We need a different copyright for individuals

I used to think I wasn’t affected by copyright issues but as I have posted more of my work on my website, control over the use of my images has surfaced. I have gotten requests to use them and have always granted the request, unless it was obvious the person was going to make money off of selling it. Of course I have no way of knowing who has used my images without consent. I have been following Cory Doctorow

We need a different copyright for individuals

“We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation”

Most of his work is published under “Creative Commons”

It makes me think I should be more explicit about my work but I am still not certain exactly what that would entail.

Artist as Moralist

Could there be two more different people in their belief about art and healing/salvation? Conrad was intimate with the depths of the emptiness that plagued man.

“He was just a word for me … it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence … its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone. Marlow says of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation. The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous - so full of hope. — Joseph Conrad

Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow….

In this world — as I have known it — we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt….

There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that… is always but a vain and floating appearance….

A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains — but a clot of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.

Thanks to http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewArt and the The Guardian UK

Technorati Tags:

Artist as Shaman

Joseph Beuys

A nice clip on Beuys and his first trip to the US. He arrives in an ambulance and lives with a coyote for a few days in a New York Gallery space. This all takes place during the Nixon Years — a time when the US did need a lot of healing. Who knows where we would be without his visit and talk with the Coyote?

via http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewArt 1/28/08 7:08 PM vvoi etc performing

The Autumn of the Multitaskers

I’ve been off for a few weeks battling a case of shingles, that affected my right eye. As I don’t like to be laid up — makes me contemplated what in my life is wrong. This article struck me. Maybe the key is to focus down on a few projects and complete them. I’m a great juggler of tasks. Maybe in the long run too many balls in the air becomes more a problem than a solution.

The Autumn of the Multitaskers:

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity

BY WALTER KIRN

The Autumn of the Multitaskers

Happy, Happy, Happy

I’ve just red this article from the Chronicle Review on Melancholy(In Praise of Melancholy - ChronicleReview.com). It promotes the idea that Melancholy should be treated as a something beautiful and transient. Quoting from Keats and the “Ode to Melancholy” This melancholy fit is a mixed affair. It falls from heaven “like a weeping cloud,/That fosters the droop-headed flowers all.” But it also brings rain and nourishment. Indeed, this cloud “hides the green hill in an April shroud.”

This is something I think about often in our culture of “Happiness”. I no longer know what that word or emotion means in our culture. Is is a new 42 inch Plasma TV, an appearance on American Idol? I used to think of melancholy as a “depression” and in one sense it is, but it is not a depression that is cured with Prozac, Effexor or an other new pill. It is not a depression that can be cured with a self-help book or talking therapy. Instead it is an opportunity to get a new perspective on life, it can show us a path back to life. It is an emotional food that can help us grow in ways we can only imagine.

ODE ON MELANCHOLY

NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist

Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist

By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;

Make not your rosary of yew-berries,

Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be

Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl

A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

— John Keats (The Oxford Book of English Verse:

1250-1900, 1919 edition)

Technorati Tags: ,