Culture

Art vs. Illustration: Shepard Fairey, Art and Technology

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There’s a Shepard Fairey discussion starting on the Facebook page of Arts on the Block, a community arts organization for teens in Montgomery County, Maryland.

AOB leads off the discussion:

The author of a New York Times article on Shepard Fairey – the artist whose portrait of Barack Obama (now on view at the Portrait Gallery here in DC) became the iconic symbol of the campaign- claims that Mr. Fairey is less like art and more like “a canny illustration of what everyone already knows.” What do YOU think?

I responded:

I think that when the author puts what Fairey does in those terms, he’s defining art based on the technologies and practices he’s accustomed to thinking about, rather than allowing the visual image to speak for itself.

That is, he calls Fairey’s work “illustration” because it begins with photographic images and ends with software, rather than beginning with beginning with an image in “the mind’s eye” and ending with “hardware,” the painter’s array of brushes and paints and canvases and so on.

These kinds of claims fail to understand where the human artistic touch enters into the equation. Fairey still has to understand color and composition, for example. And he has to understand his complex software as well as any painter understands his or her hardware. Just as importantly, he has to understand the cultural context of his images better than most artists do.

It’s worth noting that people made the same kinds of claims about photography, yelling that it’s not an art because the human hand need not intervene (much). This debate went on for many decades, until Ansel Adams drove the last nail into that coffin. I hope Fairey does the same for these digital techniques.

I would add here just some further fuel to the fire, from “a critique by artist Mark Vallen” who charges Fairey, mainly, with plagiarism):

What initially disturbed me about the art of Shepard Fairey is that it displays none of the line, modeling and other idiosyncrasies that reveal an artist’s unique personal style. His imagery appears as though it’s xeroxed or run through some computer graphics program; that is to say, it is machine art that any second-rate art student could produce.

Comment at the AOB page (click “Discussions”) or here.

Where Do I Make this Joke?: Facebook-Twitter Integration & a Problem of Social Media

devangoldstein2 Comments

Last night, Jay had a few of us over to play cards. He tweeted:

Jay is waiting for the gentlemen to show up.

This morning, I @replied:

@thebristolkid Gentlemen? I guess you waited all night.

The joke’s a little predictable, a little modally antiquated, sure. But that’s not the point. I saw Jay’s status on Twitter, but I also saw it on Facebook. There, Jay has the Twitter app set his status when he tweets (as do I). So, his tweet about waiting for us to arrive updated his Facebook status more or less immediately.

The point, then, is this: The appearance of Jay’s message in more than one place—and the ways that such multiplicity positions me in relation to Jay and others—reveals one of the peculiarities of online social media, their simultaneously collaborative and competitive aspects.

We’ll get there by looking quickly at my reaction to seeing this message in many places and at the different roles of Twitter and Facebook status updates (in my life, at least). We’ll then consider the differences between online and offline mediators of our social relationships, and finally the two aspects of social media that motivate this post, perhaps best conceived as intersecting pressures on individual online services or platforms.

Perhaps an hour after I @tweeted Jay, when I got around to Facebooking this morning, I saw his status, and, in it, a missed opportunity. See, I meant my joke mostly for Jay, but like so much online comedy, I also meant it to have a public or semi-public aspect. That is, it might have been nice for someone else involved with our card game to see it and to respond. None of those people is on Twitter, though some are on Facebook.

Moreover, I might have liked for some friends who aren’t involved with our game, who may not even know Jay, to see the joke. I’m surely not the only one who’s identified a performative aspect to his social media behaviors; it seems to me that, among other ways, jokes like these function to complement or reinforce my meatspace persona. In a way, I want people who aren’t in on the joke to become in on the joke so that they can better understand who I am and how I think about the world. (Really.)

Given that I have far more friends on Facebook than I do followers on Twitter, should I have held off on making the joke on Twitter, and waited until I made my way to Facebook? Should I have re-posted it on Facebook, violating that strange but compelling prohibition on repeating a joke before the same audience (if not on repeating a joke at all, at least without acknowledging its travels)?

It might be nice if there were a way to tell the Twitter app on Facebook that, hey, that dude I follow on Twitter is this dude on Facebook. Then, it could ask that dude for permission to post my Twitter @replies as comments to his status messages, and we’d be off. (Such a configuration would no doubt require like nine databases and three APIs that don’t and maybe can’t exist.)

