument fairly well in two points; rating dictates audience dictates money, and people should be media literate enough to know what’s appropriate.

Any R rated movie has a smaller audience.  This is fair, not everyone is mature enough to see the things in an R rated film.  At the same time, attaching an arbitrary age range further limits the number of people who will see it.  The real problem, though, is that films (as the most prominent rated medium) are written, filmed, and edited to the desired rating – meaning as a creative product, the rating outranks all artistic concerns.

Think about your favourite book.  Now consider if it wouldn’t have been published unless it was edited either 2 hollywood ratings up (i.e., from G to PG-13), or 2 hollywood ratings down.  Would it still be your favourite book?

The second point is that ratings don’t really protect anyone.  The people who care, or want to protect their children, should be able to tell from the title, posters, and trailer, which movies are appropriate.  The people who don’t care will take their kids no matter what the rating is.

I’d like to live in a society that assumes people are smart enough to entertain themselves appropriately.  I realize how absurd it is to have to say that, but here we are.

commodification of street art.

Now firmly entrenched as the graffiti artist most lauded by the fine arts crowd, Banksy raises an interesting point. While I can understand the rising auction prices of his work, all rooted in the street art he made his name with, I'm more interested in the speed with which his rise in stature has connected directly with changing attitudes towards his (still illegal) graf pieces.

At least two times that I know of, Banksy's work has been removed from it's original home (a public object) and auctioned off for notable amounts of money. This in and of itself doesn't bother me. My issue is with the forced commodification of something that Banksy's own work seems to classify as a means of fighting back for a chunk of public space. When that weapon can get cut or chiseled free, and then becomes a commercial object despite the wishes of the creator, that becomes something of a problem for me.

The same thing happened recently with Murakami taking a tagged Murakami billboard, and adding it to his collection.

I'm not saying I'm surprised, or that I don't understand the motivations, but at the same time, this seems reprehensible to me. The value in these pieces, in my opinion, is as a public good. Graffiti serves the commons, whether as inspiration, decoration, or call to arms. I have no issue with a graf artist working for corporate interests, but I have a problem with a public good being turned into a private one for profit.

In short, this is turning graf into what I considered it the antithesis of - advertising - is as much as it takes a public good (space, graf) and turns it into a private one (ads, auction fodder).

The thing is, objectively, there is little difference in this, than in getting an artist to paint on a branded pair of shoes, or bag. So I suppose this was inevitable, although it seems doomed to strip the whole enterprise of meaning.

music is already free

Dear Music Industry,

There's something you need to understand, and you don't seem to be getting it. Someone has to tell you, and they have to say it in no uncertain terms.

Stop arguing that music cannot be free. Stop it. It doesn't matter what your justification is, whether it's that the Radiohead model (as it is apparently now known) devalues music for other, less wealthy bands, or whether it's just plain thievery, and nothing else should matter, it's irrelevant.

I'll say it slowly, because I'm obviously not talking to the smart kids: MUSIC. IS. ALREADY. FREE.

We can't go back in time. Bandwidth and Compression made Apple a force in it's industry again. These technological changes made file sharing reasonable. And it made free plausible, not as a business model, but as a reality that cannot be ignored.

It doesn't matter if you can't work your old business model in a world where music is free. It doesn't matter if you feel it devalues your work. It doesn't matter if you think this paradigm only rewards the ultra rich, or those with a dedicated fan base who will spend money without needing to, or whether it just plain bothers you.

Music is already free. The genie is not going back in the bottle, because the holy triumvirate of bittorrent, bandwidth, and compression all have legitimate uses. And not in the NRA style 'guns are for protection, too' legitimate use, but there are entire business models that are only viable due to these innovations.

Music is free. You can't change that, you have to work with it. Radiohead decided that might be an idea - ACCEPTING REALITY - and hoping that, considering it would leak anyway, a portion of fans would be willing to give them a couple of bucks for something that, within minutes of release, WAS FREE ANYWAY.

I'm sorry that a lot of people, Music Industry, are caught in a transitional period where old ways are failing and new ways are undefined. I'm sorry that old revenue streams are falling by the wayside. I'm sorry that so many of you equate changing sources of money with doom.

But it doesn't matter if I'm sorry.

Because music is already free, and you can't change that will anything, even an endless parade of frivolous lawsuits.

With more than a modicum of disappointment,

The Broken Gentleman

just because you should see it.

