& Rember to remember Just wached this again...

Denote refers to the literal thing. If one screams “fuck” when one makes a mistake is one denoting rough
 sexual intercourse? Not likely. To connote is to refer to qualities implied or suggested by that thing, but
 not the thing itself. In trying to apply the above example I am therefore lost — obviously we often use
the F word solely for emphasis…as far as I know when one says, “that’s a big fucking tree” one does
 not imagine the tree engaged in sexual intercourse. So how did “qualities implied or suggested” by sexual
 intercourse become an intensifier, how did a word for sex become a word for adding emphasis?

Parallels

Here are some frames from Blind Spot — Hitler’s Secretary, that is pretty much one long contemporary
 interview with that woman. It is a wonderful example of how we humans can deceive ourselves, delude
 ourselves and blinker ourselves.

Now, of course, she realizes what she had willed herself not to see or admit, just as now many people
(many less than previously) refuse to admit what the Bush admin is doing because the politicians and others
 push their buttons with words or national security, terrorists, democracy, small government…

                
                
                

Our ability to live in denial and hide from facts in front of our faces is obvious. I am thinking that it must
 have evolved out of a survival mechanism — some mental ability that helps one focus on the hunt, on
 courtship, on our children and on other ancient behaviors that are essential and absolutely necessary…
necessary at the time that they are needed.

The fact that demagogues, advertisers, marketing experts and religious leaders have learned to tap into
 these powerful instincts is unfortunate, but maybe inevitable. In fact, since it is natural that we have these
 abilities, maybe it is also natural that they will be exploited and that some will become skilled at this
exploitation.

However, as powerful and irresistible as these buzzwords are, it is possible to resist them and be aware
 when they are being employed — employed for better or worse. And then to make a decision whether
one wants to be manipulated or self-deluded, or not. There are times when a certain amount of self delusion
 is “good”, when it allows us to accomplish a necessary task, create something unlikely or new, or even
 speak out — and in those cases it might be deemed worthy.

E.B. White, Death and Hope

Read E.B. White’s skinny little book This Is New York. It was written in 1948 as an assignment for
 Holiday magazine — I’m not sure travel and leisure mags would accept a piece like this these days —
 it concludes with some very prescient meditations on death and war.

When he wrote this piece, a few years after WWII, the UN building was either just completed or was
 being built. He points out that after that war all cities, New York being a prime example, were opportunities
 for massive carnage and destruction on a scale not hitherto imagined:

"A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy,
burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages,
 cremate the millions."

Cities once were secure refuges for people — whether walled like the Medieval ones or not — they were
 places where people met, haggled and were to a degree protected. Now, with the atomic bomb especially,
 the protection part has been turned upside down.

But he notes that just as this shadow begins to loom over great mixtures of humanity like New York, an institution,
 the UN, rises to attempt to put an end to this threat. Death and hope, simultaneously, as always.

That the U.S. has clearly and brazenly taken an anti-UN stance in recent years — failed to pay their bills and
has acted in defiance of UN resolutions and principles is a bad sign. The U.S. are not the only ones to have
done so, but being the biggest kid on the block, it’s the most obvious, visible and ominous. It sends a sign to
all the other kids that this kind of behavior is OK. A sign that death is sometimes more powerful than hope,
temporarily. The UN is far from perfect — self interested parties and nations skew its abilities to perform its
mission, its members are human — but the fact that that a little ray of hope still exists and it is unavailable to
 corporate lobbyists, religious demagogues and crooked election rigging is something.

Happy Idiots

If religious people do indeed live longer and are indeed happier, as some studies claim to show, then the
 evolutionary basis and reason for the continued existence of religion in the face of rationality and common
 sense is self-evident. Humans would have evolved a propensity to become religious because it helps their
survival.

The truth may set you free, but you might not be as carefree and happy. It will eat away at you — what hurts
you does not necessarily make you stronger.

