October 2010

Did the Chelsea crawl yesterday with dumpers Hypothete and Frankhats, who are in town for the IRL residency. 23rd Street everything was open and most shows were good, e.g., Lily van der Stokker's only-mildly-sarcastic kiddie wall paintings at Leo Koenig, Omar Chacon's vibrant Op Glop at Margaret Thatcher, and Casey Cook's cartoon surrealist meditations on paint stains (above) at I-20.The Heathers on 22nd and 24th were mostly closed for installation; an exception being Friedrich Kunath's show "Tropical Depression" at Andrea Rosen, featuring some tasty Sigmar Polke-ish paintings packed with layered vintage illustration. On other streets and avenues: a show of neo-quasi-ostensibly geometric painting at Edward Thorpe featuring some nice work by Andrew Spence, Stephen Mueller, Jennifer Kobylarz, and others; and a solid Dan Flavin offering at Paula Cooper consisting of a boxy room-within-a-room with a central grill of back-to-back fluorescents dramatically canceling each others' optical frequencies so that each group's predominant color was intensified when viewed through the grill from the opposite side.

...they first make stupid.

At one point Google had an ambitious plan to copy all books and make them available on the internet. Ha ha, said the copyright goons, not so fast, every idea has a price in a capitalist society. Expression is like a highway, it takes money to build and its owners expect a 300% return and a sybaritic lifestyle so little people must pay tolls. No ticket, no intellectual convo. So Google took out portions of books making them unusable as complete works but still quotable as to the non-redacted portions.

And the copyright goons said, uh, it has come to our attention that "bloggers" are linking to the free parts in order to have authority for their arguments. It is very important that we administer little electric zaps to these discussions to keep people stupid, befuddled, and dependent on their masters. So Google followed Amazon's "look inside" manipulation. Now if a blogger links to a Google Books page and enough traffic comes to that page, the page joins the redacted portions in commercially tantalizing unavailability.

Once there was a concept in law called "fair use," which recognized a public policy purpose for keeping conversations free from idiocy-inducing electro shock administered by profiteer elements of society. The internet is not going to be a zone where this concept is recognized. If you are going to quote, better get a screenshot or the weight of your words will be constantly dwindling. And if you post that screenshot don't use any words that would identify the content in the filename.

Update, June 2012: The Google Books pages that disappear in response to heavy link traffic seem to reappear at a later date when traffic has died down. Don't know if that really changes anything said above.