Category Archives: Art

The Customer is Always Right, Except When They Aren’t

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Once in a while someone comes along and makes a passionate argument justifying that they have to illegally download content because it is the only way they can get it. Except that very often, it isn’t. They provide a false argument where they don’t want to pay for the way they could get it, because it is slightly more expensive than they want it. Or, it comes to them in a method that is not the medium they would prefer it be delivered to them.

So, they push the “bad behavior” off of themselves and on to the very entity that is providing the content that they claim to love and desire so desperately they have to steal to obtain it. This is bullshit, plain and simple.

Giving the consumer what they want is great, and obviously the key to any great business. But it only works for rational demands.

After that point a company simply can’t grant everyone’s greatest wishes. Its a business, it costs money. Shows cost money to make, and they have to make money back. Many businesses have determined that certain methods of delivery, like over cable distribution systems where the overhead, distribution, and customer service is handled instead of an expense.

There are lots of things I want that I can’t have because I lack the resources like a Viking range, a BMW X5 and washboard abs. Doesn’t mean I’m allowed to go out and steal them. Same goes for music, movies and video games. Just because I want the content and it’s convenient to steal doesn’t mean I should.

There’s right, and there’s wrong. Stealing stuff is just plain wrong. We learn this as children, yet somehow we make elaborate excuses for it as we get older, like “Well, I’m just copying bits. I’m not really stealing.” Or “If it weren’t so hard for me to get legitimately, I wouldn’t have to steal it instead.”

When the studios make it hard for you to have content you want, you should just live without it, or reward other content providers who make it easier for you to do business with them.

Consumers have to stop expecting to have everyone kiss their ass just because they want something. This is the warped, misguided reason why “Six Strikes” policies are created to begin with.

-LoopInsight

Certainly, there can be arguments for better methods. At some point if someone provides a product closer to what customers want, then they deserve to win, but I would argue that if no one is coming in to serve the demand, it is not sustainable. If it is sustainable, someone will come along and take away their customers. That is how the free market works. Players adapt or die.

But the sense of entitlement to product is just staggering. As Andy Ihnatko put it:

The world does not OWE you Season 1 of “Game Of Thrones” in the form you want it at the moment you want it at the price you want to pay for it. If it’s not available under 100% your terms, you have the free-and-clear option of not having it.

It has even gotten to the point where when a company does ship something that is available anywhere you want it, for the lowest possible cost, at any time, as much as you want – people still complain that there are credits. That’s right. God forbid we acknowledge the people took time to make the product you are marathon watching because its-just-that-good to devote 13 straight hours to over a weekend.

I love this argument – “Give us what we want, when we want it, how we want it, and for the price we’re willing to pay for it and we’ll happily hand over our money for it.”

This doesn’t sound ”comically selfish” – it is selfish. First, the problem was not being able to get the content we wanted when we wanted it. Then, came the laments about pricing. How dare seasons of television cost anything more than [INSERT ARBITRARY NUMBER I REMOVED FROM MY RECTUM]!

Now, people are getting their panties in a twist over having to sit through opening credits? Where does it end? At what point does this blatant selfishness turn into, “I hate this actor/these mushy love scenes/this director. If you remove all of that, I’ll be beating down your door to give you money, then complaining some more.”

-CuriousRat

Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”

Today I stopped by LACMA because I heard they were doing a screening of “The Clock”. The concept of this film art piece is pretty entertaining.

The Clock is a 24 hour film by Christian Marclay. It is made up of clips from other movies with clocks/watches/timepieces in them. And whatever time is on the screen it is in real life. So, the film runs in real time. The film starts at noon and runs through the next day at noon.

Part of the review from The New Yorker:

For those who haven’t managed to make it to “The Clock,” it’s back in New York City, through August 1st, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, and it’s one of those things you have to see. There’s no story in “The Clock,” just a carefully assembled series of film clips featuring clocks and watches, synced to real time (12:12 in life is 12:12 in the film), for twenty-four hours—a cinematic timepiece. The installation seats a limited number of people, so you can expect lines, but waiting in line for a movie about time—a piece that has no beginning or end, only arbitrary points of entrance and exit—seems fitting. I was ready to be skeptical, having heard so much about the piece’s brilliance—might it not feel like a one-liner, in the end?—but the charms of “The Clock” are real. And there are many of them.

But for all the brilliant visual pleasures here, the most significant thing about “The Clock” is its sound editing. Marclay has made a movie that at once draws endless attention to its own artificiality and ruthlessly forces us to submit to it. Watch “The Clock” and you’ll be reminded that we’re crude creatures, craving suspense and narrative, however sophisticated we think we are. All Marclay has to do is rig the music from one clip this way or that, raise the volume, and our hearts leap, or fall, or contract in fear. A techno beat layered over Chaplin fussing with a clock’s hands gets our pulses racing, makes us wonder, what’s coming? What’s going to happen to the wife of the bank manager? Will she be shot, as the thieves have threatened? More than ever aware of artifice, we remain just as deeply (or perhaps more deeply than ever) under its power. It’s a delightful conundrum.

Ultimately, “The Clock” is a signature artwork of our archival age, a testament to the pleasures of mechanization (and now digitization). It’s an experience, I suspect, that would be nearly entirely illegible to an eighteenth-century time traveller who, curious what modern-day New Yorkers were all wound up about, wandered into line. “The Clock,” with its obsessive compiling, its miniature riffs, its capacious comic and dramatic turns, speaks to the completist lurking in all of present-day us. If montage is usually as cheaply sweet as Asti Spumante, “The Clock” is Champagne: it’s what the form was invented for, it turns out. Drink it in deeply, and the days just might go on forever.

