Hey guys, sorry for the delay but here's some ideas for the business questions.
#2 effects of inequality. I would talk about how it was one of the factors that led to the financial crisis as wealth became more concentrated in the hands of the 1% (the richest) they had more money to lend while those in the bottom of the income distribution needed to borrow more to maintain their lifestyle or aspire to live like those at the top. This increased demand for the creation of lending products to be created such as CDO's (collateralized debt obligations, the bundling of mortgages together to be chopped up and sold to investors). As loans were made to riskier and riskier customers it was in fact inevitable that the bubble would eventually burst when enough of the loans went bad.
Besides that I would talk about the societal effects of inequality. Nations with higher inequality are more likely to experience a range of societal ills. You could talk about the GINI index at this point, it is a measurement of income inequality for a country that ranges from 0 (perfect equality, everyone has the same income) to 1.0 (perfect inequality, one person earns all the income). When you chart the GINI index against a range of problems from obesity, to teenage pregnancy, to murder rates and many more, you find there is a strong correlation between them not only between countries but also within countries (the US state to state). You can get an idea of all the factors here - http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/research
#3. Factors that led to the great divergence. Beginning in around 1980 there was a strong push for a variety of policies that exacerbated inequality. Tax rates for the rich were cut, privatization of a bunch of state functions such as pension plans and deregulation of industries such as banking. Those in a position to benefit (such as bankers) did, while the rest found themselves falling further and further behind. We also talked about globalization (low skilled jobs being outsourced so low income people lost their jobs while those at the top such as CEOs of corporations saw their salaries increase), technology, women entering the workforce (they are more likely to earn minimum wage) and increased immigration.
#4. Most of the same ideas as #2!
#5. Securitization food chain. This was the result of financial innovation. No longer did home buyers, those looking for mortgages get their money directly from the local bank. Back then, lenders had more incentive to ensure borrowers were credit worthy as they would have a 30 year relationship so it was important to know the home buyers had steady work, were trustworthy, etc. Here's a clip from the movie, a perfect answer - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-S6rZ18KKk
#6. Prediction - I would talk about the recurrence of crisis over the past couple of
centuries but more specifically about the Savings and Loan crisis of the
80's, followed by the Dot-Com bubble in 2000 and then the current
crisis. People within gov't such as Brooksely Born warned (from movie)
that the huge growth in financial derivatives (financial products whose value was based on things such as mortgages) had no oversight and was
inherently risky as bankers were being paid huge bonuses for short term profits while creating long term risk (bad incentives) but was overruled by others and the Commodity Futures
Modernization Act was implemented making it illegal to regulate
the derivative industry. 2004, the FBI formally warned that the mortgage market was
becoming unstable. 2005, the head of the IMF gave a speech in which he
said the incentive structure of rewarding short term profits with huge
bonuses was creating long term dangers for which he was called a Luddite
and ignored. Many articles appeared in the financial press in 2006 and
2007 warning that there was too much debt and was becoming unsustainable. Finally, I'd mention the
similarities between 2007 and 1929, the huge increase in income
inequality caused those at the top to need to borrow more money in order
to keep up and also created a huge pool of investment funds at the top
of people needing to invest in something. The inevitable result was the
riskier and riskier loans were made to those who ultimately couldn't
afford it. At the same time, Wall Street was employing rocket scientists
to create investments which seemed to magically get rid of risk...
Here's a video about musicians making money - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h72miK8vaVc
Good article for the monogamy question - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/books/review/what-do-women-want-by-daniel-bergner.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1
Hey there. Haven't heard from anyone for awhile and there's still work to be done on these questions in my opinion. You might want to take a look at what's been done for the 1MA/4 questions, you might get some ideas. I'm gonna put some notes next to each topic to tell you what I think needs doing.
Oh, and I just read this article about consumerism, more ideas for you - http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16582-consumerism-and-its-discontents
1MA
FINAL LIST
Politics and society -
1. What are some possible explanations for voter apathy and how can it be counteracted?
2. Should soft drugs be legalized?
3. Discuss some of the protest
movements and the root causes for the protests seen around the world
in the last two years.
4. What are some of the causes of mass
murders and how should we punish the perpetrators?
5. Why did
the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more
successful than other protest movements.
6. Do you think that laws should be passed to limit gun
ownership?
Relationships - Do you really like question 3?
1. What is your opinion about
polyamorous relationships?
2. How do polyamorous relationships affect children? Should polyamorous
families have the right to raise children?
3. Is monogamy the only kind of human relationship through which we can achieve happiness?
4.
Why do some women begin relationships with locked up men?
5. How have
technological devices changed the way we communicate?
6.
Is it possible to be truly alone in a technology-driven
society such as ours?
Lifestyle - What do you want to do with #5? For question #3 you should watch this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XSaaQjuuK0
And here's an article i read yesterday related to sextremism - http://www.economist.com/news/international/21578381-young-feminists-are-reviving-old-struggle-rights-womens-bodies-breast-beating
1. Discuss some of the most prevalent methods used by advertisers and
the media to influence our behavior?
2. Do things and money bring happiness? If not what does?
3. How does
consumerism affect children?
4. What impact does consumerism have
on holiday seasons?
5. Why do you think the term
‘feminist’ has a negative connotation?
6. What are some of
the means feminists use to attract attention? Can you justify their
choice?
Tourism and travel
1.
Is the urge to travel genetic?
2. Describe the influence of technology on traveling.
3. How do
cameras affect our travel experience?
4. Why is extreme tourism
growing in popularity?
5.
Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing?
Why?
6. Is it ethical to travel to war affected and
poverty-stricken areas?
Technology
1. What
is hacktivism? What are some methods used by hacktivists?
2. Do you support any of the hacktivists’ actions? Why or why not?
3. Should information be completely free?
4. How can technology be used to improve/alter our bodies?
5. Would
you ever consider putting implants in your body?
6. Discuss the pros and cons of smartphones.
Media and journalism - What are we doing with questions #1 and #4. Can you answer #5 and #6? Again look at the other groups questions.
1. How much freedom do
reporters have and how much should they have when pursuing a story?
2. What impact does technology have on journalism?
3. What are the core components of creating a successful Internet/YouTube video?
4. What is the
culture of fear and how does in relate to consumerism?
5. Can we
trust the media?
6. Should violence in the media be censored?
Business and finance - Again check out the other group's questions. Can you answer #5 and 6?
1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the American Health Care System?
2. What are the effects of income inequality?
3. What are some of the factors that have led to the "Great Divergence"?
4. Is income inequality just the problem of the 99%?
5. What is the securitization food chain and how did it make the financial system riskier?
6. Is it true that nobody could have predicted the financial crisis?
Ethics - Question #4?
Brilliant talk, austerity, Scottish accent, swearing and economics. Moral hazard comes in at about 14:30 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JQuHSQXxsjM#!
1. Explain the term “moral hazard”. In what contexts does it occur and what are its
consequences?
2. How do we distinguish between right and wrong? What are our sources of ethical behavior?
3. What are some examples of rich people's unethical behavior illustrated by recent research?
4. Is society becoming less moral or not? Explain your answer.
5. Discuss some of the consequences of using doping and performance-enhancing
drugs.
6. Why was the World Anti-Doping Agency created and what are its aims?
Art & Culture - Any suggestions for the wording of #6 and #7?
1. How can we make art more accessible to the general public
2. What is the role of art?
3. How has technology such as the internet influenced art generally and music specifically?
4. Do you agree with the statement that some art is better than no art and that it is always socially beneficial?
5. Why do some musicians not regard celebrities as 'real' artists?
6. Who should pay for music?
Monday, May 27, 2013
Sunday, May 26, 2013
1 MA/4 Final Exam Questions
Ok, haven't had much time to make the list for 1MA/4 so here's the 1MA/3 list of questions with the articles that we're done inserted into each topic so we know what to add and take out in tomorrow's class. See you then.
1. What techniques do advertisers use to convince people to buy unnecessary things?
Art & Culture
I would like to change a couple. Remove/add something from the article below.
1MA/3 had a presentation about poor musicians while 1MA/4 had an extra class about illegal file downloading based on this article -
thetrichordist.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/
1. How can we make art more accessible to the general public?
2. What is the role of art?
3. How has technology such as the internet influenced art generally and music specifically?
4. What different interests can art serve?
5. How should communities decide what is appropriate art for the public space?
6. How do people interpret art and whose interpretation counts.
7. What do you think about art in public spaces such as 'outer spaces'.
Politics
and society
1MA/3 had an article about guns, but Ania is now in our class so we can keep those questions if you want, otherwise we'll need a couple of new questions.
1. What are some possible explanations for voter apathy in American elections?
2. Should soft drugs be legalized?
3. Discuss some of the protest movements and the root causes for the protests seen around the world in the last two years.
