Workshop #9
December 8, 2006
We met on Thursday this week, to accommodate an invitation I received to a Monday party in NY (www.unitedstatesartists.org). Apologies to workshop members (Colin, Stephen, Philip, and Marc) who couldn’t make it Thursday. We had champagne and anchovies.
While reviewing the highlights of my trip to NY, we talked about “selling out.” I suggested that “selling out” is a powerful and largely unexamined idea, underscored by a demonization of money that is the equivalent (and flipside) of a deification of money: In either case money — its presence or absence — determines value. Those who speak of “selling out” believe in the purity of some things (one’s work) and the impurity of others (money, or the wrong collaborators or wrong audience).
We speculated about the history of this idea. Certainly the bible positions money as an antagonist to Christ and so reflects some of these beliefs. (See James Buchan’s excellent book, Frozen Desire, for a history of money.) And poverty has been a badge of honor for artists since at least the Romantic era.
Sarah Gottesdiener pointed out that poor people don’t usually worry about “selling out.” It is a bourgeois concern. Certainly the realm in which we see it every day — mostly among artists and musicians working outside what they describe as “the mainstream” — is a largely bourgeois realm. Rob interjected that he doesn’t believe class is a useful descriptive tool for understanding the means and meanings of artistic work; class obscures other differences (and alliances) through which Rob gets more insight into the work of others. People might have aesthetic concerns or habits in common, even across class difference. The aspects of work that interest Rob are obscured when we understand our work as an articulation of class. Strong objections were made — for one, to erase class as an issue serves extremely narrow class interests — and we agreed to disagree.
The subject of class reminded us of Raymond Williams’s small book, Communications, which Beth introduced by telling us a little about Williams’s background and his intent when, in the early 1960s, he wrote this modest, populist pamphlet about the systems of communication that shape contemporary culture. Williams’s subject was essentially the same as Adorno and Horkheimer’s in “The Culture Industry.”
Yet Williams’s text was plain and applicable where Adorno and Horkheimer’s was dense and discouraging. Where Adorno and Horkheimer turned the conditions of the Culture Industry into a dazzling spectacle — the spectacle of their superb and insightful writing — at which we could gaze in awe, paralyzed, Williams rendered the familiar apparatus around us (the newspapers and television and films, the audience and producers) as a set of divergent realities that could only be understood in the specific, by engaging and changing them. Williams is an activist; Adorno and Horkheimer are not. For example, Williams rejects the idea of a “mass audience” whose stupefaction (as Adorno and Horkheimer would have it) is general. The audience is made of many divergent and constantly changing, evolving parties. If our chance for hope and optimism is embedded in our capacity to change, Williams, argued, our analyses of communications must acknowledge that capacity.
Here was the heart of Williams’s activism: his insistence that the conditions we find ourselves in are “a product of history, and could change.” Williams reminds us to historicize ideas and conditions, to always see them as the product of people and their interests and to recognize our ability, as people, to make history. Along these lines he breaks down the monolithic spectre of “controlled media” into four varieties of control: authoritarian, paternalistic, commercial, and democratic. Authoritarian is, quite simply, when a minority controls the means of communication and uses them to pursue its own interests. In a paternalistic system, a minority controls communications but claims to do so in the interests of all. A commercial system (the most like Adorno and Horkheimer’s Culture Industry) is one in which market forces restrict everyone’s freedom by squelching whatever cannot make enough money to pay for itself. Finally, the term “democratic system” does not so much describe an existing reality as it does cloak Williams’s utopian ideal of a socialist system of publicly controlled media made available to all regardless of profit. Democratic media are controlled by democratic processes, largely enacted via centralized authorities who answer to popular will.
At this point, our guest for the evening, Mikey Merrill, arrived with his online cohort Jona Bechtolt to discuss their website (with Steve Schroeder), www.urbanhonking.com. We all had our laptops and, serviced by the classroom’s powerful wireless internet cloud, conducted our discussion half in the physical room and half in the borderless realm of the internet. Mikey gave a PowerPoint history of Urban Honking as it morphed from a kind of local online magazine into the massive, multi-sourced, blog-centric community it is today. “We couldn’t get people to write for us,” Jona recalled, “but we could give them a place to write.”
Mikey and Jona both acknowledged their indifference to the potential monetary rewards of the internet. Very little money moves through Urban Honking. While they have no puritan objections to selling out, they’ve never sought nor wondered about sponsorship or advertising on their site. Mikey said the subject is interesting enough that he’s done some Google ads (netting around $30) and also accepted sponsorship from businesses that interest him. For example, the Nashville Knife Company wanted to run a banner ad during Urban Honking’s "moustache growing competition," and Mikey though it would be cool.