None of what I saw in “The Clock” felt tragic, despite the work’s obsessive preoccupation with the materiality of time, and its endless ticking away toward an end. While death suffuses the piece, its primary effect is to make the viewer feel an ongoing nostalgia for the present. It’s a funny film: a collage that’s also a kind of Duchampian ready-made. It’s both its parts and the sum of it. Like a Swiss watch whose insides are exposed, it lets us stare, transfixed, at its moving parts, which can’t be stopped.

Unfortunately, the film is not available online, but to give you a concept of this here is a clip I found on YouTube:

I only stayed for around an hour. If it comes by your town make sure you check it out for a little while.

Los Angeles at Night

Described by Rich as “a three minute tour through the City of Angels,” the video, “NightFall,” captures the beauty of our town in transition from sun to moon to the tune of M83′s “Echoes of Mine.” Rich waxes poetic about L.A. and his year-long plus creative process in the Vimeo credits:

Nightfall in particular is my favorite time to shoot time lapse. Capturing the transition from day to night while looking back at the city as the purple shadow of Earth envelopes the eastern skyline and the warm distant twinkling halogen lights spark to life and give the fading sun a run for her money- this will never grow old or boring to me.

Manufacturing Meaning

No doubt you have seen your friends posting photos on various picture sharing sites that look like they were taken with an old 70s camera, or a polaroid. But you were in the photo. You know they used their iphone to take that picture. What’s the deal?

Due to the popularity of smartphones, there has been an explosion of “faux-vintage” apps that apply a filter to pictures you taken and make your normal looking photographs look vintage. I have commented several times how much I loathe these fake photos. We all are very interested in how many megapixels our cameras and cameraphones have so that we can get crisp, true, vivid images. Then we run them through filters so they look crummy. Beyond that simple gripe, it also seems to me there was something desperate about trying to make our pictures look interesting, maybe because we felt they weren’t important or interesting enough on their own.

A dissertation essay (stay with me – its really cool, I wish my dissertation was half as interesting as this) discusses the phenomenon of Faux-Vintage Photography and tries to examine why these apps are so popular.

The author comes up with two theories, but equally intriguing.

Grasping for Authenticity

What I want to argue is that the rise of the faux-vintage photo is an attempt to create a sort of “nostalgia for the present,” an attempt to make our photos seem more important, substantial and real. We want to endow the powerful feelings associated with nostalgia to our lives in the present. And, ultimately, all of this goes well beyond the faux-vintage photo; the momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past.

He argues that technology has made taking pictures and cataloging our daily lives with photos has become easier than ever. I am willing to bet you have a camera within 3 feet of you right now. Therefore, because it is so easy to take pictures, especially compared to the past, we have a desire to make our photos stand out. We can do this by adding these vintage filters. For one, it changes the image from just the normal static image you see in most pose-smile-click photos. Second, it make the photos look like those old style pictures. The kind you had to take to a photo shop and wait an hour to develop. You only took photos of important things, because you had film that ran out. And you had to go pay to get it developed. We are trying to impart that same importance to our largely disposable pictures.

I submit that we have chosen to create and view faux-vintage photos because they seem more authentic and real. One does not need to be consciously aware of this when choosing the filter, hitting the “like” button on Facebook or reblogging on Tumblr. We have associated authenticity with the style of a vintage photo because, previously, vintage photos wereactually vintage. They stood the test of time, they described a world past, and, as such, they earned a sense of importance.

The two problems with this are that, of course, they aren’t authentic. They are imitating authenticity. They are, like the author writes, like those 50s style diners that crop up in suburbs now. An imitation of a bygone era, trying to briefly grasp a cherished time in a way that is too self aware.

Nostalgia for the Present

His other argument is a bit wider in its implications. He describes how as a society, we are constantly cataloging our lives, not really living them anymore. I am guilty of this myself. Instead of enjoying a moment, a sunset, a good meal, a concert – we take a picture, or check in, or tweet it, or record it.

The rise of faux-vintage photography demonstrates a point that can be extrapolated to documentation on social media writ large: social media users have become always aware of the present as a potential document to be consumed by others. Facebook fixates the present as always a future past. Be it through status updates on Twitter, geographical check-ins on Foursquare, reviews on Yelp, those Instagram photos or all of the other self-documentation possibilities afforded to us by Facebook, we view our world more than ever before through what I like to call “documentary vision.”

Documentary vision is kind of like the “camera eye” photographers develop when, after taking many photos, they begin to see the world as always a potential photo even when not holding the camera at all. The habit of the photographer involuntarily framing and composing the world has become a metaphor for those trained to document using social media. The explosion of ubiquitous self-documentation possibilities, and the audience for our documents that social media promises, has positioned us to live life in the present with the constant awareness of how it will be perceived as having already happened. We come to see what we do as always a potential document, imploding the present with the past, and ultimately making us nostalgic for the here and now.

The faux-vintage app helps us to reclaim a bit of this. It reminds us of the analog limitations of life. It makes things imperfect.

His closing is an especially interesting point – and is often the crest and downfall of all trends. Eventually those things that make us “different” and “cool” become mainstream. Enough people have them, and you no longer are set apart, but a part of the crowd.

Most damming for Hipstamatic and Instagram is that these apps tend to make everyone’s photos look similar. In an attempt to make oneself look distinct and special through the application of vintage-producing filters, we are trending towards photos that look the same. The Hipstamatic photo was new and interesting, is currently a fad, and it will come to (or, already has?) look too posed, too obvious, and trying too hard (especially if the parents of the current users start to post faux-vintage photos themselves).

Do you use these apps, such as Instagram or Hipstamatic? Why do you use them?