4. What are some of the causes of mass murders and how should we punish the mass murderers?
5. Why did the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more successful than other protest movements.
1MA/3 had an article about guns, but Ania is now in our class so we can keep those questions if you want, otherwise we'll need a couple of new questions.
1. What are some possible explanations for voter apathy in American elections?
2. Should soft drugs be legalized?
3. Discuss some of the protest movements and the root causes for the protests seen around the world in the last two years.
4. What are some of the causes of mass murders and how should we punish the mass murderers?
5. Why did the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more successful than other protest movements.
6.
Do you think that laws should be passed to limit gun
ownership?
Relationships
(find cnn video) - Here's a link to an onion spoof. Underneath is the actual CNN video.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/US/story?id=889903&page=1#.UayLv9ixOho
1. What is your perspective on polyamorous relationships? Can you imagine being a part of such a relationship?
2. How do polyamorous relationships affect children? Should polyamorous families have the right to raise children?
3. What can be done to help ex-convicts re-enter society.
4. Why do some women begin relationships with locked up men?
5. What different forms of sexual harassment are still seen in modern workplaces?
6. What should be done to combat sexual harassment?
Lifestyle
Relationships
(find cnn video) - Here's a link to an onion spoof. Underneath is the actual CNN video.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/US/story?id=889903&page=1#.UayLv9ixOho
1. What is your perspective on polyamorous relationships? Can you imagine being a part of such a relationship?
2. How do polyamorous relationships affect children? Should polyamorous families have the right to raise children?
3. What can be done to help ex-convicts re-enter society.
4. Why do some women begin relationships with locked up men?
5. What different forms of sexual harassment are still seen in modern workplaces?
6. What should be done to combat sexual harassment?
Lifestyle
1. What techniques do advertisers use to convince people to buy unnecessary things?
2.
Do things and money bring happiness? If not what does?
3. How does consumerism affect children? (Consuming Kids - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XSaaQjuuK0)
4. What impact does consumerism have on holiday seasons?
5. What is couchsurfing and what are some dangers associated with it?
6. Discuss some other creative and unconventional ways of traveling.
Tourism and travel
1. Is the urge to travel genetic?
3. How does consumerism affect children? (Consuming Kids - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XSaaQjuuK0)
4. What impact does consumerism have on holiday seasons?
5. What is couchsurfing and what are some dangers associated with it?
6. Discuss some other creative and unconventional ways of traveling.
Tourism and travel
1. Is the urge to travel genetic?
2.
Describe the influence of technology on traveling.
3. What is the difference between travel and tourism?
4. How can tourists negatively affect their destinations and the people living there?
5. Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing? Why? http://thevelvetrocket.com/2011/12/04/disaster-tourism-destinations/
6. Is it ethical to travel to war affected and poverty-stricken areas?
Technology
1. What is hacktivism? What are some methods of hacktivism?
2. Do you support any of the hacktivists’ actions? Why yes/not?
3. What is the difference between travel and tourism?
4. How can tourists negatively affect their destinations and the people living there?
5. Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing? Why? http://thevelvetrocket.com/2011/12/04/disaster-tourism-destinations/
6. Is it ethical to travel to war affected and poverty-stricken areas?
Technology
1. What is hacktivism? What are some methods of hacktivism?
2. Do you support any of the hacktivists’ actions? Why yes/not?
3. What are some of the advantages of taking a break from technology?
4. How can technology be used to improve/alter our bodies?
5. How do social networking sites afftect kids' social skills?
4. How can technology be used to improve/alter our bodies?
5. How do social networking sites afftect kids' social skills?
6. How have technological devices changed the way we communicate?
Media and journalism
1. How does the White House shape and manipulate media coverage?
2. What are the three pillars of video virality?
3. What are the core components of creating a successful Internet/YouTube video?
4. Discuss other famous media hoaxes played and the motivations for creating them.
5. What are some of the media manipulation techniques employed by those in power?
Media and journalism
1. How does the White House shape and manipulate media coverage?
2. What are the three pillars of video virality?
3. What are the core components of creating a successful Internet/YouTube video?
4. Discuss other famous media hoaxes played and the motivations for creating them.
5. What are some of the media manipulation techniques employed by those in power?
6. What is the relationship between the media and those in power?
Business and finance
For question #2: I would talk about the recurrence of crisis over the past couple of centuries but more specifically about the Savings and Loan crisis of the 80's, followed by the Dot-Com bubble in 2000 and then the current crisis. People withing gov't such as Brooksely Born warned (from movie) that the huge growth in financial derivatives had no oversight and was inherently risky but was overruled by others and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was implemented making it illegal to regulate derivatives. 2004, the FBI formally warned that the mortgage market was becoming unstable. 2005, the head of the IMF gave a speech in which he said the incentive structure of rewarding short term profits with huge bonuses was creating long term dangers for which he was called a Luddite and ignored. Many articles appeared in the financial press in 2006 and 2007 warning that there was too much debt. Finally, I'd mention the similarities between 2007 and 1929, the huge increase in income inequality caused those at the top to need to borrow more money in order to keep up and also created a huge pool of investment funds at the top of people needing to invest in something. The inevitable result was the riskier and riskier loans were made to those who ultimately couldn't afford it. At the same time, Wall Street was employing rocket scientists to create investments which seemed to magically get rid of risk...
Business and finance
For question #2: I would talk about the recurrence of crisis over the past couple of centuries but more specifically about the Savings and Loan crisis of the 80's, followed by the Dot-Com bubble in 2000 and then the current crisis. People withing gov't such as Brooksely Born warned (from movie) that the huge growth in financial derivatives had no oversight and was inherently risky but was overruled by others and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was implemented making it illegal to regulate derivatives. 2004, the FBI formally warned that the mortgage market was becoming unstable. 2005, the head of the IMF gave a speech in which he said the incentive structure of rewarding short term profits with huge bonuses was creating long term dangers for which he was called a Luddite and ignored. Many articles appeared in the financial press in 2006 and 2007 warning that there was too much debt. Finally, I'd mention the similarities between 2007 and 1929, the huge increase in income inequality caused those at the top to need to borrow more money in order to keep up and also created a huge pool of investment funds at the top of people needing to invest in something. The inevitable result was the riskier and riskier loans were made to those who ultimately couldn't afford it. At the same time, Wall Street was employing rocket scientists to create investments which seemed to magically get rid of risk...
1.What is a fiat currency and why does it have value?
2.Is it true that nobody could have predicted the financial crisis?
3.What
are some of the factors that have led to the "Great Divergence"?
4.Is
income inequality just the problem of 99%?
5.What is a Ponzi scheme and how does it compare to the financial system?
6. How
did the government of Cyprus and the troika try to solve their
banking crisis?
Ethics
Leaving it but we could remove one of the doping for a ethicalishness question
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/15/does-morality-have-a-place-on-wall-street/greed-on-wall-street-prevents-good-from-happening
In economic theory, a moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk. In other words, it is a tendency to be more willing to take a risk, knowing that the potential costs or burdens of taking such risk will be borne, in whole or in part, by others. A moral hazard may occur where the actions of one party may change to the detriment of another after a financial transaction has taken place.
Good talk, austerity, scottish accent, swearing and economics. Moral hazard come in about 14:30 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JQuHSQXxsjM#!
Revolving Door -
1.Explain the term “moral hazard”. When does it occur and what are its consequences?
2.How do we distinguish between right and wrong? What are the sources of ethical behavior?
3.Recent research suggested that the wealthy are less ethical, why could this be so? Give examples of the unethical behaviors of the rich.
Leaving it but we could remove one of the doping for a ethicalishness question
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-184511311MA/3 had an article about doping in sport, 1MA/4 didn't have a presentation.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/15/does-morality-have-a-place-on-wall-street/greed-on-wall-street-prevents-good-from-happening
In economic theory, a moral hazard is a situation where a party will have a tendency to take risks because the costs that could incur will not be felt by the party taking the risk. In other words, it is a tendency to be more willing to take a risk, knowing that the potential costs or burdens of taking such risk will be borne, in whole or in part, by others. A moral hazard may occur where the actions of one party may change to the detriment of another after a financial transaction has taken place.
Good talk, austerity, scottish accent, swearing and economics. Moral hazard come in about 14:30 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JQuHSQXxsjM#!
Revolving Door -
1.Explain the term “moral hazard”. When does it occur and what are its consequences?
2.How do we distinguish between right and wrong? What are the sources of ethical behavior?
3.Recent research suggested that the wealthy are less ethical, why could this be so? Give examples of the unethical behaviors of the rich.
4.Is
society becoming less moral or not? Explain your answer.
5.Discuss
some of the consequences of using doping and performance-enhancing
drugs.
6.What is the revolving door and how does it relate to ethical behavior?Art & Culture
I would like to change a couple. Remove/add something from the article below.