Then again, it might not be nice at all. The more I think about it, the more I think my uses for Twitter and for my Facebook status differ—or at least, should differ. Twitter “feels” more directed towards two-way communication—this despite the @reply’s absence from the service’s original conception (Twitter-blog post and napkin-sketch). One’s Facebook status, though it may draw replies, seems more about one-to-many transmission, less about soliciting a response.

My perception of this difference may derive from just how few Twitterers I follow, and how few follow me, as compared to my Facebook friends. That is, on Facebook, it would be as unlikely for others to comment regularly on my status as it is that I will comment on theirs; my Twitter circle is more intimate.

Still, I won’t remove the Twitter app; I continue to want my tweets reflected in my Facebook status. It’s not just that I’m lazy. It’s also that some of the value of these new-ish media forms derives from the knowledge that one has configured one’s digital life in ways that are compatible with those digital lives it intersects, at least for me. The upshot of my decision, though, is a lingering dissatisfaction with every tweet on the terms I’ve sketched here: Each is either too transmissional for Twitter or too solicitational (of a response) for Facebook.

However unique this situation, or idiosyncratic my response to it, it does belie a larger problem of social media. And it’s important that I don’t say “problem with”: I’m not criticizing, just critiquing.

For comparison’s sake, our offline interactions with each other are structured by lots of different institutions, among them school, work, coffee shop, club, public transportation, and movie theatre, depending on your inclinations.

The online institutions that mediate our relationships, if no less powerful, are far more transparent. I know more or less exactly how Facebook will shape my contact with Jay before I sign up, because Facebook has been designed with that purpose made explicit. This transparency creates a marketplace: We choose among competing platforms based on our conscious ideas and expectations about each.

This may be less true for very early adopters, to be fair; that a group of early Twitterers created the @reply without regard for the built-in purposes of the service—and that the service then assimilated the @reply—shows just how much power can come from the ground up. Still, at the moment in which one creates a Twitter account, I suspect the rule is that one expects to participate within the bounds of prescription.

An armchair Foucauldian analysis might tell you that each of the offline institutions works just the same, that spatial configurations and designations of authority have been implemented—perhaps no less by design—in order to shape social relations. Even if this is so, though, these functions are so obscured that it takes a Foucault to expose them in the first place. We participate in these institutions for reasons far more complex, entangled, and at times unconscious than those that motivate our signups online.

The problem, then, is this: The free-market competition among social media platforms and their underlying collaborational ideology—best demonstrated by the obligatority of the API—may be fundamentally incompatible, or at least, only partially resolved. The partial integration of Twitter and Facebook illustrates the conflict. The existence of a Twitter Facebook app is a foregone conclusion. Yet, in order to remain different, to remain competitive, the two can’t be integrated completely.

If my suggestion for a total (or more total) integration were implemented, the differences between tweeting and setting one’s Facebook status, between @replying and commenting, would be two: first, default privacy settings, which we can read as the developers’ ideas about who should see one platform’s version of the same message, and about how that behavioral aspect of the platform should shape our interactions with one another. Still, a user can (and many users do) override these settings on Twitter and, with considerably granular control, on Facebook.

Second, with more significant interplay between Twitter and Facebook, the choice of interface would remain as a difference. But even within either site, one already has dozens of options for tweeting or updating one’s status—not just from the computer, but from the phone, too. A list of applications for interacting with Twitter makes the head spin.

Finally, even in this hypothetical circumstance, brand recognition would still play. One benefit of affiliating oneself with a particular platform is that the affiliation is public. That is, for a variety of social reasons, one may want it known that one is a Twitterer. One may also be motivated professionally; I originally signed up for Facebook, for example, so as to be better able to advise higher education clients on its potential utility in their marketing efforts.

This last factor seems the most crucial difference that would remain, to be sure. But if Twitter and Facebook’s status feature were made virtually identical, I doubt that Twitter could remain important. That is, I think that although Twitter would continue to exist, it could not do so as more than a badge, an obligatory statement of one’s partaking in a certain broad movement.

The point I want to make here is just this: There are non-parallel forces—collaboration and competition—that press against social media platforms. Under certain circumstances, these forces can also come to press against us. In this context, we must look closely at the intertwining of our relationships and platforms. That is, if we’re better off after careful critiques of our classrooms, prisons, and cube farms, then we ought to derive similar benefits from thorough examination of our online institutions. I hope to have begun to provide a small example of how this might work.

