Artist Cai Guo-Qiang realized “Sky Ladder” at Huiyu Island Harbour, Quanzhou, Fujian, on June 15, 2015 at 4:49 am, for approximately 2 minutes and 30 seconds. (photos by Lin Yi & Wen-You Cai, courtesy Cai Studio, via Colossal)
This week, the death of the US dance critic, Black Lives Matter at the Venice Biennale, James Baldwin’s FBI file, Happy Birthday’s copyright shenanigans, and more.
Reflecting on one year after Michael Brown (there’s a great reading list in the article):
Apartheid South Africa, in fact, offers a rubric for understanding the stratification of race in the US (RFK famously drew this parallel in his 1966 visit to the University of Cape Town). To be Black in America is to live in a cruel and dangerous parallel existence, one mostly invisible to those of other races.
This moment is one that could only have happened now, with the proliferation of cell phone cameras and social media. It was fitting that, for comment, I would seek the voices of the younger generation, those most capable of understanding the current moment.
The death of the American dance critic:
Over the course of the last 20 years dance coverage—and dance criticism in particular—has been decimated in the mainstream press. This past April, Gia Kourlas left Time Out New York, where she had been dance editor for 20 years, after they eliminated her stand-alone section. The New York Post stopped commissioning regular reviews from its critic Leigh Witchel in 2013, and Jennifer Homans left The New Republic last year. The Village Voice and New York have both let go of their regular dance writers and editors in the past 15 years. The trend hasn’t been limited to New York, the dance capital of the U.S. either: Both the Los Angeles Times and the Orange Country Register laid off their critics, and the San Francisco Chroniclehasn’t had a full-time dance writer since 2004. “There aren’t many outlets to begin with, and every day you hear about another [critic] going down,” said Marina Harss, who writes about dance for The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Quebec City is having a bit of a cultural renaissance, particularly in terms of food culture, according to Dan Salzstein of the New York Times:
“In a cultural way, Quebec City is a very modern city,” said Emile Tremblay, the 29-year-old chef de cuisine at the restaurant Légende, par la Tanière. “I don’t want to go to war with Montreal, but if you take in mind the amount of people, if you take the ratio, the creativity is more in Quebec City.”
During an early summer visit, my wife and I started our exploration at the workplace of another of those young chefs: the restaurant La Planque in Limoilou, a working-class neighborhood on the other side of the St.-Charles River now peppered with hipster types. We wandered through its broad, leafy streets, passing a street fair where a girl not older than 7 wowed a small crowd with her skateboarding technique. (Having to survive long, hard winters means Quebec is packed with fairs and festivals all summer.)
Artists at the Venice Biennale respond to Black Lives Matter:
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts: … You know, at the moment that we’re dealing with Black Lives Matter and the violence against black people and brown people in the United States, Europe is a experiencing incredible deaths of black people here, too. Actually, after Venice, I’m planning to go down to Lampedusa, which is the kind of the center of migration, where people from the Near East and Africa come through Lampedusa in order to arrive in Europe. So, this perilous state of people worldwide that have been subjugated to white supremacy and capitalism is the thing that I think of. And here is—it’s just one occasion, among many, to consider those connections.
There’s a lot of talk about surveillance nowadays (probably because it impacts white middle class people now) but it has been around for a long time for minority and marginal communities. Case in point, James Baldwin’s surveillance by the FBI:
Yet looking at his FBI file, even the most basic facts of his life are riddled with inaccuracies. There is, for instance, a description of Baldwin as “white, early 20s, 6′, neat.” In another file, Baldwin is listed as the author of “Go Tell It to the Mountains” and “Another World.” His first and third novels are in fact titled Go Tell It On The Mountain and Another Country. Such baffling errors read like a precursor to the ways in which bulk collection of metadata today often results in wellsprings of misinformation.
The FBI is not alone in trying, albeit comically at times, to identify Baldwin’s fingerprint. His critics and detractors were almost always obsessed with categorizing him too neatly, labeling him a black writer, a gay writer, a religious or a secular writer, an American or an expat. Field’s book as a whole poses the argument that Baldwin’s irreverent humanism evades simple literary detection, and the formerly classified documents fit soundly, even crudely, into this line of thought.
Antwaun Sargent on the new craze to attract Instagram influencers to art events:
Using Instagram as a digital-marketing ploy to promote art helps to increase the attendance and visibility of artists and exhibitions. And it’s easy to hope that the desire to take a photo of a piece of art would inspire a wider interest in the art work. But the photographs shared from MetroTech Commons generally lacked the didactic nature of the sculptures that hang throughout the park. One photo shows a visitor posing with her mouth open, pretending to eat a sign that says “truth” on it. Another one shows a woman holding her dog in the air underneath a “love” sculpture. The whole practice calls into question the role of art in society: Should it always be educational? Is there a right way to engage with art?