1MA/3 had a presentation about poor musicians while 1MA/4 had an extra class about illegal file downloading based on this article -
thetrichordist.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/
1. How can we make art more accessible to the general public?
2. What is the role of art?
3. How has technology such as the internet influenced art generally and music specifically?
4. What different interests can art serve?
5. How should communities decide what is appropriate art for the public space?
6. How do people interpret art and whose interpretation counts.
7. What do you think about art in public spaces such as 'outer spaces'.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Arts & Culture Presentation (1MA/3)
Hey guys here's the article for Thursday's presentation:
Attaching yourself or your band to the corporate structure of a
record label has historically had its advantages: promotions, studios,
tour management, image, marketing, etc., but all those things come at a
price. When it all boils down to it, the average musician in the band
makes about $23.40 for every $1000 of music sold. Of course, money
isn’t the only problem with this sort of arrangement. Record labels are
notoriously wary of music that ventures out of the box at all, or goes
against an already money-making formula. Many artists who are signed to
labels soon disconnect from the lives that inspired their music, often
resulting in the dreaded Sophomore Syndrome.
Sure, the top 0.001% of musicians make a lot of money. Paul McCartney’s net worth has been valued at around £387,012,000. Madonna has been valued at around $110,000,000. Kurt Cobain just might have made more money dead last year than you’ll ever make in your life. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. Telling your parents that you want to be a rock star when you grow up is like saying, “Daddy, I want to win the lottery when I grow up.” In fact, statistically, your chances might be worse in music than they are with the lottery.
Combine this with high gas prices and an economic downturn, and you have a dire situation for those who want to go on tour. Now sprinkle in the fact that musicians are selling fewer and fewer albums these days, and a public that seems decreasingly interested in local live music. It’s looking pretty dire, isn’t it?
In the words of Jeff Zentner in a recent interview he did with us, “a lot of people don’t realize how big a musician has to be before they make enough money to even quit the day job.” The cruel circular joke is, in order to get that big, a band usually has to quit their jobs and hit the road on tour. It only makes sense then that many Mormon parents are frightened when their children want to grow up to be rock stars, to say nothing about the lascivious lifestyles of many touring musicians. Mormon teenagers are encouraged to grow up, cut their hair, and get a job that will support a wife and kids. There are good reasons for this, of course, but on the other hand, this leads to many of our best and brightest musicians leaving the fold and becoming lost, and ending up as 50-year-old burnouts with more regrets than records. Is there a better way? A way that we can be true to our musical souls without selling our spiritual ones? Are all our musicians doomed to either leave the Church and go on tour, or spend the rest of their lives only playing hymns for Elders Quorum and Relief Society?
May I make a few points that might be of some assistance to those of you who with existential struggles between your art and the stability of a family life.
1) Technology is changing the way music is recorded. Fifteen years ago, in order to make a decent enough demo to put in your press kits, a band had to buy studio time, usually around $30-40 an hour at least, then get it mixed and mastered. Putting out a full album could easily take $10,000, without even including the cost of guitars, basses, drums, and amplifiers. If a band wanted to record the album themselves, and build their own studio, they could easily double that number. Breaking even was rare, and that’s why so many artists made the deal with the devil (aka record labels) to try and mitigate their losses. Now, home recording software continues to decline in price. Many Linescratchers are able to learn how to mix and engineer their own recordings using home equipment and get a pretty decent sound. The only real cost is getting the whole thing mastered. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean the recording studio is a thing of the past. Mixing and engineering can turn into a nightmare for those who aren’t technically inclined, and even tech geeks find that it’s sometimes better to rely on a professional engineer for the the technical side of things, to free up more of your creative energy for the music itself. However, Linescratchers all over the world are finding it easier and easier to record their own music on limited resources.
2) The Internet is changing the way music is promoted and distributed. Napster changed everything in this regard. The record labels are like the mighty dinosaurs: big, lumbering, and imposing, with a little tinge of feeling entitled to the world. However, the dinosaurs gave way to a smaller, more efficient, and more numerous creature: mammals. Okay, that was a dumb metaphor. The point is, there may not necessarily be another band like the Beatles that can command a majority of the young public market in the English-speaking world, but there are now riches in niches. If Epic Viking Folk-Metal is a money-making genre that is making money online, enough to even have concerts, then pretty much any genre has a chance at finding its place online. Unfortunately, this has led to about three bazillion horrible Myspace bands online with 45 friends. So finding an audience is still a difficult venture, and it still requires a fair amount of talent to attract people who might be interested in your music, but the key nowadays seems to be to find your audience. More on this below.
3) Let’s face it – touring sucks. Sure, as teenagers we all thought of “the road” as this glamorous, ideal life, with a cold rock for a pillow and a guitar in your hands, playing for drinks (Coca-Cola) and change all across the country. It’s undeniable that the people that speak the most highly of going on tour are those who have never done it. It’s a terribly inefficient way of making fans, it means lots of sleep deprivation and starvation, and, perhaps worst of all, bands that go on tour for years end up becoming completely disconnected from their lives before they were in a band. There’s a reason The Beatles completely gave up touring when they realized they didn’t have to. Now this doesn’t mean that live shows are dead. Absolutely not. There is a beauty, elegance, and intimacy in watching your favorite bands play live shows. However, I’m not convinced that losing hundreds of dollars on tours opening for B-grade acts to crowds of a dozen or less is the future of music. There must be a better, more efficient, less expensive way for bands to play live shows. I don’t know what it is yet, but local shows organized by groups like the Feel Good Music Coalition seem like they’re headed in the right direction. What do you think?
4) The ease of home recording and online distribution has led to artists who don’t have to quit their day jobs, and don’t have to compromise their artistic integrity. This is the main conclusion I think we can take from all of this. The last half of the 20th century might have meant the death of the village musician, replacing him with international billionaire pop sensations, but I think that the 21st century will be the time for the village musician to return. In this case, the “villages” are online communities with shared interests, like Linescratchers. The average musician of the 21st century won’t expect to make enough money to buy Swaziland, but they can expect to find an audience who are sympathetic to their sound, as long as they have the talent to back it up.
So don’t despair, my musical friends, and don’t feel like you need to leave the Church to find something that may not even exist out there. Succeeding in the music of the future will probably require far more humility than the music of the past. It means you may not make a living with your music, or buy a private jet, or a mansion in Beverly Hills. You may not be playing for a stadium full of thousands of screaming people. But perhaps this means that music might just return more to its pure, primal roots, as an end instead of a means to an end. As I said before, the trick is to find your village or villages. Find your community. May I suggest Linescratchers as one example.
http://www.linescratchers.com/?p=996
News flash: Musicians are poor.
If you’re a musician, then it probably didn’t take a journalistic investigation to come to the conclusion that musicians are poor. Not only are most musicians poor, but the ones who aren’t poor are actually poorer than you think they are. That’s the gist of this article I just read at The Root, but like most LDS musicians, this is information that I definitely already knew.Attaching yourself or your band to the corporate structure of a
record label has historically had its advantages: promotions, studios,
tour management, image, marketing, etc., but all those things come at a
price. When it all boils down to it, the average musician in the band
makes about $23.40 for every $1000 of music sold. Of course, money
isn’t the only problem with this sort of arrangement. Record labels are
notoriously wary of music that ventures out of the box at all, or goes
against an already money-making formula. Many artists who are signed to
labels soon disconnect from the lives that inspired their music, often
resulting in the dreaded Sophomore Syndrome.Sure, the top 0.001% of musicians make a lot of money. Paul McCartney’s net worth has been valued at around £387,012,000. Madonna has been valued at around $110,000,000. Kurt Cobain just might have made more money dead last year than you’ll ever make in your life. But these are the exceptions, not the rule. Telling your parents that you want to be a rock star when you grow up is like saying, “Daddy, I want to win the lottery when I grow up.” In fact, statistically, your chances might be worse in music than they are with the lottery.
Combine this with high gas prices and an economic downturn, and you have a dire situation for those who want to go on tour. Now sprinkle in the fact that musicians are selling fewer and fewer albums these days, and a public that seems decreasingly interested in local live music. It’s looking pretty dire, isn’t it?
In the words of Jeff Zentner in a recent interview he did with us, “a lot of people don’t realize how big a musician has to be before they make enough money to even quit the day job.” The cruel circular joke is, in order to get that big, a band usually has to quit their jobs and hit the road on tour. It only makes sense then that many Mormon parents are frightened when their children want to grow up to be rock stars, to say nothing about the lascivious lifestyles of many touring musicians. Mormon teenagers are encouraged to grow up, cut their hair, and get a job that will support a wife and kids. There are good reasons for this, of course, but on the other hand, this leads to many of our best and brightest musicians leaving the fold and becoming lost, and ending up as 50-year-old burnouts with more regrets than records. Is there a better way? A way that we can be true to our musical souls without selling our spiritual ones? Are all our musicians doomed to either leave the Church and go on tour, or spend the rest of their lives only playing hymns for Elders Quorum and Relief Society?