I would maintain that a healthy (i.e. substantial) amount of denial is therefore genetically heritable, that it allows
us to blithely go on (despite reading Beckett) and to ignore the basic sadness and desperation of life. We can
live in an illusion — in fact we are genetically predisposed to do so. These illusions can be small — I am just as
good at catching game as Bob, my rival, for example — or they can be very large — that death is not the end
 and that I will be rewarded for my faith and Bob, the apostate, will rot in Hell.

Either way, they allow me to go on, to persevere in the face of unlikely odds or limited chance of success. We
have evolved to be less rational that one might think, and to be slightly more delusional and even stupid.

Weimar Reality shows

This was in the 20s. Erwin Lowinsky’s Weisse Maus was a cabaret night that encouraged hopelessly amateur
 performers to get on stage — dreamy housewives, deluded bank clerks. They were encouraged to make fools
of themselves. Sounds familiar.

The Black Cat Cabaret featured theme nights — nude girls in imaginary sacrificial Mayan ceremonies, mock
bullfights, and naked novices being humiliated by lesbian nuns — with rituals involving silver crucifixes.

Then came Hitler.

Went to my first Bat Mitzvah. Upper East side synagogue. The cantor, Lori Corsin, has an incredibly beautiful voice.
 Wow. The congregation was led in some readings and heard some music and then came the ritual. The Rabbi turned
 and faced the elaborate bronze wall relief behind him. Slowly he walked towards it and, placing his hands on it, he slid
 it open — it was a little magical, as if a secret chamber were being revealed to us (though one could have seen that
it probably opened.)

Inside were 3 huge Torahs, and behind them a brightly colored painted chamber. Two lions faced a crown, vines
crept up underneath. Stylized flames flickered here and there. Huge images of classical columns ran up and down
 the sides.

Up above there was a stained glass image of a landscape with a half hidden temple on the top of a dirt hill. In the
foreground were cypress and olive trees. Low green hills undulated in the background.

The Rabbi clutched the giant “book”, the torah scroll, as the ceremony proceeded. As if the book were watching
the ritual, bearing witness, officiating — as if it was the book that made the ceremony real. The prayers and incantations
were the usual Levantine injunctions against worshipping other Gods and the hope that this “true” God would eventually
 overcome the unbelievers. Oh jeez. Lori sang again, it was beautiful.

I walked home, through midtown. I stopped at the ICP museum on my way and caught their new show “Ecotopia” which
 I guess is some conflation of ecology and utopia/dystopia — as many of the works are about nature and the environmental
wreckage around us. The similar world ectopia, which means a bodily organ in the wrong place, would have worked as well.
 It’s a large and powerful show, and some cool installation ideas — video monitors nestled in huge biomorphic shapes that
looked like giant rubber versions of tree growths. Catherine Chalmers’s nature doc in one growth follows a cockroach
(and many other critters) up close and personal, and it rivals the Attenborough BBC docs I love — her cinematography is
 that good. But does that mean that the BBC docs are “art” as well? Certain sequences in them — the slug-mating dance,
 the fish balls, the predator wasps — make a good case for it. And who is doing the foley work on these films? Both Chalmers
and the BBC films have lots of crunchy and squishy sounds when appropriate. These sounds make a huge difference.

Other photographers — Mitch Epstein (Biloxi, post Katrina)

                                   Robert Adams (clear cutting)

                          Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (sites of “removed” Palestinian villages,
                               now planted over as pine forests)

                              Simon Norfolk (evidence of the effects of war around Baghdad —
                               there’s a missile in the woods):

                                                       and Sophie Ristenhueber (Iraq landscapes in ruins)

Pretty much all of the above images are beautiful. I find them arresting not because they make some didactic point about
humans destroying the environment (though they may be trying to do that) but because they show us a strange and
unexpected universe — our own.

In fact, if they are simply trying to make us aware of the damage we are doing to the landscape, of injurious policies and
 projects and then move us to action — they fail. Well, they do bring home some information that might be less moving
merely as statistics — but the fact that they are beautiful subverts, for me, this possibly didactic intention. The images are
 simply gorgeous — you’d be happy and proud to hang them on your wall — pictures of devastation and destruction.
How can anything so beautiful be simple agit prop? The two seem to contradict one another.

