tom moody

Excerpt from a Mike Kelley/Glenn O'Brien conversation, via NEWSgrist:

GO: I've remembered an event and thought I'd said something when actually it was somebody else who said it or vice versa. I think, especially in writing, so much of plagiarism is completely unconscious.

MK: I have experienced that often. I've stolen ideas, and people have stolen from me. I'm all for it. That's the way things get created. That's how culture grows. When there's an amazing idea, you take it and run with it. I mean, you're going to take it someplace else than the source anyway. There are a lot of artists who've worked at that specifically. One of my favorite writers is the Comte de Lautréamont, and much of his writing is constructed from plagiarized texts. Who would claim that his work is no different than what he plagiarized?

GO: One thing that the Internet seems to be doing is eroding the idea of copyright and originality. People are just taking bits of things and using them in a very free way.

MK: That's great. And the corporate entertainment industry is trying to stop it from happening. Think about it: Andy Warhol could not have a career now. He would be sued every two seconds.

GO: It's given a lot of work to the lawyers.

MK: Copyright laws are terrible for culture. It's illegal to respond to the imagery that surrounds you; you're bombarded every minute of the day with mass-media sludge. It should be the opposite: Everybody should have to respond to it. This is what should be taught in the public school system.

William S. Burroughs should be a major role model: All students should be given tape recorders and cameras to constantly record the gray veil that surrounds them, so that they can recognize that it's even there--and manipulate it. Most people are not aware of the white noise they exist in. Tape recording and photography allowed people to become aware of what was invisible to them for the first time. We're surrounded by invisibility. That's what I think art can do--make things visible.

The part in boldface should be repeated like a catechism when you go to sleep at night, to counteract the endless media sludge of your day, for example, what I just heard on the radio at the deli against my will: "The NY Times magazine has two different covers this week, one with Tom Cruise and..." Who gives a flip about that? Really.

A comment yrs truly just made on Paddy Johnson's blog. Seems a blogger stole some of print writer turned recent blogger Catherine Spaeth's words, and Spaeth JUST WENT BERSERK, like Billy Jack kung fu-ing townies in the '70s films.

Coming in late on this discussion. Catherine Spaeth, please get over yourself. Three posts on your blog about this peccadillo you discovered and all your words here in Johnson’s comments are just too much. Publishing "the plagiarist's" picture under the blog title "_____ the Plagiarist," it's just melodramatic overkill.

I'm not sure that what you're griping about (and griping, and griping…) is even properly plagiarism. As you describe it, a blogger used some of your words but "sapped your writing of all its critical bite in order to provide comparatively glowing fodder."

That’s two different issues. If he changed your meaning but attributed the words to you, that's one thing. Using your words verbatim and passing them off as his is another. It seems like the sins somewhat cancel each other out. I'm sure you can lecture me endlessly about why this is not so.

Cribbing others' prose is wrong. Unfortunately the Internet is still an intellectual Wild West, and people do all kinds of things on the fly that won't live up to your ethical standards as a print writer. You are the schoolmaster insisting on decorum while others are ducking from the hail of bullets as the bad guys ride into town. Point out your grievance, move on. No one cares how important you think you are.

This post on William Eggleston a few years ago discussed the difference between two movements, "art photography" and "artists with cameras":

[Jim] Lewis' phrase "new art photographers" glosses over a not-so-old schism in the world of Museum-collected photography, between "art photography" and what might roughly be called "artists with cameras," a distinction outlined in Abigail Solomon-Godeau's famous essay "Photography after Art Photography." Almost exclusively shot in black and white and practiced by the likes of Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander, art photography was firmly ensconced in the museum in the '60s and '70s under the stewardship of MOMA curator John Szarkowski; it emphasized darkroom practice and objective standards of quality in photos.

The "conceptual photography" of [Richard] Prince, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and others, however, emerged from the world of painting, sculpture, and video. These artists used photos to document a performance, advance a theory, or critique the mass media, and didn't much give a damn about photographic values (including the old prohibition on color). In addition to this generation change in America, developments in European contemporary art gradually came to light in the late '70s: Gilbert & George, for example, used vivid colors in their photopastiches at least as early as 1975, and the conceptualist Jan Dibbets had no qualms about color in his images of tilted landscapes and car hoods. And finally, as Lewis mentions, color printing technology was vastly improving during this period.

Thus, while Szarkowski may have taken a big leap vis a vis older art photographers by giving Eggleston a one-person museum exhibit in '76, other trends were fast making that radicality a non-issue. The Europeans and young Americans weren’t invited into the tea circle of art photography because William Eggleston opened the door: instead, they found their own critical advocates, and after a few years of publicity and sales, they simply took over the show--and color came along with them.

The same types of distinctions could be made between "new media" artists and what could be called "artists with computers." The latter care about their laptops as much as Cindy Sherman cared about her camera. Necessary mechanical skills can be learned but the habits accompanying those skills need to be unlearned. Also, artists may not always and at all times be "with computers"--it's a tool to be picked up and put down as needed.

New media suggests a respect for hardware & software and belief in their newness, something artists with computers don't care about. New media involves a finicky devotion to programming and process, whereas artists with computers are bulls in the Apple Shop. New media artists tend to germinate in design or media arts programs whereas artists with computers incline to studio arts backgrounds or autodidacticism. Rhizome.org has traditionally been a bastion of new media whereas Paddy Johnson's blog (particularly last summer's IMG MGMT series) has provided a platform for artists with computers. (She may not appreciate being lumped into this diatribe.) Lastly, new media artists define themselves in relation to Lev Manovich's principles ("new media objects exist as data," etc.) and artists with computers find those confining, impractical, and overly utopian.

The so-called surf club artists come from both schools. Nevertheless, resistance to the clubs (comparing them to George Bush and closed source programming) and sarcasm of certain reactionaries seen in the Rhizome chat boards in June of 2008 could be construed as evidence of the split. New media artists scoff at the art world's notions of art yet want very much to be approved according to those criteria.

[This may seem like a strange time to pigeonhole Rhizome since they are in the middle of a fundraiser (this blog just kicked in for a seedling membership). The staff can't be held accountable for the obscurantists in the chatrooms; there is some sentiment within the organization for "artists with computers" so giving is recommended, enabling the institution to thrive so it can be colonized, ha ha.]