May I make a few points that might be of some assistance to those of you who with existential struggles between your art and the stability of a family life.
1) Technology is changing the way music is recorded. Fifteen years ago, in order to make a decent enough demo to put in your press kits, a band had to buy studio time, usually around $30-40 an hour at least, then get it mixed and mastered. Putting out a full album could easily take $10,000, without even including the cost of guitars, basses, drums, and amplifiers. If a band wanted to record the album themselves, and build their own studio, they could easily double that number. Breaking even was rare, and that’s why so many artists made the deal with the devil (aka record labels) to try and mitigate their losses. Now, home recording software continues to decline in price. Many Linescratchers are able to learn how to mix and engineer their own recordings using home equipment and get a pretty decent sound. The only real cost is getting the whole thing mastered. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean the recording studio is a thing of the past. Mixing and engineering can turn into a nightmare for those who aren’t technically inclined, and even tech geeks find that it’s sometimes better to rely on a professional engineer for the the technical side of things, to free up more of your creative energy for the music itself. However, Linescratchers all over the world are finding it easier and easier to record their own music on limited resources.
2) The Internet is changing the way music is promoted and distributed. Napster changed everything in this regard. The record labels are like the mighty dinosaurs: big, lumbering, and imposing, with a little tinge of feeling entitled to the world. However, the dinosaurs gave way to a smaller, more efficient, and more numerous creature: mammals. Okay, that was a dumb metaphor. The point is, there may not necessarily be another band like the Beatles that can command a majority of the young public market in the English-speaking world, but there are now riches in niches. If Epic Viking Folk-Metal is a money-making genre that is making money online, enough to even have concerts, then pretty much any genre has a chance at finding its place online. Unfortunately, this has led to about three bazillion horrible Myspace bands online with 45 friends. So finding an audience is still a difficult venture, and it still requires a fair amount of talent to attract people who might be interested in your music, but the key nowadays seems to be to find your audience. More on this below.
3) Let’s face it – touring sucks. Sure, as teenagers we all thought of “the road” as this glamorous, ideal life, with a cold rock for a pillow and a guitar in your hands, playing for drinks (Coca-Cola) and change all across the country. It’s undeniable that the people that speak the most highly of going on tour are those who have never done it. It’s a terribly inefficient way of making fans, it means lots of sleep deprivation and starvation, and, perhaps worst of all, bands that go on tour for years end up becoming completely disconnected from their lives before they were in a band. There’s a reason The Beatles completely gave up touring when they realized they didn’t have to. Now this doesn’t mean that live shows are dead. Absolutely not. There is a beauty, elegance, and intimacy in watching your favorite bands play live shows. However, I’m not convinced that losing hundreds of dollars on tours opening for B-grade acts to crowds of a dozen or less is the future of music. There must be a better, more efficient, less expensive way for bands to play live shows. I don’t know what it is yet, but local shows organized by groups like the Feel Good Music Coalition seem like they’re headed in the right direction. What do you think?
4) The ease of home recording and online distribution has led to artists who don’t have to quit their day jobs, and don’t have to compromise their artistic integrity. This is the main conclusion I think we can take from all of this. The last half of the 20th century might have meant the death of the village musician, replacing him with international billionaire pop sensations, but I think that the 21st century will be the time for the village musician to return. In this case, the “villages” are online communities with shared interests, like Linescratchers. The average musician of the 21st century won’t expect to make enough money to buy Swaziland, but they can expect to find an audience who are sympathetic to their sound, as long as they have the talent to back it up.
So don’t despair, my musical friends, and don’t feel like you need to leave the Church to find something that may not even exist out there. Succeeding in the music of the future will probably require far more humility than the music of the past. It means you may not make a living with your music, or buy a private jet, or a mansion in Beverly Hills. You may not be playing for a stadium full of thousands of screaming people. But perhaps this means that music might just return more to its pure, primal roots, as an end instead of a means to an end. As I said before, the trick is to find your village or villages. Find your community. May I suggest Linescratchers as one example.
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Arts and Culture (1MA/4 & 1MA3)
Hey, due to an unexpected dean's hours, we'll be doing the same article in both 1MA/4 on Thursday the 16th of May and 1MA/3 on the 20th. See you then
http://burnaway.org/2013/01/living-walls-and-the-perils-of-public-space-part-1/
http://burnaway.org/2013/01/living-walls-and-the-perils-of-public-space-part-2/
When the French street artist known as Roti painted his mural An Allegory of the Human City in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Southwest Atlanta, he assumed everyone would understand it as a commentary on the brutality of capitalism. They did not. That at least is apparently what he told the New York Times.
Instead, the mural was decried by a vocal coterie of residents as containing “demonic” imagery reminiscent of the pervasive destruction the neighborhood has suffered. It’s clear that not all of Pittsburgh’s residents shared that interpretation, but it was the one adopted by high-profile residents including a former state representative, Doug Dean, and the Atlanta-based group Concerned Black Clergy.
The mural, which was part of the annual Living Walls street art program, sparked a controversy that included rounds of destruction and remediation of the mural, ending finally in the work’s removal.
As a work of street art, An Allegory of the Human City was a tour-de-force. (This photo
by Dustin Chambers gives a sense of the mural’s scale.) Executed as all
of Roti’s murals in monochromatic, freehand spray paint, the mural
depicted a dense, machine-like cityscape packed with Gothic architecture
and elements reminiscent of Industrial Revolution–era smokestacks and
waterwheels. Running through this city and emerging from either side was
an enormous fishlike creature, which the artist himself calls a snake,
but which had fins and other fishlike characteristics. From the
creature’s front end emerged the torso of an unclothed man, fracturing
first into a crystalline structure at the neck and then into a
full-fledged alligator head, which in turn issued forth (or was
swallowing) a series of ever smaller and ever more numerous fish of
various species swimming into distant space in a swirling school. The
mural contained a number of other objects that implied rich, mythic
importance: a lantern-like clock with lock and key, a fishing rod held
by the alligator-snake-fish-man, a trailing birdcage that had captured
the moon.
Roti has executed numerous murals in the United States, none of which appear to have sparked any significant controversy. The city of Ithaca, New York, in particular has several, all painted in a similar style, employing similar imagery of human-animal hybrids, birdcages, fish, and perhaps most consistently, densely packed Gothic cities. For Roti, the city is both the source of human inspiration and the evidence of human dysfunction.
Many of the arguments in support of the mural have depended not on a
defense of the mural’s content, but on a cluster of well-worn clichés
about art as such: that art is always socially beneficial, that art need
never stoop to justify itself, that some art is always better than no
art.
But are those claims valid? What if art can do harm as well as good? And who decides when harm has been done? In short, does the art speak for itself, and if it can’t, whose interpretation counts?
Roti’s Allegory can be considered an example of what I call “neosymbolist” art. It’s a coinage that has been obscurely used in other contexts, but whose meaning can be redirected to apply to a large number of artists practicing today.
The original nineteenth-century Symbolists—Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon,
and others—sought to make works that existed purely on their own terms.
Focusing on spiritual and imaginative ideas, these artists were
suddenly free from imitating the outside world. Instead, the real
subject matter was the artist’s idiosyncratic, psychological interpretation
of the outside world. They could pursue their inner visions into any
dark, fantastic, or sublime corner of the psyche those visions might
lead. Thus the work was willfully obscure, esoteric, and even occult.
And it’s not unlike a great deal of work that has emerged from artists
in recent decades.
Indeed, most of what you probably believe about the role of the artist in society comes straight from the pen of Symbolist poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and his cohort: Verlaine, Rilke, Rimbaud, Yeats, and others. It goes something like this: the artist is the unique visionary whose insight into the world is so powerful, so inherently salutary, that the artwork needs no justification outside of itself. Its only obligation is to its own internally created reality. And that work of art, when out among people, must necessarily enlighten anyone who would trouble to probe its self-referential obscurities. The myth of the artist as the high priest of the dark, creative demiurge is so airtight in Western culture that any artist who behaves differently risks being accused of not being an artist at all.
Many contemporary artists have taken these ideas to a
twenty-first-century extreme. This neosymbolist work can be almost
photorealistic, yet it specifically rejects any commonly accessible
reality or any established pictorial language. The more recognizable and
readable the figures in the work, the more outlandish other elements of
the composition must be in order to free it from the tether of common
experience. Hence the explosion of pattern, color, and surreal narrative
in many such works.
The work of, for example, Marcy Starz, Jason R. Butcher, and Joe Tsambiras exemplify this mode of working. All three local artists, along with others working elsewhere such as Camille Rose Garcia and Os Gêmeos, might be considered neosymbolists whose exquisitely drafted works are replete with private symbols and obscure, self-contained narratives.