Somehow I think maybe the artists know this. I think in some cases (but not all) this contradiction, this cognitive dissonance,
 is what their images are about. They are about the fact that they can be beautiful and “ugly” and the same time — as many
things can — and what does that mean? How do we deal with that? Does the beauty obscure, or are all these things partly
beautiful and we have trouble reconciling the two?

In some cases, for some people, it seems to be a big problem. The well-known photographer Joel Meyerowitz took pictures
 of the aftermath of 9/11, near where he lives. He can’t help himself, I guess — the pictures are gorgeous, like images from
 a Spielberg epic that was never made. They’re romantic, like Caspar David Freidrich’s paintings — paintings that, in Germany,
 are seen as romantic kitsch, a precursor to the Wagnerian romanticism that some say led to (but cannot be said to have caused?)
 much Nazi propaganda and the mess that followed. Many admire Meyerowitz’s pictures, many others find them disgusting.

For many people these pictures cross the line — they beautify and possibly romanticize a tragedy that people see
as different, closer maybe, than the Iraq landscapes or the clear-cut forests. Is it? I don’t know. I saw the very same
 thing as Meyerowitz, above (relief efforts were located there) but couldn’t take pictures. Maybe I was shy, maybe
 overwhelmed. Maybe it seemed wrong to be making “art” at that moment. How do photojournalists do it? (Well,
they don’t say they’re making art, for starters — they’re letting the world see what is happening in far-flung places.)
 But I too was awe-struck and thought quietly to myself — wow, that is cool looking.

I remember a friend having come up to 12th St., where I lived then, from downtown on that morning. She was in
tears, shaking, a wreck, and she kept saying over and over “It…it…it was beautiful.” She didn’t mean the former
 trade towers were beautiful — not many would claim that — but that the massive destruction was awe-inspiring,
 overpowering…and in a horrible way, beautiful.

It started with a question to Norman Cook about the picture of the overweight kid with the T-shirt that proudly
 exclaims, “I’m #1, So Why Try Harder” that adorns one of Norm’s CDs, and a painting of which will adorn
 his upcoming UK greatest hits collection.

I asked, “Was this kid contacted? Did anyone ever speak to him? Has he surfaced?”

Norm says that according to British law, an anonymous person photographed in a crowd (this kid was at a
motorcycle convention) tacitly gives their consent if they smile at the camera.

This ruling was tested, I was told, by a photo that was used in a UK bank ad that used an image of a festival
 audience of wild hippies. The bank said something like “most of these people now bank with us.” However
one guy identified himself in the picture and sued, claiming “I don’t bank with you, and I’m STILL a hippie, so
 you can’t use my image to promote your bloody bank!”

The hippie lost. Maybe he was high when the photo was taken, but he clearly didn’t mind. And the bank wasn’t
using him by name. The crowd was a symbolic crowd, representative of an attitude and era. It didn’t matter
whether this particular hippie was featured or not.

Likewise, PL DiCorcia, the art and fashion photographer, took a series of photos not so long ago of passers by
in Times Square and showed them in an exhibition, sold them in a photo book, and sold the photos for lots of money.
 This man (below), Erno Nussenzweig, decided to sue. He is an orthodox Jew. I am not sure if he heard there was
significant money, if he was incensed at a perceived invasion of “privacy” or saw this as a violation of the injunction
 against graven images. He has sued not once, but twice. I must say I would not have expected the work of PL
 to show up on this man’s radar.

So far, this man, like the hippie, has lost. But in other places he may have won. Apparently in France, home of
 famous street photographers Cartier Bresson and William Klein, there are now laws limiting this kind of anonymous
street photography. I was told that this is why the tradition of photography these men and others helped established
 pretty much no longer exists in France. This makes me think there is an interesting relationship between art,
 specifically its content, and the law. Not just laws like this one, but estate laws (what can be given and inherited)
 and tax laws (determining how things are sold, gifted and when…and what sorts of things, too.)