Disgust Science, Disgusting Journalism

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I’ve just read on LiveScience.com that “[b]ooks are just as powerful as movies” at triggering “delight, pain, or disgust” reactions in the brain. As is so often the case on LiveScience, this gripping opening represents a kind of yellow science journalism that has intensified its hold on the popular imagination in the last few years.

For one thing, in the single study writer Andrea Thompson discusses, a team of Dutch scientists (Jabba et al.) set out to test the triggering of disgust by various stimuli: print, motion picture, foul-tasting beverage. The study concerns disgust exclusively; there’s no hint of delight or pain in it, or for the rest of the article.

Moreover, contrary to what’s suggested by the article’s title—”Books Still Rival Movies For Stirring Emotions”—the scientists themselves make no quantitative comparison between the power of books and movies. That is, nobody’s saying “just as powerful” besides Thompson, not in their interviews or in the study. The parts of the study discussed on LiveScience.com only show that similar responses can be generated from various stimuli.

Finally, those portions of the study absent from the article in fact show deep differences among the responses generated by the stimuli. Let’s take a closer look at its methods to see why and how these differences emerge. At stake is not only a better understanding of the study, but the success or failure of the LiveScience article as a piece of science journalism.

First, participants in the study were shown three-second films of a disgust reaction: A person on the screen takes a drink and then appears disgusted. There were also control films showing pleasurable and neutral responses. As they watched, an fMRI machine captured changes in blood flow to various regions of their brain. During the disgust clips, these included an increase in activity in the region that injury and other studies suggest is a crucial part of the disgust reaction. (Jabba et al., 2)
One of the team members describes the next step in Thompson’s article:

“Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios. […] For instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth.”

In both cases, as well as a third in which the subjects tasted something, well, disgusting, the anterior insula and adjacent frontal operculum lit up the fMRI. (Jabba et al., 3-4) So, we conclude, books are as effective at provoking disgust as movies, right?

Not a chance. There are crucial differences between a three-second clip of a man taking a drink and then experiencing disgust and the process of reading and imagining a scenario like the one described above, and similar differences between participants’ reactions to the two stimuli.

First, the clips and the written scenarios differ in duration. The scripts given to the participants took much longer than three seconds to read and process; the study gives the reading times as 35 seconds (2). That the scripts required so much more time than the clips to induce the desired reaction belies any suggestion that the former are “just as powerful” as the latter.

Second, the clips and the scripts differ in terms of the depth of the empathetic reaction they allow. Reading a disgusting scenario and imagining oneself in that scenario seems much more likely to trigger deep emotional reaction than just seeing a face on-screen for three seconds (mirror neurons be damned). The study confirms this differing depth; the greatest average change to the fMRI signal during clip viewing was about 0.1%, compared to about .66% for the script-reading portions of the experiment (figs. 1b and 1c, page 3).

And of course, these clips don’t replicate the experience of watching a “movie.” Typically, narrative and generic context as well as cinematic style and technique allow or assist viewers in developing empathic responses to persons on-screen. All of that is absent or extremely limited in a laboratory setting, and in the films themselves. (You can find stills of the clips in another study, requiring a paid subscription or institutional access.)

Are these problems with the study? Or just with the reporting? The study’s abstract ends:

[T]his shared region however [sic] was found to be embedded in distinct functional circuits during the three modalities, suggesting why observing, imagining and experiencing an emotion feels so different. (1)

In other words, the study acknowledges the apples-to-oranges nature of the comparisons between the different stimuli-response pairs, even as it shows their similarities. So what do we make of LiveScience’s expansion of the conversation from the realm of clips and scripts to that of “movies” and “books”?

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with science reporting in its current state—and not just on the web—is the indiscriminate use of the facts in the service of stories with artificially inflated “wow” factors. There’s a diminished ethical standard for much science journalism, in which obfuscation, equivocation, and fallacious conclusion or conjecture are all widely accepted, or at least routinely tolerated. By looking closely at one article and the study it concerns, I hope to have shown some of the problems to which this climate can lead.

Alisa Miller on the US Media

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In an oldish TED talk I just got around to watching, Alisa Miller, CEO of Public Radio International, begins with an argument I agree with: that US media coverage is heavily weighted towards the trivial and towards a limited range of international stories, and that this is some kind of problem.

But as she goes on, our points of view diverge sharply. She asks, rhetorically, why this problem has come to be, and answers: “The reality is, is that [sic] covering Britney is cheaper” than covering international news. This may be so, but it’s probably more relevant that covering Britney makes way more money.