According to Roti’s own statement, Allegory does in fact have a very precise and unambiguous meaning for him personally: fishes represent humanity, the key represents the ability to stop time, and the moon represents uncontrollable forces of nature. For the artist, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between images in the mural and their meanings in the real world. But the glossary needed for that translation exists in the artist’s head, not in any commonly understood, generally available mythos.
That’s when audiences create their own meanings. In the privacy of a
gallery or the controlled context of academic settings, this act is
almost always benign. Many artists even cherish the ways in which
audiences help them create meaning.
But when the work is placed in a broader public space, those meanings occasionally get out of control. Thus a former state rep and a group of clergymen in the Pittsburgh neighborhood attached a meaning to the snake-like image that the artist couldn’t anticipate. Those interpreters did what every one of us without privileged access to the artist did when we encountered the mural: we rummaged around our collective store of symbols and came up with the most fitting interpretation we could muster given the clues we were given. When symbolic imagery enters public space with no other explanation, it should be no surprise that it will be recognized by whatever symbolic system is most available.
Broad, common symbolic systems form part of what critic Michael Kimmelman has called the “aesthetic common denominator” required of all public art. If the work doesn’t avail itself of that common denominator, one will be imposed on it, as it were, against its will. Ironically that imposition is likely to leave both the artist and the audience feeling aggrieved.
Allegory shows one possible outcome of neosymbolist expression as it comes out of the galleries and off the web to engage with public space. Most often, audiences respond with appreciation and delight. But not always. Private allegorical language can be laced with minefields and trap doors if an artist stumbles upon a symbol whose accumulated meaning may be thousands of years older than the artist’s 23-year-old imagination.
The controversy over An Allegory of the Human City is a controversy over real things: about the overlay of incompatible mythologies and histories in public space and who bears the responsibility of interpretation. My purpose here isn’t to lay blame on any artist, community, or arts organization.
It is my purpose, however, to dispel the notion that the dispute is somehow the result of silly people on one side or the other. This dispute is not silly. It is not superfluous. It stands right in the heart of how public discourse functions.
If we accept that art has to power to uplift or heal or educate, then the same logic dictates that it also has the power to oppress or injure or mislead. The question for us all is whose job is it to decide which is which?
The recent dustup over Roti’s Allegory of the Human City mural isn’t the only such controversy to ruffle feathers in this country. It’s not even the first for Living Walls. Last fall, a Living Walls mural in Chosewood Park by Argentinean street artist Hyuro that depicted a woman shedding her clothes met with confusion, disdain, and outrage resulting in a formal request for its removal. Beyond Atlanta, street art powerhouses Os Gêmeos created a mural in Boston depicting a figure that was said to look too much like a terrorist. One in St. Paul was decried for its depiction of two bears looking suspiciously amorous. And in 2011 a mural on the outer wall of LA MOCA by renowned Italian street artist Blu was famously painted over, before the first peep of outrage, because director Jeffrey Deitch feared the mural might cause offense to someone somewhere someday.
Back in Atlanta, Allegory was finally painted over after a fierce turf war on December 11 by the Georgia Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the 240-foot retaining wall. The mural’s destruction took place despite a promised community forum that was to bring together pro and con constituencies sponsored by the neighborhoods’ city council representatives. As of the time of this writing no such forum has occurred.
Allegory‘s naked torso, fish scales, and alligator head caught Roti in the bear trap of the public’s idea of what art means. But the swift and silent way in which the mural was finally destroyed likewise highlights how limiting, perhaps even toxic, the idea of “the community” has become in its modern guise. According to several press accounts, opinions among the residents of Pittsburgh were split at best and, at worst, those opposing the mural may have been a minority, albeit a vocal and powerful one. But all of that complexity, with all of its potential for nuanced interpretation, was wiped away with the monolithic coat of gray paint that “the community” allegedly demanded.
Sociologist Richard Sennett described this sort of conundrum in his influential analysis of the public sphere, The Fall of Public Man.
With the social roles of modern life constantly in flux and in turmoil,
Sennett wrote, “the community”—whatever and wherever one thinks that
is—has become the one place where we insist on being ever our real
selves, safe and unchallenged. Even the family doesn’t provide that
sanctuary for many people in the modern age. So we’re always on the
lookout for signs that someone else may not really belong. Everyone is
constantly testing everyone else, and the price of failing those tests
is excommunication. “Fraternity,” wrote Sennett “often becomes an
exercise in fratricide.”
That’s why those who speak for this or that community are almost always the most strident voices. They are the voices least likely to be confused for an outsider’s. In other words, whoever speaks for the community is whoever’s most “down” with the cause at hand. And the easiest way to be the most down is to take an extreme position—to insist that a mural be erased utterly with no conversation, no public debate, or conversely to insist that the work remain just as its artist intended it no matter who it offends. Both are extreme positions that grow out of the sense of belonging to a community that’s clear on who’s “one of us” and who’s not.
Historically, the race to out-down the next guy has proven especially vexing in matters of public art. In the 1930s
controversies over public murals were both more frequent and more
acrimonious than anything this country has since experienced. In that
decade and through the culture wars of the 1980s,
pleasing the community often meant appealing to its loudest and most
conservative voices. A single strident no could outweigh a thousand
yeses.
Street art is the newest guest at the table of public art, and as such Living Walls now finds itself on the receiving end of that pitiless please-the-public-or-die logic. Joining guerilla-style street art with sanctioned public art makes for a strained marriage. Street art is often illegal and anonymous. It answers only to its own artistic vision. Public art, on the other hand, is often at its best when undertaken with the deep involvement of surrounding neighborhoods.
Roti has been typical of an old-school street artist: throughout his
early practice, none of his work in the public spaces of his native
France was sanctioned or asked for. He needed answer only to himself and
his own aesthetic impulses. That practice of willful
self-determination, however, carries a baked-in tension with communities
that may otherwise have their own priorities and aesthetics. As the two
worlds merge, that tension is likely to become more and more evident.
The tension is unsustainable. In each case something’s got to give. In one scenario, the street artists will begin to think of their work less as their own expression, and more as a collective expression that may include views of the world quite different from their own. The alternative is that we dismantle the idea that a community should be a safe place where one’s most fundamental truths are never challenged. The first option runs against some of the most cherished notions of how an artist should function, and the second runs counter to the way communities have come to function. This impasse isn’t likely to be dislodged anytime soon, and the resulting turf wars of meaning and interpretation are likely to be constant companions.
In an ideal world, a skirmish such as the one over Allegory would produce more than just a clash of ideas; it would serve as an exercise in getting along in a democratic society.
Every modern person in a pluralistic democracy such as ours must constantly question what he or she assumes to be true about the world. Every cosmopolitan, multi-cultural society in modern history has developed some culture of healthy doubt, and the US is no exception. Doubting our received beliefs is what allows different races, different religions, and those of different political viewpoints to avoid all-out war and, occasionally, even live in something approaching harmony.
The opposite of doubt is certainty. And it’s certainty—the belief that no legitimate explanations for the world exist outside one’s own—that marches soldiers onto battlefields and flies planes into buildings.
In a much less dramatic arena, it’s also the impulse to plug our ears and refuse to believe that a piece of public art could have very different meanings within the fabric of daily life depending on the texture and history of each life.
When a few residents in the Pittsburgh neighborhood caught wind of
Roti’s admittedly baffling mural, the logic of certainty quickly took
hold on all sides. The battle lines were drawn and genuine openness to
doubt became impossible. What should have been an opportunity to
encounter new ideas and new ways of seeing the world instead became a
series of tribal calls-to-arms to defend this or that community.
That’s why the cancelation of the promised neighborhood forum to discuss Allegory is the true tragedy here. Without the public outlet as a first step to hash out opposing ideas, anyone involved in the debacle can instead walk away convinced of their own righteousness, secure that no alternative explanation of the situation was possible. For the life of a democracy, an enforced silence around the mural is far worse than all the noise and fury the mural sparked in the first place.
The art world isn’t the only place where people fracture into self-enclosed juntas. It isn’t hard to see the same dynamic increasingly at work in our electoral politics. When someone disagrees with us politically, the past decade has shown that we’re more likely than ever to misunderstand each other. When these arguments happen, we don’t simply assume that the other person is under the sway of wrong ideas; we assume that they must be the wrong kind of person. Not just mistaken, but evil. No wonder we have no language of compromise. When you’re certain of your own rightness and equally certain of your opponent’s evilness, compromise always looks like selling out.
