For his fourth collaboration with the company, Mr. Arsham, an artist who has designed sets, lighting and costumes for Merce Cunningham, will fill the Park Avenue Armory with “clouds” of colored spheres; the design will be used in the company’s final performances, on Dec. 29 to 31 at the armory.

I have written several times about the significant impact of my encounter with everyone in the Company (including the musicians John Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma) in the summer of 1968. This was the first time I learned to appreciate the nature of Cunningham’s repertoire; and one work that had particular impact on me was “Rainforest.” Cunningham would frequently apply “naturalistic” names to abstract compositions of choreography, probably knowing full well that they would shape impressions, rather the way a crystal fragment can “seed” a much larger crystal structure when dropped into a supersaturated solution of the appropriate molecules. “Rainforest” was a perfect example of this principle of “induced meaning.”

That induction was due, in no small part, to the décor. You cannot have a rainforest without clouds; and, for this choreography, those “clouds” were designed by Andy Warhol as oversized aluminized Mylar pillows inflated with helium, some (but not all) of which were anchored by weights. (It turns out that they were not oversized enough. I first saw “Rainforest” in Boulder, Colorado. During rehearsal the Company discovered that, at more than a mile above sea level, the specific gravity of the pillows was greater than that of the air. They all sank to the stage floor; and it took some amazingly well-coordinated support action to make sure that larger pillows would be ready in time for the performance.)

I have no idea whether or not Arsham’s clouds were intended in the spirit of homage to Warhol’s past relationship with the Dance Company. As may be seen on Arsham’s Web site, these clouds are decidedly different in structure; and I have no idea whether the balloons that form them cohere (like the skin of a Warhol pillow) or break apart over time (like the droplets of water in a real cloud). Nevertheless, I suspect that anyone bringing a rich memory of the Cunningham repertoire at the final concert will experience at least of tinge of memory when encountering clouds among the dancers again.

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

Net News Publisher for World News

The buyer was a private American collector.

The painting, in brilliant tones of blue and green and measuring 22 x 22 inches, is one of only four Flowers paintings from this year recorded by The Andy Warhol Foundation archive, and this is a record price for a 1978 Flowers painting. The work has been in a private German collection for many years.

Hans Neuendorf, chief executive officer of artnet, commented, “This sale confirms what we have maintained for a long time at artnet—that art buyers are willing to buy high-end artworks online.”

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andy warhol foundation for visual art sold 1989 flower

Individual terror is based on the conviction that history is made by emperors, kings, and presidents; a conviction that is shared by emperors, kings, and presidents. No bomb thrower can change the great and anonymous social forces: the technical and industrial potential, the aggregate conditions of the classes, the relationships of wealth to the lack of it and the administrative apparatus. It is for this reason that no modern assassin has become truly famous; even the two gunmen of Sarajevo were only pawns in a larger game. The actions of bomb throwers remain anecdotal.

This view of the late nineteenth century contrasts with current conditions in some interesting ways. In the brave new world of globalization, emperors and kings have been replaced by chief executive officers; and presidents are more beholden to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund than they are to their constituents. Those “anonymous social forces” persist; but the targets of frustration and rage have shifted. Meanwhile, the media have given the terrorists a greater crack at fame, usually for more than Andy Warhol’s allotment of fifteen minutes. Thus, the leaders of al-Qaeda are as concerned with “media presence,” consistent with consciousness industry principles, as they are with their ideological positions.

Also, Enzensberger is not as dismissive of that final sentence in the above quotation as one might think. He begins his next paragraph as follows:

Anecdotes, however, if they have a fine point, can be more expressive than whole volumes.

It seems to me that one of the consequences of consciousness industry thinking is that such anecdotes can be just as expressive even when their points are blunt, if not downright slovenly. I happened to come across a remark by Dame Judi Dench that today’s actors are so concerned with “expression” that they no longer master the nuts and bolts of basic acting technique. This seems corollary to a media industry determined to get volumes of coverage out of anecdotes without worrying about more mundane matters like accurate description and comprehensive exposition. In other words the consciousness industry fertilizes the ground for the terrorists, all in the interests of their own business growth!