Mikey said the site is “more like a TV network” and less like a magazine or journal. When considering what the right mix of bloggers will be or conceptualizing future projects, they imagine they’re programming a network and aim for the kind of show they think Urban Honking needs. The site includes science, tech geeks, music, photography, art gossip, film makers, and this class, among many other offerings.
Like a TV network, Urban Honking is limited in size, and Mikey and Jona are glad about that. While they have no formula for keeping it the right size and mix, they’re inclined toward a smaller site that is unified by their own sensibilities. “We add something if we really like it,” Mikey said plainly. “And we say ‘no’ to all the stuff we don’t like.” We talked about exclusion and the possibility that the internet caters too easily to each user’s narrow interests, uniting us swiftly with a large sample of people who share our quirkiest, subjective predilections. Mikey said he didn’t know why you would want to find people who don’t share your interests and acknowledged that Urban Honking is in some ways “defined by what it excludes,” as are all groups.
This brought interesting, vigorous objections from the workshop. We reprised some of the discussion covered in workshop #8, critiquing the internet as an engine that can convert an otherwise heterogeneous world — reality — into a reflection of your own, narrow subjectivity. It was suggested that political power and cultural richness might lie in heterogeneous mixing with strangers. The success of Urban Honking might not be its ability to exclude and define a narrow interest, but its publicness and the variety of interests supported by the three co-founders. While it gains identity and clarity from the co-founders imposition of their tastes, it retains its vigor and vitality because they do so in an improvisatory and incomplete way.
Changing the subject, I asked if Mikey or Jona would let other people create things as them, using their names, “Mikey Merrill” or “Jona Bechtolt.” It turns out that Mikey’s brother already does a lot of writing as “Mikey Merrill” and that Mikey is also looking to “outsource” some of his writing to India. (In a follow-up e-mail, he pointed me to http://www.b2kcorp.com/ as his potential collaborator.)
This kind of “open sourcing” of one’s name brought strong objections from Sarah Boss, who felt the economics might become exploitative (as they sometimes do when artists subcontract fabrication of their highly-valued work to minimum-wage workers in factories) and wondered whose work it would be if Mikey wasn’t writing it. Mikey countered that it was just as much an art to manipulate money — moving it around so that it ultimately resulted in the writing or object-fabrication or whatever it was that you wanted — as to manipulate language or materials. Why should the intelligent manipulation of money be any less artistic than the intelligent manipulation of language (writing), paint (painting), or metal or wood or plastic (sculpture)? Mikey was pursuing his art by moving money around. (Jona, by the way, does not want people to produce music using his name.)
It was interesting to watch this unusually lively conversation (it might have been the champagne, but I believe it was also the easy affability of our guests) keep fragmenting into four or five islands of computer-assisted tête-à-têtes, with the class pursuing its four or five sub-conversations in the glow of their enabling laptop screens. There was no anxiety or offense in these breakdowns. In fact they felt like an evolution in our method, a transcendence of our usual cumbersome tethering of everyone to the class’s one, narrow line of inquiry. Now we were liberated by our screens to ascend away from the group and enter into the refined ether of our sub-interests.
The evening ended with an informal survey of some sites we all admired, and then we split up and vanished into the night. Next Monday is our last class. To prepare, please read the two new entries at the Annenberg DIY blog (concerning "YouWitness News" and "socially networked systems."
In regard to the latter, please also consider the Friendster profile of Calvin Johnson (K records, Dub Narcotic, etc.), which reads in part: "Contact me if you meet one or more of the following criteria: Junkie... queerbait... lonesome…disruptive...half-assed...sweaty...shy...poseur... spineless...pigeon toed...kleptomaniac...breathless...anti-social... bikerchick...lard- ass...pinko...autistic...topless...boring... cross-eyed...ugly duckling...compulsive...bad breath...perv...no wave... stoner...V.D....homeless...speedqueen...stutter...fag ...oppressive odor...agoraphobic...lost...emotionally crippled...gutterball...porn addict...shitpunk...distraught...facial birthmark...listless...pot head...coward...wear no underpants...hysterical... abusive... hoarse...Negroid...alcoholic...lesbo...fashion victim...illiterate... missing teeth...dancer...obnoxious...geek...utterly undependable... loner...shoeless...looking for a fat lip...drool...bulimic... greaser... dull as a post...reek...schizo...whistle...internal bleeding...obsessive ...sociopath...fainting spells...wus...communist sympathizer... whore..."
He will be our beacon as we exit the confines of our class room and enter into the world.
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