Political tribalism didn’t start with public art and won’t be solved by public art. But if we can’t use it to work out a vocabulary of compromise, a language of productive disagreement, then all the controversy will have been a waste. Public art won’t save democracy, but it may at least remind us how easy democracy is to lose.
http://burnaway.org/2013/01/living-walls-and-the-perils-of-public-space-part-1/
http://burnaway.org/2013/01/living-walls-and-the-perils-of-public-space-part-2/
Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space, Part I
The recent controversy over a public mural begs the question: If art can’t speak for itself, who gets to speak for it? This is the first installment of a two-part article on the subject.When the French street artist known as Roti painted his mural An Allegory of the Human City in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Southwest Atlanta, he assumed everyone would understand it as a commentary on the brutality of capitalism. They did not. That at least is apparently what he told the New York Times.
Instead, the mural was decried by a vocal coterie of residents as containing “demonic” imagery reminiscent of the pervasive destruction the neighborhood has suffered. It’s clear that not all of Pittsburgh’s residents shared that interpretation, but it was the one adopted by high-profile residents including a former state representative, Doug Dean, and the Atlanta-based group Concerned Black Clergy.
The mural, which was part of the annual Living Walls street art program, sparked a controversy that included rounds of destruction and remediation of the mural, ending finally in the work’s removal.
Roti has executed numerous murals in the United States, none of which appear to have sparked any significant controversy. The city of Ithaca, New York, in particular has several, all painted in a similar style, employing similar imagery of human-animal hybrids, birdcages, fish, and perhaps most consistently, densely packed Gothic cities. For Roti, the city is both the source of human inspiration and the evidence of human dysfunction.
But are those claims valid? What if art can do harm as well as good? And who decides when harm has been done? In short, does the art speak for itself, and if it can’t, whose interpretation counts?
Roti’s Allegory can be considered an example of what I call “neosymbolist” art. It’s a coinage that has been obscurely used in other contexts, but whose meaning can be redirected to apply to a large number of artists practicing today.
Indeed, most of what you probably believe about the role of the artist in society comes straight from the pen of Symbolist poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and his cohort: Verlaine, Rilke, Rimbaud, Yeats, and others. It goes something like this: the artist is the unique visionary whose insight into the world is so powerful, so inherently salutary, that the artwork needs no justification outside of itself. Its only obligation is to its own internally created reality. And that work of art, when out among people, must necessarily enlighten anyone who would trouble to probe its self-referential obscurities. The myth of the artist as the high priest of the dark, creative demiurge is so airtight in Western culture that any artist who behaves differently risks being accused of not being an artist at all.
The work of, for example, Marcy Starz, Jason R. Butcher, and Joe Tsambiras exemplify this mode of working. All three local artists, along with others working elsewhere such as Camille Rose Garcia and Os Gêmeos, might be considered neosymbolists whose exquisitely drafted works are replete with private symbols and obscure, self-contained narratives.
According to Roti’s own statement, Allegory does in fact have a very precise and unambiguous meaning for him personally: fishes represent humanity, the key represents the ability to stop time, and the moon represents uncontrollable forces of nature. For the artist, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between images in the mural and their meanings in the real world. But the glossary needed for that translation exists in the artist’s head, not in any commonly understood, generally available mythos.
.
But when the work is placed in a broader public space, those meanings occasionally get out of control. Thus a former state rep and a group of clergymen in the Pittsburgh neighborhood attached a meaning to the snake-like image that the artist couldn’t anticipate. Those interpreters did what every one of us without privileged access to the artist did when we encountered the mural: we rummaged around our collective store of symbols and came up with the most fitting interpretation we could muster given the clues we were given. When symbolic imagery enters public space with no other explanation, it should be no surprise that it will be recognized by whatever symbolic system is most available.
Broad, common symbolic systems form part of what critic Michael Kimmelman has called the “aesthetic common denominator” required of all public art. If the work doesn’t avail itself of that common denominator, one will be imposed on it, as it were, against its will. Ironically that imposition is likely to leave both the artist and the audience feeling aggrieved.
Allegory shows one possible outcome of neosymbolist expression as it comes out of the galleries and off the web to engage with public space. Most often, audiences respond with appreciation and delight. But not always. Private allegorical language can be laced with minefields and trap doors if an artist stumbles upon a symbol whose accumulated meaning may be thousands of years older than the artist’s 23-year-old imagination.
The controversy over An Allegory of the Human City is a controversy over real things: about the overlay of incompatible mythologies and histories in public space and who bears the responsibility of interpretation. My purpose here isn’t to lay blame on any artist, community, or arts organization.
It is my purpose, however, to dispel the notion that the dispute is somehow the result of silly people on one side or the other. This dispute is not silly. It is not superfluous. It stands right in the heart of how public discourse functions.
If we accept that art has to power to uplift or heal or educate, then the same logic dictates that it also has the power to oppress or injure or mislead. The question for us all is whose job is it to decide which is which?
Living Walls and the Perils of Public Space, Part II
Artists sometimes slip up when it comes to placing art in communities. But that doesn’t let communities off the hook. When do communities go too far? This is the second of a two-part article on the subject. Part I appeared in the pages of BURNAWAY last week, accompanied by some intriguing commentary from our readers.The recent dustup over Roti’s Allegory of the Human City mural isn’t the only such controversy to ruffle feathers in this country. It’s not even the first for Living Walls. Last fall, a Living Walls mural in Chosewood Park by Argentinean street artist Hyuro that depicted a woman shedding her clothes met with confusion, disdain, and outrage resulting in a formal request for its removal. Beyond Atlanta, street art powerhouses Os Gêmeos created a mural in Boston depicting a figure that was said to look too much like a terrorist. One in St. Paul was decried for its depiction of two bears looking suspiciously amorous. And in 2011 a mural on the outer wall of LA MOCA by renowned Italian street artist Blu was famously painted over, before the first peep of outrage, because director Jeffrey Deitch feared the mural might cause offense to someone somewhere someday.
Back in Atlanta, Allegory was finally painted over after a fierce turf war on December 11 by the Georgia Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the 240-foot retaining wall. The mural’s destruction took place despite a promised community forum that was to bring together pro and con constituencies sponsored by the neighborhoods’ city council representatives. As of the time of this writing no such forum has occurred.
Allegory‘s naked torso, fish scales, and alligator head caught Roti in the bear trap of the public’s idea of what art means. But the swift and silent way in which the mural was finally destroyed likewise highlights how limiting, perhaps even toxic, the idea of “the community” has become in its modern guise. According to several press accounts, opinions among the residents of Pittsburgh were split at best and, at worst, those opposing the mural may have been a minority, albeit a vocal and powerful one. But all of that complexity, with all of its potential for nuanced interpretation, was wiped away with the monolithic coat of gray paint that “the community” allegedly demanded.
That’s why those who speak for this or that community are almost always the most strident voices. They are the voices least likely to be confused for an outsider’s. In other words, whoever speaks for the community is whoever’s most “down” with the cause at hand. And the easiest way to be the most down is to take an extreme position—to insist that a mural be erased utterly with no conversation, no public debate, or conversely to insist that the work remain just as its artist intended it no matter who it offends. Both are extreme positions that grow out of the sense of belonging to a community that’s clear on who’s “one of us” and who’s not.
Street art is the newest guest at the table of public art, and as such Living Walls now finds itself on the receiving end of that pitiless please-the-public-or-die logic. Joining guerilla-style street art with sanctioned public art makes for a strained marriage. Street art is often illegal and anonymous. It answers only to its own artistic vision. Public art, on the other hand, is often at its best when undertaken with the deep involvement of surrounding neighborhoods.
The tension is unsustainable. In each case something’s got to give. In one scenario, the street artists will begin to think of their work less as their own expression, and more as a collective expression that may include views of the world quite different from their own. The alternative is that we dismantle the idea that a community should be a safe place where one’s most fundamental truths are never challenged. The first option runs against some of the most cherished notions of how an artist should function, and the second runs counter to the way communities have come to function. This impasse isn’t likely to be dislodged anytime soon, and the resulting turf wars of meaning and interpretation are likely to be constant companions.
Every modern person in a pluralistic democracy such as ours must constantly question what he or she assumes to be true about the world. Every cosmopolitan, multi-cultural society in modern history has developed some culture of healthy doubt, and the US is no exception. Doubting our received beliefs is what allows different races, different religions, and those of different political viewpoints to avoid all-out war and, occasionally, even live in something approaching harmony.
The opposite of doubt is certainty. And it’s certainty—the belief that no legitimate explanations for the world exist outside one’s own—that marches soldiers onto battlefields and flies planes into buildings.
In a much less dramatic arena, it’s also the impulse to plug our ears and refuse to believe that a piece of public art could have very different meanings within the fabric of daily life depending on the texture and history of each life.