The beautifully told story of artists Barry McGee, Clare Rojas, and Margaret Kilgallen:
In the studio they shared, Kilgallen and McGee worked side by side. He showed her how to make her own panels, and she brought home from the library the yellowing endpapers of old books, which they started painting on. She worked on her women; he painted and repainted the sad, sagging faces of the outcast men he saw around the city. They worked obsessively, perfecting their lettering, their cursives, and their lines. “Barry is busy downstairs making stickers,” Kilgallen wrote to a friend. “I hear the squeak of his pen—chisel tipped permanent black—I have been drawing pretty much every day, mostly, silly things; and when I feel brave I have been trying to teach myself how to paint.” When he needed an idea, he’d go over to her space and lift one. Deitch likens them to Picasso and Braque. From a distance, Rojas, too, idealized them. “That was a perfect union, Barry and Margaret,” she says. “You couldn’t get more parallel than the feminine and the masculine communing together.”
While the Happy Birthday song should be in the public domain, so tricky people have found a way to profit from it:
The brief recap is that although the music and lyrics to “Good Morning” have a clear copyrightable moment in 1893, the same music coupled with the “Happy Birthday” words does not. The lawsuit notes the appearance in print in the early 1900s in various sources of alternate words, but without being authorized specifically by the Hills—who ostensibly retained copyright to “Good Morning,” not the Song Storiespublisher—that doesn’t necessarily diminish their claim.
In 1934, Jessica Hill sued over the performance of “Happy Birthday” as part of a 1933 Irving Berlin stage musical, but without referencing the lyrics—only earlier copyrights to “Good Morning.” (Jessica inherited part of the rights from Mildred, who died in 1916.) In 1934 and 1935, Jessica sold rights to certain piano arrangements of “Good Morning” to the publisher of Song Stories, the Clayton F. Summy Company. Summy in turn filed a series of “republished musical composition” copyright registrations for “Happy Birthday,” although only the last of which included the lyrics, and the lyrics weren’t cited as part of the revisions that would justify a new registration.
The Warner/Chappell defense of the copyright that remains is that somehow, the 1893 music combined with lyrics that were already in wide use and published extensively, once put together in 1935 represent a new work. That idea may be indefensible enough, but there are many other flaws in how the song traveled from 1893 to 1935. (The original 1893 work and a revised 1896 version should have remained under copyright until 1921 and 1924; the lawsuit says a proper renewal wasn’t filed. Even if it were, the last possible date of protection would have been 1924 plus 28 years: 1952.)
When Jörg Colberg writes about photography, you should listen, He opines:
Contemporary photography has become too comfortable. The New Formalism fad might just be the most obvious expression of that: if that is what you want to focus on, without any of the larger ideas someone like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy dealt with almost 100 years ago, you might just be too comfortable. And that is what bothers me about this movement the most. It’s not that I’m not interested in looking at what photographs do — quite on the contrary. But it needs to be done for the sake of something other than itself. If you don’t know what this might mean, read Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, and Film.
This should worry all journalists and people who rely on journalists to give you the full story:
The Pentagon has produced its first Department of Defense-wide Law of WarManual and the results are not encouraging for journalists who, the documents state, may be treated as “unprivileged belligerents.” But the manual’s justification for categorizing journalists this way is not based on any specific case, law or treaty. Instead, the relevant passages have footnotes referring to either other parts of the document or matters not germane to this legal assertion. And the language used to attempt to justify this categorization is weak at best.
Tyler Ford writes about living as a genderless person:
I have been out as an agender, or genderless, person for about a year now. To me, this simply means having the freedom to exist as a person without being confined by the limits of the western gender binary. I wear what I want to wear, and do what I want to do, because it is absurd to limit myself to certain activities, behaviours or expressions based on gender. People don’t know what to make of me when they see me, because they feel my features contradict one another. They see no room for the curve of my hips to coexist with my facial hair; they desperately want me to be someone they can easily categorise. My existence causes people to question everything they have been taught about gender, which in turn inspires them to question what they know about themselves, and that scares them. Strangers are often desperate to figure out what genitalia I have, in the hope that my body holds the key to some great secret and unavoidable truth about myself and my gender. It doesn’t. My words hold my truth. My body is simply the vehicle that gives me the opportunity to express myself.
File under things that could easily be art: Shade Balls Being Poured Into A Los Angeles Reservoir. The black plastic balls help maintain water quality by blocking sunlight and preventing hazardous reactions with the chlorine and bromide in the water:
The life of an art museum phone operator in haiku:
The museum is not
free. This upsets you greatly.
And it’s my fault.
The prices are too
high. I’m not buying tickets,
just thought you should know.
There was a Rodin
at another museum.
So what was its name?
Social media is increasingly important for US Presidential hopefuls, so it’s interesting to see what networks they are choosing: The Tianjin explosions were so large they were visible from space:
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.