The last post received a long, thoughtful comment by David Mack about the nature of his work.

Read it here, or go look into the comments for the last post.

It leads me to consider whether almost any art form can be considered complete until it has been interacted with by another individual. This will most likely keep me up nights, in the best way. Communication instead of expression. That's something sure to make me smile for a while yet.

Thanks, this made my day.

[EDIT: Link corrected.]

accessibility versus disposability.

I was re-reading a few issues David Mack’s Kabuki the other day, and if you have ever seen anything he’s painted or drawn, you can understand why I had a moment that could be described as an immediate questioning of the definitions and limitations of the standard public definition of 'fine art'. It’s almost impossible for me to describe what reading an issue of Kabuki is like, except to say that it’s beautiful, engaging, and always feels to me like staring directly into innovation as a concept. The man tells stories in a way that seems completely new regardless if an issue or arc is read once or a dozen times. He mixes media, he shifts styles, and, from the one time I spoke to him at a Toronto comics convention, he does it without becoming arrogant, pretentious, or self-important in the least.

While those qualities alone would separate him from the ranks of ‘fine art’ in the eyes on many, many sarcastic people I know, I would assume he also has to deal with at least some level of ghetto-isation based on the vast amount of his work that is in the medium of comics. This raises questions. It can’t be said that any devaluation is an inherent part of created a reproducible work, because otherwise Starlight Over Rhone wouldn’t be considered fine art, as reproductions of it have been sold hundreds of thousands of times, on postcards, posters, prints, etc. This argument could be taken further (and, horrifyingly, I could reference Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art as Mechanical Reproduction) but I’d rather skip ahead to the current state of the artistic image, which is that anything that exists does so in a state of endless reproduction. Welcome to the digital world.

So, reproduction is out. Access into major galleries is circular reasoning at best (it’s not in the Tate because it’s not Art, which I can tell because it isn’t in the Tate), so the next thing to discuss is whether accessibility is a negative trait, and whether it is confused with disposability.

Kabuki (the last issue I bought) retails for $4.25 Canadian. Collections of past issues are readily available at any truly decent comic shop, and back issues are often still available for order. Kabuki is something that can be owned and enjoyed by anyone who reads it. There are original pages, and from what I can tell they can be purchased. The separation is that the reproduced option, the comic itself, is the intended form for consumption. This might be because Mack is a talented artist who just happens to love comics, it may be for specific benefits of the medium (such as being able to create complex and decipherable meanings while making beautiful static images), or it might both and many other things besides. However, this seems to be the point that people feel lets them argue that such a thing isn’t fine art.

I think this ties into the conflation of accessibility and disposability. I make the same mistake, and often drunkenly explain to people that any band who is loved universally has run out of meaningful things to say. This argument falls apart with the example of the Beatles, who were both insanely commercially successful, and unquestionably of artistic merit. Graphic art has different rules, however. Gallery art, where there is a single ‘true’ piece, fulfills needs of exclusivity and scarcity. There is only one Starlight Over Rhone, and everything else is a copy. The intended form of the painting is only the painting, reproductions are merely that. But a comic book is different. The original art is part of the process of creating the mass material. A comic is, more often than not, a universally accessible work of art, one that many can own, experience, and interpret. What confuses me is the assumption that because something is available and accessible, it must therefore be disposable. The assumption that because nearly anyone in North American society who cares to look can own an issue of Kabuki, it is somehow diminished in value, suggests that ‘fine art’ is not a concern of meaning, ability, or quality, but instead that meaning, like taste, is directly attached to having something others cannot. That ‘great’ artworks are those which only one person can own, attach to themselves as a statement of worth, and then loan to galleries in a gesture of generosity crossed with self-adoration.

I guess, at the end of it, I was re-reading issues of Kabuki, and I suddenly found it very depressing that David Mack’s work could be dismissed by anyone because of his choice of an accessible, available medium, with characteristics that no other has. I do, however, think that the commodification of visual art has lead to a situation where, beyond the confusion of comics as a genre, rather than a medium, there is brilliant work that melds both visual art and story seamlessly, which isn’t getting the recognition it deserves.

Then again, people are still complaining about Damien Hirst, so I suppose definitions of art are even tighter than the idea of exclusivity and scarcity.

[EDIT: David Mack's own thoughts are in the comment thread. Read them, and understand the intention of the artist rather than my own somewhat clumsy ramblings.]