That’s why the cancelation of the promised neighborhood forum to discuss Allegory is the true tragedy here. Without the public outlet as a first step to hash out opposing ideas, anyone involved in the debacle can instead walk away convinced of their own righteousness, secure that no alternative explanation of the situation was possible. For the life of a democracy, an enforced silence around the mural is far worse than all the noise and fury the mural sparked in the first place.
The art world isn’t the only place where people fracture into self-enclosed juntas. It isn’t hard to see the same dynamic increasingly at work in our electoral politics. When someone disagrees with us politically, the past decade has shown that we’re more likely than ever to misunderstand each other. When these arguments happen, we don’t simply assume that the other person is under the sway of wrong ideas; we assume that they must be the wrong kind of person. Not just mistaken, but evil. No wonder we have no language of compromise. When you’re certain of your own rightness and equally certain of your opponent’s evilness, compromise always looks like selling out.
Political tribalism didn’t start with public art and won’t be solved by public art. But if we can’t use it to work out a vocabulary of compromise, a language of productive disagreement, then all the controversy will have been a waste. Public art won’t save democracy, but it may at least remind us how easy democracy is to lose.
1MA/3 Final Exam Questions
Hey there, here's the list for the final exam questions for 1MA/3. Please read them and decide if you like them. Additionally, there are still a couple of questions to be decided on. Feel free to leave comments below.
1MA
FINAL LIST
Politics
and society
1. How can governments counteract voter apathy? or Are Amrican elections democratic or are they an oppressive tool?
2. Should soft drugs be legalized?
3. Discuss some of the protest movements and the root causes for the protests seen around the world in the last two years.
4. What are some of the causes of mass murders and how should we punish the mass murderers?
5. Why did the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more successful than other protest movements.
1. How can governments counteract voter apathy? or Are Amrican elections democratic or are they an oppressive tool?
2. Should soft drugs be legalized?
3. Discuss some of the protest movements and the root causes for the protests seen around the world in the last two years.
4. What are some of the causes of mass murders and how should we punish the mass murderers?
5. Why did the Maple Spring movement develop and why can it be viewed as more successful than other protest movements.
6.
Do you think that laws should be passed to limit gun
ownership?
Relationships
1. What is your perspective on polyamorous relationships? Can you imagine being a part of such a relationship?
2. How do polyamorous relationships affect children? Should polyamorous families have the right to raise children?
3. Is monogamy natural?
4. Why do some women begin relations with locked up men?
5. How have technological devices changed the way we communicate?
Relationships
1. What is your perspective on polyamorous relationships? Can you imagine being a part of such a relationship?
2. How do polyamorous relationships affect children? Should polyamorous families have the right to raise children?
3. Is monogamy natural?
4. Why do some women begin relations with locked up men?
5. How have technological devices changed the way we communicate?
6.
Is it possible to be truly alone in a technology-driven
society?
Lifestyle
1. Discuss some of the most prevalent methods used by advertisers and the media to influence our behavior?
Lifestyle
1. Discuss some of the most prevalent methods used by advertisers and the media to influence our behavior?
2.
Do things and money bring happiness? If not what does?
3.How does consumerism affect children?
4.What impact does consumerism have on holiday seasons? (Here or could we think of another question and add this one to tourism and travel?)
5.Why do you think the term ‘feminist’ has a negative connotation? OR Why do you think being labeled as a feminist have a negative meaning?
6.What are some of the means feminists use to attract attention? Justify their choice.
Tourism and travel
1. Is the urge to travel genetic?
3.How does consumerism affect children?
4.What impact does consumerism have on holiday seasons? (Here or could we think of another question and add this one to tourism and travel?)
5.Why do you think the term ‘feminist’ has a negative connotation? OR Why do you think being labeled as a feminist have a negative meaning?
6.What are some of the means feminists use to attract attention? Justify their choice.
Tourism and travel
1. Is the urge to travel genetic?
2.
Describe the influence of technology on traveling.
3. How do cameras affect our travel experience?
4. Why is extreme tourism growing in popularity?
5. Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing? Why?
6. Is it ethical to travel to war affected and poverty-stricken areas?
Technology
1.What is hacktivism? What are some methods of hacktivism?
2.Do you support any of the hacktivists’ actions? Why yes/not?
3. How do cameras affect our travel experience?
4. Why is extreme tourism growing in popularity?
5. Which disaster sites (if any) would you be interested in seeing? Why?
6. Is it ethical to travel to war affected and poverty-stricken areas?
Technology
1.What is hacktivism? What are some methods of hacktivism?
2.Do you support any of the hacktivists’ actions? Why yes/not?
3.Should
information be completely free?
4.How can technology be used to improve/alter our bodies?
5.Would you ever consider putting implants in your body (if yes, what kind of implants/if no, why not)?
4.How can technology be used to improve/alter our bodies?
5.Would you ever consider putting implants in your body (if yes, what kind of implants/if no, why not)?
6.Discuss
the pros and cons of smartphones.
Media and journalism
1.What impact does a president have on manipulating media content? How and why is this done? OR How much freedom do reporters have when they pursue a story? How much should they have?
2.What impact does technology have on journalism?
3.What are the core components of creating a successful Internet/ YouTube video?
4.Is there a correlation between fear and consumerism? or What is the culture of fear and how does in relate to comsumerism?
5.Can we trust the media?
Media and journalism
1.What impact does a president have on manipulating media content? How and why is this done? OR How much freedom do reporters have when they pursue a story? How much should they have?
2.What impact does technology have on journalism?
3.What are the core components of creating a successful Internet/ YouTube video?
4.Is there a correlation between fear and consumerism? or What is the culture of fear and how does in relate to comsumerism?
5.Can we trust the media?
6.
Should violence in the media be restrained?
Business and finance
Business and finance
1.What
are the advantages and disadvantages of the American Health Care
System?
2.How
does inequality affect economic growth?
3.What
are some of the factors that have led to the "Great Divergence"?
4..Is
income inequality just the problem of 99%?
5.What
were the reasons of 2012-2013 Cypriot financial crisis?
6.How
did the government of Cyprus and the troika try to solve their
banking crisis?
Ethics
1.Explain the term “moral hazard”. When does it occur and what are its consequences?
2.How do we distinguish between right and wrong? What are the sources of ethical behavior?
3.Recent research suggested that the wealthy are less ethical, why could this be so? Give examples of the unethical behaviors of the rich.
1.Explain the term “moral hazard”. When does it occur and what are its consequences?
2.How do we distinguish between right and wrong? What are the sources of ethical behavior?
3.Recent research suggested that the wealthy are less ethical, why could this be so? Give examples of the unethical behaviors of the rich.
4.Is
society becoming less moral or not? Explain your answer.
5.Discuss
some of the consequences of using doping and performance-enhancing
drugs.
6.Why
has the World Anti-Doping Agency been introduced? What are its aims?
Art & Culture
1. How can we make art more accessible to the general public?
2. What is the role of art?
3. How has technology such as the internet influenced art generally and music specifically?
4. Do you agree with the statement that some art is better than no art and that it is always socially beneficial?
5. How should communities decide what is appropriate art for the public space?
6. Celebrity vs. Musicians
7. Make people for music versus let people pay for music.
Art & Culture
1. How can we make art more accessible to the general public?
2. What is the role of art?
3. How has technology such as the internet influenced art generally and music specifically?
4. Do you agree with the statement that some art is better than no art and that it is always socially beneficial?
5. How should communities decide what is appropriate art for the public space?
6. Celebrity vs. Musicians
7. Make people for music versus let people pay for music.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Arts & Culture 1MA/4
Hey there. Sorry for the delay, but here's the article for the 1MA/4 class on Monday. In keeping with my recent habit of mixing the last topic with the next it is a bit ethics based I know (and long!):
thetrichordist.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/
Here's the link to the article the letter is in response to if you're interested - http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2012/06/16/154863819/i-never-owned-any-music-to-begin-with
If you've got some extra time you might want to check out my latest post on my blog, it's got all kinds of good politics and finance mixed in with Poland and the UK. See you Monday!
Emily:
My intention here is not to shame you or embarrass you. I believe you are already on the side of musicians and artists and you are just grappling with how to do the right thing. I applaud your courage in admitting you do not pay for music, and that you do not want to but you are grappling with the moral implications. I just think that you have been presented with some false choices by what sounds a lot like what we hear from the “Free Culture” adherents.
I must disagree with the underlying premise of what you have written. Fairly compensating musicians is not a problem that is up to governments and large corporations to solve. It is not up to them to make it “convenient” so you don’t behave unethically. (Besides–is it really that inconvenient to download a song from iTunes into your iPhone? Is it that hard to type in your password? I think millions would disagree.)
Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.