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

Net News Publisher for World News

The best way to approach this essay is through its most extended case study of an author who, in the midst of a global obsession with the Internet, has succeeded (at least for now) in the good old-fashioned world of print publication:

Take, for example, Jonathan Littell, the Franco-American author of The Kindly Ones, a 900 page Holocaust novel that won the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française and Prix Goncourt in France, and which the News Corp owned Harper Collins paid $1 million for the privilege of exclusively distributing in the American market.

Littell is a good example of a cultural aristocrat in the analog ancien regime, a writer acclaimed by high-end cultural curators for his “talent”. Last February, for example, he was interviewed by Jeffrey Trachtenberg, the book reviewer of The Wall Street Journal. “Will you come to the U.S. to promote your book?” Trachtenberg asked him.

“No,” Littell replied, disdainfully. “I don’t do that kind of thing. I don’t consider it my job.”

So what, exactly, is the “job” of an artist like Jonathan Littell? Historically, at least since the industrial revolution of the mid 19th century, his commercial function has been to create art that would then be manufactured and sold on the mass-market by his publisher. For the last 150 years, there existed a clear division of labor between a Littell who created art and his mass-market publisher who printed and sold copies of the finished product.

Over the last twenty years, however, an interconnected trinity of technological, cultural and ideological events have revolutionized the mass-market copy economy:

1. The appearance of the Internet as a global platform for the creation and distribution of content.

2. A broad legitimacy crisis of the traditional copy economy, both in terms of its economic and cultural value.

3. The ideological assault on the supposedly “elitist” idea of talent and of the role of cultural gatekeepers in the discovery and development of high-end artists like Jonathan Littell.

It is important to begin with this emphasis on the word “job.” Keen frames this word in the context of a commodity that is first created and then mass-produced for the sake of marketing and sales, where a division of labor exists between these two phases in the life cycle of the commodity. He then illustrates how his “interconnected trinity of technological, cultural and ideological events” has strained this life-cycle model to an extent that it may now be just shy of its breaking point.

Using this context as his point of departure, Keen plays out an argument that culminates in the following conclusion:

Thus, Jonathan “I don’t consider it my job” Littell is absolutely wrong. For better or worse, the reverse is actually now true. The job of all artists is now self-promotion. In an age in which the old cultural gatekeepers are being swept away, the most pressing challenge of creative artists is to build their own brands. And it’s the Internet which provides creative talent with easy-to-use and cheap tools for their self-promotion.

In other words, because Internet technology has all but blown away everything in the life-cycle concerned with mass-production and traditional practices of marketing and sales, all that remains is the creation of the commodity and the need for the creator to promote that creation. From a lexical point of view, Keen has argued that the very concept of “job” must change to accommodate the new practices of that world the Internet has made.

There is, unfortunately, a problem with this conclusion; and that problem is well known to researchers whose work can only be sustained through frequent infusions of grant money. Like the artists that Keen has in mind, these researchers must devote large portions of their time to promoting their projects. Without that promotion, there will be no support through grants. If you build it, there is no guarantee that the Ford Foundation (or the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health or any of the funding agencies under the Department of Defense) will come. Indeed, it is all but certain that, unless you promote what you have built, none of these agencies will come, since they are too busy responding to other efforts that have put more time into promotion.

This is where the problem arises: When does the researcher have the time to figure out what “it” is (even before worrying about building it), if the “necessary work” has more to do with promotion than with research itself? Often the answer is that the researcher does not have the time and is therefore obliged to “outsource” the research to others: The researcher must become the “chief executive” of a laboratory workplace whose “job” has become managing that workplace by directing its activities and providing the necessary resources for those activities. In other words the necessity of promotion forces the researcher to give up being a researcher!

