Week 2

Art

 Lichtenstein Lawsuit for Gagosian

I saw this headline and it caught my attention. I'm taking a Pop Art and Fluxus class, so Lichtenstein has been coming up a lot in my reading. Apparently, the Gagosian Gallery in New York is being sued by an art collector, Joan Cowles, over a Lichtenstein painting. The collectors son sold the painting without her consent to the gallery, who then sold it for 2 million dollars, reportedly less than it's market value, and now the collector is sueing Gagosian for 10 million dollars and accusing the gallery of "such wanton dishonesty as to imply criminal indifference to civil obligations, with reckless disregard of Cowles’s rights." The gallery denies the accusations and claims that they did not know at the time of purchase that the son did not have permission to sell the painting.
A lot of our discussion in the Pop Art class has centered around the distinction between Pop Art, with a capital P, and commercial (popular) art. The Smithson’s called for fine art to compete with pop art, and perhaps this means appropriating the qualities of pop art. I think the commercial success of Pop Art proves that it did just that, but the comodification of these artworks also brings into question whether they can be considered Fine Art objects at all.

Thinking

The Birth Of Tragedy

In preparation for the lecture on Thursday, I read the introduction of Nietzsche's The Birth Of Tragedy. The link includes the whole text. The central idea proposed by the text is that art is motivated by two factors, personified by Greek gods. Apollo becomes Apollonian art, or the plastic arts, and Dionysus becomes the Dionysian, paired with music. Greek tragedy marries the two forces to create ideal art. Nietzsche explains the two forces as dream and intoxication as well. Apollonian arts emerge from the fantastic, idealized dreams of the artist. Apollo, the god of brightness, is also the god of fantasy. The Dionysian then is linked with intoxication. He associates this with the “tremendous awe which seizes a man when he suddenly doubts his ways of comprehending illusion.” The Dionysian is a more spiritual experience with nature, and life. Active and emotional next to the controlled intelligence of the Apollonian.
Nietzsche claims that the best art marries these two forces, and the most successful marriage of the two is in fact the Greek Tragedy. He acknowledges both as art, but believes that one without the other is less valuable than both.

Social Change

ACTA Summary
ACTA Video

After all of the hype over SOPA and PIPA which failed in congress last week after major sites like Reddit, Wikipedia, Imagur, and Craigslist went black for 12 hours in protest, the internet is turning to an older bit of legislation, ACTA, which would be implemented on a larger scale. The summary (which is, ironically, from Reddit) includes a link to the source material, gives an overview of the bill, focusing on what it would actually do. The author of the post emphasizes the fact that what makes the bill dangerous is not what it legislates, but what it would allow governments to legislate. Under ACTA, bills like SOPA and PIPA would be able to be passed.
The hype ACTA is recieving is misleading. While it is dangerous, and definitely compromises free speech and file sharing, and having farther reaching consequences in farming and healthcare, the bill itself does not implement anything, it simply makes it possible to. The video is very well made, but I don’t think it is particularly informative. It provides ‘what if’ scenarios, but does not adequately explain how the bill works to enable these possible scenarios. I will pursue these issues in further posts.