Let’s go with an overwraught analogy, comparing Britney and international coverage to two very different movies that I love: Halloween (1978) and Sideways (2004). According to Box Office Mojo, the first cost $325,000 to make, and has grossed $47,000,000 domestically. But its 8 franchise films have seen a combined domestic gross of another $228,000,000 or so.1 It’s reasonable to think that more cheap sequels and remakes could profit similarly well.

Sideways, on the other hand, cost $16,000,000 to make and grossed $71,000,000 domestically. Not bad, to be sure, and all the talk of a new mid-cap Hollywood model really came out of Sideways‘s success. But it’s reasonable to assume that, after just four years, the well has run more or less dry. Will Sideways keep earning at the pace Halloween and its franchise have? Will there be a sequel? Will there be a genre of thoughtful boys-will-be-bourgeois romps that emerges around the film’s success, in the way that the modern slasher film really emerges out of Halloween‘s?

To paraphrase the 8 ball, all signs point to no. The difference parallels the one Miller points to, between Britney coverage and international stories. It’s not so much about how much cheaper the one is to make—though the difference betwen $325,000 and $16,000,000 is significant, even adjusted for inflation.

Rather, it’s about whether the body of films or news that will emerge from one investment can sustain itself. In Hollywood, the question is answered by moviegoers, represented by box office figures. In the network media, the question is answered, by and large, by the complex relationship between stories, ratings, and advertising dollars. I’m very, very confident that the networks have, with a scientific precision Newton would envy, determined that they can make more money with more Britney than with more international coverage.2

And who’s to blame for this? Ultimately, it’s hard to hold the networks responsible, as Miller wants to. If they buck the viewers, they go into crisis. As I recall, this happened a few years back, amid talk one or all of the network news bureaus might collapse. It seems some combination of viewers with bad priorities and our free-market economy is at fault, and that’s too complex a culprit to support the emotional simplicity of blame.

As Miller asks, “Is this distorted view what we really want for Americans in our increasingly interconnected world?” Of course not. So what do we do? We give to NPR and PRI, we watch and read UK publications, which have (depending on which one you look at), government support or a more internationally-minded audience or both. We identify the problem, as is Miller, in public forums. (I shy away from commending her because she is, after all, CEO of an interested party.) We write on our blogs, talk to our friends, join our FaceBook groups. Is all that enough? It’s hard to know, but what good does blaming the networks do? What ends can come from that line of argument?

1: The production budgets of these other Halloween films are mostly irrelevant. First, they are similarly low with one or two exceptions—for example, Halloween H20, which cost $17,000,000 in 1998 and has already outgrossed the original at $55,000,000+. More to the point, though, as each film can be seen as paying for the next out of its profits. [Back to text]

2: I should note Miller does cite a Pew study in which the percentage of “Americans who say they closely follow global news most of the time grew to over 50%.” But surveys are notoriously unreliable indicators of respondent’s actual preferences and behaviors. If there’s one thing the free market does well, it’s tell us where the real money is to be made. [Back to text]

Who Do You Love?

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I know I’m behind on this one, as I’m just catching up with my feeds after a long busy spell. But I thought I’d relate a little story from when I saw Bo Diddley, in 2000 or 2001.

I caught his act at the Iron Horse in Northampton, a little club that seemed like it held no more than 60 or 70. I was seated at a table that had been set up more or less in the middle of an aisle, with a mom, dad, and daughter in from Boston to visit Amherst.

Bo played included all the songs you’d have wanted him to, but many were made slightly unfamiliar. For example, the classic desert-road hambone haunt, “Who Do You Love,” was an extra-long encore with a jumpy, major-key interlude.

I learned a lot from that song in particular. Bo’s tweaks showed a creative passion—an interest in process, in revision—that, culturally, we don’t often attach to the “classic” blues singers. Which is foolish, of course: Bo, for one, famously designed his own boxy guitar, and . In short, with an attention to traditional craft and a ceaseless drive towards innovation, he helped shepherd the blues into rock ‘n’ roll’s growing hands.

Finally, the classic “touching brush with fame” moment: On a break between sets, I was getting a Coke at the Horse’s back bar. Bo walked up next to me—I heard his boots coming before I saw him—and ordered his drink.

I didn’t want to just stare at him, so I said, “Hey—I really love what you’re doing up there, how you’re changing things.” (I’m sure it came out more clunkily.)

Bo glanced over, smiled, and asked, “Do you play, brother?” Then he paid for my Coke.