Anyway. What if the kid or Erno were famous? A celebrity or known mobster or a famous CEO? I was told that
it was politicians who pushed through the legislation in France — the assumption is they didn’t want to have photos
of themselves with their mistresses in the press. This might be a clichéd view of the French, but it might be true.

I would propose that were Erno well known, which, curiously, he is now becoming, the rules would be different. He
 could then argue that the worth of the photo and its interest is determined by who he is, and that the photographer is
benefiting (financially) because people recognize Erno and want a photo of Erno on their walls. He, if well known, is
 not then an anonymous passer by, a metaphor for the NY streets and the many types who exist there, but a “name”,
and he therefore possibly cannot be used to sell a bank or anything else without his permission. Well, maybe.

This doesn’t seem to really apply, as paparazzi make a living out of surreptitiously photographing celebrities and Royalty
every day. They make money, the tabloids make money and the advertisers in those tabloids make money. Some say
this is the price of fame — as a famous person your image becomes public property. Well, only to some extent —
I suspect that if a photo of overweight Britney were slapped on a T-shirt and sold millions of copies it would not be
seen as a given right. The tabloids, however, may legally squeak by claiming they are “news”. News. Uh huh.

In the U.S., a notoriously litigious society, Norm’s CD will have a different cover. The smiling consent rule apparently
 does not apply.

[Link to a New York Times article or a Wired article on this subject.]

Then we get into the area of art that includes images of known people and things. These are seen as a quotation.
As far as I know Campbell’s or Brillo never sued Warhol for capitalizing on their packages. Nor did the graphic
designer of those packages step forward and say, “you are selling my design, and I deserve credit or a piece of the
 action”. (My guess is that those designers’ work was done for hire, and therefore is wholy owned by Proctor and
 Gamble or whoever the parent company was). Nor did David or Keith sue Liz Peyton, for selling what appear to
be “fan” portraits for large sums. They may have even purchased the paintings themselves, who knows? But certainly
 the value of these paintings is intimately tied up in whose portraits they are.

Some years ago the photographer of a postcard image of cute puppies sued the artist Jeff Koons for turning the
photograph into a sculpture. To me this win by the photographer is specious — the translation into a 3-D object
 is so different than the postcard on which it was based — and furthermore, it could be argued that the photograph
 was not a “creative” work, in the sense that it would be if the postcard depicted puppies with human heads, for
 example. If I were to translate the image of Kate Moss snorting up a line into a sculpture, or even a painting,
would I owe Ms. Moss some money or permission?… Or would I only owe the photographer who took the
 tabloid image?

And what if it wasn’t Kate Moss, what if it was some anonymous clubber doing a line, who decided he or she
 didn’t want their adventure made public? What if the photographer of the Baader-Meinhof gang that Gerhard
 Richter turned into paintings wanted a share, or even said no?

What if this “news” image above is now owned by Corbis (the Bill Gates owned image bank) and what
 if they said no? What if I painted a slightly altered version of this image — quoting Richter, the photographer
 AND the Baader-Meinhof gang all at once?

What if I turned this image into a sculpture? What if I turned a famous photo of anonymous people like the
 one below into a sculpture? (You could imagine a sculpture like this at an airport, for example.)

Would I owe the photographer? The couple? Neither? What if I made a fictional film and created a scene
 that recreated this tableau? Which happens all the time — DPs and directors are often “inspired” by stills
 and paintings.

Some of this falls under “fair use”. You are allowed, within limits, to quote things and images of people that
 are relevant to your “discussion” — it expands and clarifies your own work. It helps the work resonate in a
deeper way. A work of art, especially given that they are unique and not mass produced, is a kind of discussion
 too, one might argue, so the same rules apply. A CD cover, T-shirt, poster, ad for a bank or fashion photo
 is not the same kind of discussion.

Robert Rauschenberg, contemporary of Warhol, eventually decided to use only his own photos in his work
 after he was sued for clipping out some news photos and “transferring” them to canvas as part of his hybrid
paintings. These photos were considerably altered, usually degraded in the process, but it seems it was still
a problem. Again, the law changes what people create.