Millionaire or Artist? You Decide: Is the World Binary?

Robert Scoble fields questions after Forbes bestows Net celebrity status:

Anonymous: "“I’m very honored to be #9 on that list…”

“Personally, I’d rather give up my spot on that list to someone who actually DID something for the Web.”

Well, which one is it?"

Robert: Both. The world is not binary.

I fielded a question from a pro photographer upset that I'd used his image on my blog. I tried to explain that I was an advocate for artists, and if I wanted to steal the image I certainly would not have intentionally hyperlinked to their site.

I told him to check out novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow widely quoted essay on art in the digital, remix age: Giving It Away. 

Someday soon I may write a Letter to a Young Artist, Musician, Filmmaker, Poet, Creative Fill-in-Blank in the Digital Remix Age post. (Give it a shot yourself.)

Ironic ain't it, that in the DIGITAL remix Age, the number one truism - that is, if you're not into S&M and friction - will be to drop the BINARY view.

A recent Anselm Kiefer exhibit at the SF MOMA deeply influenced me on multiple levels. At first I didn't regard the work as 'colorful' enough to suit my taste. Heck he even mixes gray ash into his paint. Although it didn't meet my preconceived notion of what I like in art, Kiefer won me over and there's no denying its colossal power. It clicked for me when I read a Kiefer quote that said he didn't see the world as black and white. Aha, the grays.

My preference is to affiliate only with artists that see for themselves. Artists that don't take on rote binary views. Artists that don't take on anything handed down from anyone else: (that includes anything I write.)

Money is one of those touchy binary spaces. It may not be obvious but the hoarding view is very binary: there is enough for me, or there is enough for you.

Another binary view is that whole madonna or whore dichotomy too. But don't get me started, it's way way too big to touch on today. (That's my way of explaining the Cecily Brown obsession today.) She is one vivacious artist ("10 Artists That Every Man Should Know") that defies neat categorization.

There's an insidious binary view in media too. "It is a journalistic canard that there are two “sides” to every “story”," said Stowe Boyd recently.

Two sides to every story? That's in a nutshell was precisely why I could not be a citizen journalist. I didn't know that going in though.

Taking bites from a seared tuna salad special at 21st Amendment with Stowe recently I was recounting why I had never really been able to write the 'real' meat from my tsunami one-year-later 9-week trek.

Absolutely nothing boiled down to sound bites. In a fifteen minute interview it seemed easy to discern clear-cut villians and clear-cut heroes. Yet I spent way too much time there. A keen observer, I saw the deep flaws in the people and institutions that at first glance glowed saintly.

It was one of the hardest experiences of my life to reconcile the good, bad, and the ugly all in one. It was one of the hardest things to reconcile, because in the end, I fell in love with them anyway imperfections or not.

Stowe listened intently and like any artist knew because he replied, "When does dawn begin?"

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. - Pablo Picasso

Bonus: Currently savoring Broken Screen: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative. I love it and highly recommend to nonlinear nonbinary types and those venturing beyond the black and white.

From the book: "It's amazing to create something. There's that moment that happens when you see something and you become aware that you are the first person to ever see it." - art director and designer Pablo Ferro

and "It is about losing certainty, about not knowing anymore, or knowing too much to handle and then the real film starts, the inner film." - installation artist Carsten Holler

and  "I'm more interested in looking for the transitory than in producing a conclusion. In traveling in the here and now without going anywhere." - artist Pierre Huyghe

p.s. Email's subject line: I still don't know who you are

a reader writes: "I read the blogs and I still don't know who you are.  I can tell that you are a broad-based consumer and culture savvy observer of the post-modern world.  But, aside from liking tea and the psuedo-spiritual-metaphysical, who are you?  In what are you grounded?"

Wondeful! I'm succeeding: My blog's sole purpose for breathing is turning that question over to you, Who are you?

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso

It doesn't matter who I am. The whole celebrity propaganda has serenaded us into living vicariously through others. Live, see, taste, feel, love, frolic, knead bread, fingerpaint, touch for your self.

