Boing Boing posted an article today about the “Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images” exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (which I went to last weekend) about, in Cory Doctorow’s view, LACMA’s hypocritical stance on fair use.  The exhibit features Magritte’s work, as well as the work of artists that have been influenced by him, both directly and indirectly.  Doctorow, who I usually agree with on matters such as this, finds fault with the museum’s policy of no photography, per the request of the private collectors, saying:

If the point of the exhibit is to show us the wonders of fair use, how can LACMA justify taking paintings in on terms that betray fair use?

Now, I have been to the exhibit in question, as well as many other exhibits that banned photography, and I have never seen it as conflicting with fair use.  Although it is not the case with the Magritte exhibit, a lot of museums when showing older work, do not allow photographs, or at least flash photography, not only because it annoys the other patrons, but because the light from the flashes can artificially age and degrade the work. (Some museums won’t even let you take in pens; they will only let you take in pencils for fear of you making permanent marks to the work.)
But more to the point of the article, big shows of famous artists are great opportunities for bootleggers to come and make nice copies of the work, and it becomes the collector’s prerogative whether they want to allow photography or not.  It has less to do with fair use, and more with protecting the integrity of the work.  Artists make their living off of their work.  If people come in and take pictures of the work, and make copies of the work, thats money out of their pocket.  (And this does happen.  A lot.  Just check out You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice)  So if they don’t want photography, then that is a decision that we should respect.  Personally, I don’t like the idea of people saying that work is either totally copyrighted or totally fair use; I think that it should be up to the individual artist to decide for themselves what they want for their work.  Thats why I like, and use, Creative Commons licenses: because they allow you to choose how much access to your work you want to allow, instead of the all-or-nothing approach.
And moreover, a showing is not the place to be making a copy that you want to work with.  If you want to use another artist’s image in your own work, and you need to work with the original, contact the artist, or in lieu of that the gallery or collector that has their work.  Requests like that are not uncommon at the gallery that I am at, and a lot of the time the artists, if approached by someone serious, are happy to work with them.  There are just safeguards that they have to put up in order to protect themselves and their livelihood.

In the end, I really don’t see how the inclusion or exclusion of photography in an exhibit is a good bellwether of a work’s fair use rights.  There are so many other avenues that one can pursue in order to procure a particular image that it all seems like a rather moot point.  I can see where someone from the outside, who’s only exposure to art is in the museum setting, would be confused, (as condescending as that sounds) but the fine arts were able to thrive and have a free flow of ideas for hundreds of years without the aid of photography in exhibits, and I am confident that it can continue to do so.  Because for artists, it is not the photographic documentation, but the idea that is paramount.  And as long as those are not locked away, we can continue to dialog with each other, just as the Magritte exhibit presents.

I’m a couple of days late in posting about the this, but I just got back from LA, and have some pictures from the trip up on my Flickr page. I had a great time down there, and miss everyone already. See you all next time!

So a while ago, I posted a crash course of sorts about digital cameras, and I mentioned Flickr, and their stripping of uploaded color profiles. As an update to that, I discovered today that in addition to the stripping, Firefox also has no current support for color profiles. That means that even if an image is uploaded with an ICC profile, it is ignored. IE and Safari have have support for ICC profiles, with Safari going a step farther and if it comes across an image without an ICC profile, it applies your monitor’s output ICC profile to it. All of which is really frustrating for me, because Firefox is, in every other respect, the better browser, and my preferred browser. But since I spend a good amount of online time looking at art and photography images, color correction is an important thing for me, and I don’t want to have to switch browsers depending on what I am looking at. But the more important thing is that as someone who spends a good deal of time working on his images for presentation, it’s frustrating that there’s not cross browser support for the standard ICC profiles, so that the colors that I see and want others to see, are the ones that are delivered, correctly.

Interior Design is reporting that The Internation Association of Art Critics has announced their picks for the best of 2005-2006. A lot of the list I didn’t see, so I can’t comment that much on them, but as the gallery I intern at represents him, I am excited to see David Ireland on there for Best Show in a Commerical Gallery Nationally. The Rauschenberg exhibit at MOCA I am bit (just a bit) surprised about. It was good, but I don’t know about best of the year. Same for the Richard Tuttle at the SF MOMA; it was good, but not great. I do have to say that I am surprised that the Matthew Barney exhibit at the SF MOMA didn’t make anyones list, such as Artforum, (although a show at MOMA made their list) Art Fag City or Alex Soth.

Via Fecal Face 

In reading an article about the new iPhone in Time, I ran across the name of Apple’s head of design, Jonathan Ive. But this paragraph really struck me:

The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. Unlike my phone. He picks it up and points out four little nubbins on the back. “Your phone’s got feet on,” he says, not unkindly. “Why would anybody put feet on a phone?” Ive has the answer, of course: “It raises the speaker on the back off the table. But the right solution is to put the speaker in the right place in the first place. That’s why our speaker isn’t on the bottom, so you can have it on the table, and you don’t need feet.” Sure enough, no feet toe the iPhone’s smooth lines.

and later in the article:

When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. “I think there’s almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment,” says Ive. “We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.”

That thought process struck me, and I began looking him up. Ive is responsible for the design of, among other things, the iMac, (the original, also a design of his, was a key product for Apple) the Powerbook G4, the Powermac G4, and of course, the iPod. That’s an impressive portfolio.

Product design is nothing new, and in fact, Ive’s and Apple’s more recent designs weigh heavily on the influence of Dieter Rams, chief designer at Braun in the 1960’s. But the level at which they are taking it in technology is unheard of, and impressive to say the least. The consideration of X factors such as the design of the product, as well as the function, as having an effect on the user experience is something that no other technology company does, or at least as well. And perhaps that emphasis, above all else, is why I see more Macs in the hands of creative people than I do PCs.

What Apple’s #1 product is, is good design, and that is something that is hard to quantify into technical specs. It is also something that is hard to see sometimes, because as Rams states in his ten principals of good design:

Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design helps us to understand a product.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is durable.
Good design is consequent to the last detail.
Good design is concerned with the environment.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Back to purity, back to simplicity.

In downtown San Francisco there was a large protest today, protesting Taiwan’s president, Chen Shui-Bian outside the St. Regis. I have some images up on my Flickr page from it.

Gallery Paule Anglim has a show up right now of James Drake’s work that is worth a look. This is one of the cases where seeing the images online doesn’t do them justice, as they are quite large. Of particular interest are four drawing, all ten feet high, of war time portraits. If you are in the area, it is worth a visit. The show will be up until January 27

(Full Disclosure: I currently intern at Gallery Paule Anglim)

I have my portfolio up finally, which you can get to on the sidebar or here.  I am still in the process of going through, and scanning in my old 35mm black and whites, so the black and white section will be getting some more updates soon, but I will post when that happens.

We Make Money Not Art has an interesting article about an updated Milgram Obedience experiment with a virtual shock recipient (the emphasis is theirs)

Participants who could see and hear the avatar were affected by the experiment as if it were real. Their stress responses were raised (as judged by sweating and heart rate). And when the woman protested, the participants tended to give her longer to answer before administering the shock. Some participants emphasised the correct answer among the available choices, as if trying to help the woman avoid a shock.

As Yishay Mor notes, the results put in a new light the idea that we should give human rights to sentient machines.