At one point Lee made a statement that struck a chord with me as it probably would to most artists as it related to how there is no border between working and not working. Meaning that as an artist one is constantly working on the next idea. She expressed the desire to work a 9-5 job from time to time as it benefited from having a definite beginning and end. This way she could just come home and leave her work behind at the office.
Mr. Gagosian is effecting trades in which none of the parties know the identity of anyone else. Collectors say they typically receive calls from him saying something like, “If you want that Francis Bacon, you need to give me your Lichtenstein and the two Basquiats.” Who is on the other side of that trade, or whether the Bacon came from Mr. Gagosian’s private stash, is never discussed.
I cannot vouch for the music, as I do not listen to Grizzly Bear, but the cover is beautiful.
The writers I know, there’s a certain self-consciousness about them, and a critical awareness of themselves and other people that helps their work. But that sort of sensibility makes it very hard to be with people, and not sort of be hovering near the ceiling, watching what’s going on. One of the things you two will discover, in the years after you get out of school, is that managing to really be an alive human being, and also do good work and be as obsessive as you have to be, is really tricky. It’s not an accident when you see writers either become obsessed with the whole pop stardom thing or get into drugs or alcohol, or have terrible marriages. Or they simply disappear from the whole scene in their thirties or forties. It’s very tricky.
I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art. We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “Golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!” But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not?
Printing is still just as easy and cheap as it ever was, but given the option, we now prefer to save - or upload - instead. That tells us something about our appetite for convenience, but even more about what we want from photographs in the first place. The object itself, no matter how crisp and permanent, how lush or mysterious, turns out to matter less than our ability to capture, store, and share an image. Without the print, photography’s magical power - to freeze a moment in time - is still ours. In fact, although we continue to think of the photograph as a physical thing, we are finding out that it better serves our needs without being printed….but just as the paperless format erases one kind of closeness, it can open entirely new realms of intimacy - the minute you hit “upload.” While our stored photos are shy (you have to search for them) and a little vulnerable (they can all disappear with a hard drive), the ones we put on the Web are gregarious and immortal. Never before has the photo been so emphatically public, announcing our achievements and pleasures with a swiftness we never dreamed of. So even when these disseminated images come to haunt us, it’s not in the manner of the print - which conjured private sentiments, like longing or regret - but with rather more civic feelings, like shame and embarrassment. Usually these unnerving photos are the ones other people have posted (and “tagged”), but what’s really irksome is that other people are seeing them, and that these other people can even copy them and distribute them, if they so choose. The old idea of “destroy the negatives” sounds pretty quaint in a world of endlessly reproducible jpegs, as does the notion of asking to take someone’s picture. We’re all celebrities now! But it is the photographs, not their subjects, that are godlike in their movements.
In a sense, he seemed to be saying that documentary photography is the underlying practice of all photographers, even the one’s who set-up their images.
1. Authorship is an issue even more than with Sherrie Levine/Richard Prince “rephotography,” assuming the capture is some one else’s work other than the capturer’s. Putting a Walker Evans on the copystand, printing, framing, and exhibiting vs hitting the “printscreen” button, making a jpeg, and uploading to a blog.
2. Photography at its most indexical doesn’t confuse as to its purpose. Whereas a screen capture that includes, say, YouTube controls, is far more likely to be mistakenly clicked by the consumer than merely passively viewed.
3. Captures are inherently irresponsible. Unless the capturer has included a surrounding frame (such as a web browser’s scroll bars and address bar) the viewer has no way of knowing if the capture came from the web, the capturer’s home computer, or somewhere else entirely. There are no easy verification methods such as looking for telltale signs of the clone stamp to detect Photoshopping.