I'm grounded in the present. I'm grounded in unbridled curiousity. I'm grounded in direct experience. Anything else is obsolete as soon as I hit "Publish" on this post.

...Alright, alright, you can read this obsolete "About" page ;-) too.

shamelessly 'stolen' images Hugh MacLeod's cartoon; Cecily Brown's New Louboutin Pumps, Cecily Brown's Pyjama Game

Comments

[Loofa]

Most of us like to simplify, despite the fact that there is so much more to see. Despite the grays, we still usually lean towards the things that draw us in most. And describing those grays is challenging.

By the way, I don't know who you are, but I like you, anyway. You devour a lot, not like a glutton but like a person who is interested in tasting many different things, and sometimes you present your tastes in ways that seem hurried. It can be overwhelming, but anyone who has spent some time here will get a sense of who you are. And even if we never know, the questions that you raise are, like the things you love (imperfections or not), also part of that gray area that we still like to see.

[Nick Smith]

Prrrrrrrrrr.... I like you too! :-)

[isabel gallagher]

I love reading your blog!

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Thanks for the kind words Loofa, Nick and Isabel.

Yes there is an overwhelming amount in my blog, yet I don't go out of my way to see and find things to write about. It just is what is available, what comes into my sphere at the time.

Something in the 'simplify' I'd like to say. Not exactly what you said, but maybe what your thought triggered.

People might be appalled how simple my life is. I chuck conventional ideas around productivity and to-do lists and planning and keeping on top of things.

Categorizing things into bins, especially the good/bad bins, doesn't simplify life, it weighs it down.

I realized how exhausted I was after nine weeks of traveling winter '05/'06. The last two days in Sri Lanka I wanted to simply to get away from the tsunami-ravaged coast. Far from any conversation about disaster and rebirth.

I was drawn to go to Kandy in the highlands of the tea plantations. I was restful in a car ambling past coconut vendors, and women carrying jugs, and then as we climbed women plucking tea leaves into rice bags clamped to their backs on my way to a meditation retreat center for the day.

And all of a sudden I had an epiphany. I realized my exhaustion came from my process of seeing -- I was trying to categorize and judge and measure and interpret and have an opionion and weigh in on whether everything I was seeing meant. Was it good/bad?, black/white?, right/wrong?, day/night?, meaningful/meaningless?, helpful/not helpful?, agreeable/disagreeable?, worthwhile/worthless?, etc.

That realization was a huge release -- physically and pyschically felt a beatific lightness. The most easeful and peaceful thing in the world is to walk through life seeing, period -- the effort comes in feeling you have to layer on any judgments.

[Siona]

Oh my.

Evelyn? That last comment of yours woke something tremendous in me. I've been to the de Young Museum in San Francisco a few times since it opened, and each time have staggered out just exhausted after a few hours. It seemed too much -- too much history and significance and art and meaning and desperate, sincere expression, and my body and brain gasped from the weight of it.

And then, reading your last note made me think more about why it felt so heavy to me, and why I'd emerge so drained. I'd thought before about how I took the project of engaging with each piece, each period, quite seriously, how I'd want to do both it and myself the service of really looking and exploring, but I hadn't considered that I could (ethically) adopt other approaches, or that I could play a little with what dropping the burden of history might feel like.

So thank you, deeply, for this. Thank you.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Siona, You're welcome.

Thinking, "So what do I think about this?" at all turns is wearying and appears to obscure the simple enjoyment of This.

We do it all the time as a matter of habit. And on my one-year post-tsunami trek, I really thought I HAD to since I was going to write about it. Yet observation-as-is is easy, it was casting judgment ABOUT and on top of the sheer observation that gets weighty.

Museums are definitely quite stimulating! I was suffused with a myriad of creative imagery at the SF MOMA bookstore recently that stirred up juices for a video project. Without the layer of opinion/judgment, perception, even quite overwhelming sensory input, has qualities more akin to joy of playing well and exhilaration than exhaustion.

[Evelyn Rodriguez]

Ohhh, I just read this. Very apropos:

"Now, you are learning something fundamental - how to exist before the mind. You are learning how to be present before a thought arises on the screen of consciousness." - Aziz Kristof