A More Artistic POV

I'd like to turn an eye to the present for a moment to consider a different sort of angle--artists! 


Here's where some MUSICIANS are standing: a statement from the Future of Music Coalition 

I thought this part was noteworthy (and I'll come back to it in a minute): 

"Naturally, there are are concerns about protecting copyright and intellectual property online. Keep in mind that FMC supports artists' rights to have control over their creative expressions, as well as their ability to access potential audiences. Yet any solutions to unlawful filesharing are likely to be the product of a neutral net."

A sampling from the LITERARY SORT: It's All About the Leverage by Cory Doctorow on Locus

He raises an interesting notion about the web as leverage for publishing.  

"You don’t need to self-publish to get a better deal from a publisher or other gatekeeper: you merely need to be able to self-publish. A negotiation in which the two choices are ‘‘Do it my way’’ and ‘‘Go pound sand’’ is not one that will end well for the supplicant. The mere existence of a better option than ‘‘Go pound sand’’ raises the floor on our negotiations."  

Is there any truth in this? Perhaps. I wonder how many inches the net actually "raises the floor" when there doesn't seem to be an effective way to make much money on it as a self-published writer. 

Jaron Lanier devoted a solid chunk of You Are Not a Gadget to whether creative people attempting to develop a career via the new web model have been even remotely successful. I'd like to interject an excerpt from his book here:

The people who devote their lives to making committed cultural expression that can be delivered through the cloud—as opposed to casual contributions that require virtually no commitment—well, those people are, Kevin acknowledges, the losers.

 His new advice at the time was similar to the sorts of things we used to suggest in fits of anticipation and wild hope ten, fifteen, and even twenty-five years ago. He suggested that artists, musicians, or writers find something that isn‟t digital related to their work, such as live appearances, T-shirt sales, and so on, and convince a thousand people to spend $100 each per year for whatever that is. Then an artist could earn $100,000 a year.

 I very much want to believe that this can be done by more than a tiny number of people who happen to benefit from unusual circumstances. The occasional dominatrix or life coach can use the internet to implement this plan. But after ten years of seeing many, many people try, I fear that it won‟t work for the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists, and filmmakers who are staring into career oblivion because of our failed digital idealism (You are Not a Gadget, 61).

To jump back to the FMC for a moment, they made a solid statement that a neutral net and open culture (ie filesharing) should not be lumped into one issue. They implied that the solution to the problem might indeed require the innovation of an open net to be found or implemented.

Back to Cory Doctorow's ideas about publication leverage:

"While artists have been going bonkers over threats to copyright, the media titans and the telcoms ogres have quietly formed a pact that will establish them as permanent gatekeepers to the world’s audiences.  Not because reaching those audiences is difficult or technically challenging, but because they’ve sewn up the market."  

I object to the notion that reaching audiences with creative work via the web is neither difficult nor technically challenging. I think that there might be some concessions to be made here to the "Telco Giants." I think that offering better video, audio, etc. services is the main reason they cite for wanting to tier the net in the first place. No? But maybe there is another, more "little guy" friendly solution to the problem. People like Tim Wu think so, and I'll be following some more of his work in the next posts.

It's fun to read a post about Net Neutrality that drops words like danegeld. What's less fun is the shameless use of phrases like "sellout FCC" and "corporate welfare bum." Not that they aren't appropriately used, or deserved, but that it's a super fast way to whittle your audience down 'til you're preachin' to the choir. Well, writers will be writers I suppose.

And, what some VISUAL ARTISTS are showing: Super Santa Barbara Net Neutrality Show

I like that the nature of a group show necessitates that multiple perspectives and opinions be encountered by the viewer in a visit. I contacted a few artists from this show and got a response from James Van Arsdale, who contributed "Snakes and Ladders," [ 2010. Wood, paint, canvas, wire, HTML electronic web page. 24" x 24" x 30", with separate QR Code printed and electronic web page on mobile device].  He wrote this about his piece:

"It was inspired by this quote:

     '... Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you hope to climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner, and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil... ' (Salman Rushdie)

     I generated a QR code to paint on the base of the piece and this code leads to the First Amendment text.

     As essentially an issue about our first amendment rights to free speech, the Net Neutrality issue is presented here as a game, with the game board being a QR Code (Quick Response Code) that links to a web page, when scanned on a mobile device, to the First Amendment text. Upon this game board are the Snakes and Ladders that represent the duality, the up and down, and also the struggle of the individual against the corporation in this fight for the rights to access on the web and an open and equal eEvironment."