The analogy should be obvious: The artist whose job has become self-promotion is likely to be so consumed by that task that no time is left to be an artist. If Keen’s argument is either true or eventually emerges as true in the world of the creative arts, then the model for creation may well be that of Andy Warhol’s Factory (in which case posterity may remember Warhol more for his economic foresight than for any of his work that now hangs on museum and gallery walls).

For now I am willing to leave any examination of the moral consequences of Keen’s vision as an exercise for the reader. What interests me more is that this model may extend well beyond the work of creative artists. After all, in the grand scheme of things, the impact of the Internet on the work practices of creative artists may be little more than a side show (even if it is a side show of considerable personal interest). More important is the world of work in general, particularly as envisaged by those Internet evangelists who see a future in which we all hang our shingles out on Web pages and wait for the work to come to us. Those who follow this advice are not that different from creative artists and will quickly discover that they, too, must heed Keen’s advice: Without extensive self-promotion, work will not come. The irony, of course, is that, as any form of promotion depends more and more on getting good page rank and buying the most strategic keywords, promotion for the sake of creating art will become no different than promotion for any other form of employment. Marshall McLuhan’s “Bali ideal” will have been fulfilled: We shall no longer have art; we shall all just do things as best as we can.

McLuhan’s vision, however, neglected to tell us that most people on Bali, who do things as best as they can, spend most of their time doing things like growing their own food, making their own clothing, and building their own shelters. Tightly coupled to all three of those practices is an extensive framework of religious rites that organize life on every scale from day-to-day up to year-to-year. As Paul Goodman pointed out in his Growing Up Absurd essays, ours is a culture in which work is not so directly coupled to providing food, clothing, and shelter. McLuhan’s ideal is a pretty picture; but it does not “fit” the context of the industrialized world in which most Internet users reside. Thus, while Keen’s model may readily extrapolate from the creative artist to anyone else trying to earn a living through work, it is far from clear that it will sustain anyone, whether that happens to be Joe the Plumber getting customers through the Internet or Jonathan Littell trying to work on his next book. Now the reader can start considering questions of moral consequences!

Posted by Stephen Smoliar

Net News Publisher for World News

This collection is an explosion of all rules associated with saris it reduces the age of a sari by a whole generation. He has expressed the various moods and images of everyday life in the form of contemporary fashion. For example, love is the message, expressed in playful hearts carefully hand painted in a multitude of colors; or simply the word ‘love’ in iconic 60′s stencil typographic style in full color or crisp black n white.

There are classic Warhol style iconic prints of bollywood greats, and in keeping with the branding sensibility, depicting his illustrious father and creator of the brand Satya Paul. In the Lichtenstein inspired creations, brightly colored pop graphics and brush strokes. To deliver the full burst of newness into the age-old drape, prints with barcodes, money, lips, Bollywood icons, and even Google have been given a place in fashion history by way of these prints. He says “It is the Satya Paul style expressed in the bold iconic pop style through an interplay of colors, balanced by embroideries and materials.”

Starting in the 50′s, Pop art is a reflection of popular culture in art. It is neither praise nor condemnation but explores the everyday imagery that is so much a part of contemporary consumer culture. This art form has used media, advertising, packaging, celebrities and comic book art styles as various sources of imagery. Some notable artists of the style include Richard Hamilton, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol has painted the things he loved the most, such as Dollar Bills, Campbell Soup Cans, Marilyn Monroe, brand names and even celebrities as a token of his love for them. Roy Lichtenstein had said, “Pop Art is industrial painting.” He believed that the entire world would soon become industrial. Robert Indiana related pop with love “Pop is love, for it accepts everything. Pop is dropping the bomb.”The collection comprises saris, salwar-kameez sets and dresses, and is available at select Satya Paul boutiques across the country.

Source: www.satyapaul.com Net News Publisher