I’ve been teaching college students about the economics of the music business at the University of Georgia for the last two years. Unfortunately for artists, most of them share your attitude about purchasing music. There is a disconnect between their personal behavior and a greater social injustice that is occurring. You seem to have internalized that ripping 11,000 tracks in your iPod compared to your purchase of 15 CDs in your lifetime feels pretty disproportionate. You also seem to recognize that you are not just ripping off the record labels but you are directly ripping off the artist and songwriters whose music you “don’t buy”. It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t take these tracks from a file-sharing site. That may seem like a neat dodge, but I’d suggest to you that from the artist’s point of view, it’s kind of irrelevant.
Now, my students typically justify their own disproportionate choices in one of two ways. I’m not trying to set up a “strawman”, but I do have a lot of anecdotal experience with this.
“It’s OK not to pay for music because record companies rip off artists and do not pay artists anything.” In the vast majority of cases, this is not true. There have been some highly publicized abuses by record labels. But most record contracts specify royalties and advances to artists. Advances are important to understand–a prepayment of unearned royalties. Not a debt, more like a bet. The artist only has to “repay” (or “recoup”) the advance from record sales. If there are no or insufficient record sales, the advance is written off by the record company. So it’s false to say that record companies don’t pay artists. Most of the time they not only pay artists, but they make bets on artists. And it should go without saying that the bets will get smaller and fewer the more unrecouped advances are paid by labels.
Secondly, by law the record label must pay songwriters (who may also be artists) something called a “mechanical royalty” for sales of CDs or downloads of the song. This is paid regardless of whether a record is recouped or not. The rate is predetermined, and the license is compulsory. Meaning that the file sharing sites could get the same license if they wanted to, at least for the songs. They don’t. They don’t wanna pay artists.
Also, you must consider the fact that the vast majority of artists are releasing albums independently and there is not a “real” record company. Usually just an imprint owned by the artist. In the vast majority of cases you are taking money directly from the artist. How does one know which labels are artist owned? It’s not always clear. But even in the case of corporate record labels, shouldn’t they be rewarded for the bets they make that provides you with recordings you enjoy? It’s not like the money goes into a giant bonfire in the middle of the woods while satanic priests conduct black masses and animal sacrifices. Usually some of that money flows back to artists, engineers and people like you who graduate from college and get jobs in the industry. And record labels also give your college radio stations all those CDs you play.
Artists can make money on the road (or its variant “Artists are rich”). The average income of a musician that files taxes is something like 35k a year w/o benefits. The vast majority of artists do not make significant money on the road. Until recently, most touring activity was a money losing operation. The idea was the artists would make up the loss through recorded music sales. This has been reversed by the financial logic of file-sharing and streaming. You now tour to support making albums if you are very, very lucky. Otherwise, you pay for making albums out of your own pocket. Only the very top tier of musicians make ANY money on the road. And only the 1% of the 1% makes significant money on the road. (For now.)
Over the last 12 years I’ve watched revenue flowing to artists collapse.
Shortly before Christmas 2009, Vic took his life. He was my neighbor, and I was there as they put him in the ambulance. On March 6th, 2010, Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart. Anybody who knew either of these musicians will tell you that the pair suffered depression. They will also tell you their situation was worsened by their financial situation. Vic was deeply in debt to hospitals and, at the time, was publicly complaining about losing his home. Mark was living in abject squalor in his remote studio in the Smokey Mountains without adequate access to the mental health care he so desperately needed.
I present these two stories to you not because I’m pointing fingers or want to shame you. I just want to illustrate that “small” personal decisions have very real consequences, particularly when millions of people make the decision not to compensate artists they supposedly “love”. And it is up to us individually to examine the consequences of our actions. It is not up to governments or corporations to make us choose to behave ethically. We have to do that ourselves.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Now, having said all that, I also deeply empathize with your generation. You have grown up in a time when technological and commercial interests are attempting to change our principles and morality. Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. Although it is the premise of every “machines gone wild” story since Jules Verne or Fritz Lang, this is exactly backwards. Sadly, I see the effects of this thinking with many of my students.
These technological and commercial interests have largely exerted this pressure through the Free Culture movement, which is funded by a handful of large tech corporations and their foundations in the US, Canada, Europe and other countries.* Your letter clearly shows that you sense that something is deeply wrong, but you don’t put your finger on it. I want to commend you for doing this. I also want to enlist you in the fight to correct this outrage. Let me try to to show you exactly what is wrong. What it is you can’t put your finger on.
The fundamental shift in principals and morality is about who gets to control and exploit the work of an artist. The accepted norm for hudreds of years of western civilization is the artist exclusively has the right to exploit and control his/her work for a period of time. (Since the works that are are almost invariably the subject of these discussions are popular culture of one type or another, the duration of the copyright term is pretty much irrelevant for an ethical discussion.) By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work. This system has worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally. We are being asked to continue to let these companies violate the law without being punished or prosecuted. We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.
Who are these companies? They are sites like The Pirate Bay, or Kim Dotcom and Megaupload. They are “legitimate” companies like Google that serve ads to these sites through AdChoices and Doubleclick. They are companies like Grooveshark that operate streaming sites without permission from artists and over the objections of the artist, much less payment of royalties lawfully set by the artist. They are the venture capitalists that raise money for these sites. They are the hardware makers that sell racks of servers to these companies. And so on and so on.
What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting. Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it. And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?
But it’s worse than that. It turns out that Verizon, AT&T, Charter etc etc are charging a toll to get into this neighborhood to get the free stuff. Further, companies like Google are selling maps (search results) that tell you where the stuff is that you want to loot. Companies like Megavideo are charging for a high speed looting service (premium accounts for faster downloads). Google is also selling ads in this neighborhood and sharing the revenue with everyone except the people who make the stuff being looted. Further, in order to loot you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400 Samsumg tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music. (Like most claimed “disruptive innovations”it turns out expensive subsidies exist elsewhere.) Companies are actually making money from this looting activity. These companies only make money if you change your principles and morality! And none of that money goes to the artists!
And believe it or not this is where the problem with Spotify starts. The internet is full of stories from artists detailing just how little they receive from Spotify. I shan’t repeat them here. They are epic. Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. The reason they can get away with paying so little to artists is because the alternative is The ‘Net where people have already purchased all the gear they need to loot those songs for free. Now while something like Spotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now. As long as the consumer makes the unethical choice to support the looters, Spotify will not have to compensate artists fairly. There is simply no market pressure. Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.
++++++++++++++++++
So let’s go back and look at what it would have cost you to ethically and legally support the artists.
And I’m gonna give you a break. I’m not gonna even factor in the record company share. Let’s just pretend for your sake the record company isnt simply the artists imprint and all record labels are evil and don’t deserve any money. Let’s just make the calculation based on exactly what the artist should make. First, the mechanical royalty to the songwriters. This is generally the artist. The royalty that is supposed to be paid by law is 9.1 cents a song for every download or copy. So that is $1,001 for all 11,000 of your songs. Now let’s suppose the artist has an average 15% royalty rate. This is calculated at wholesale value. Trust me, but this comes to 10.35 cents a song or $1,138.50. So to ethically and morally “get right” with the artists you would need to pay $2,139.50.
As a college student I’m sure this seems like a staggering sum of money. And in a way, it is. At least until you consider that you probably accumulated all these songs over a period of 10 years (5th grade). Sot that’s $17.82 dollars a month. Considering you are in your prime music buying years, you admit your life is “music centric” and you are a DJ, that $18 dollars a month sounds like a bargain. Certainly much much less than what I spent each month on music during the 4 years I was a college radio DJ.
Let’s look at other things you (or your parents) might pay for each month and compare.
Smart phone with data plan: $40-100 a month.
High speed internet access: $30-60 dollars a month. Wait, but you use the university network? Well, buried in your student fees or tuition you are being charged a fee on the upper end of that scale.
Tuition at American University, Washington DC (excluding fees, room and board and books): $2,086 a month.
Car insurance or Metro card? $100 a month?
Or simply look at the value of the web appliances you use to enjoy music:
$2,139.50 = 1 smart phone + 1 full size ipod + 1 macbook.
Why do you pay real money for this other stuff but not music?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:
Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?
Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?
Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?
This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:
Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!
Hardware: Giant mega corporations.Cool! have some money!
Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class.Screw you, you greedy bastards!
Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!
I am genuinely stunned by this. Since you appear to love first generation Indie Rock, and as a founding member of a first generation Indie Rock band I am now legally obligated to issue this order: kids, lawn, vacate.
You are doing it wrong.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Emily, I know you are not exactly saying what I’ve illustrated above. You’ve unfortunately stumbled into the middle of a giant philosophical fight between artists and powerful commercial interests. To your benefit, it is clear you are trying to answer those existential questions posed to your generation. And in your heart, you grasp the contradiction. But I have to take issue with the following statement:
As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and t-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.
I’m sorry, but what is inconvenient about iTunes and, say, iTunes match (that let’s you stream all your music to all your devices) aside from having to pay? Same with Pandora premium, MOG and a host of other legitimate services. I can’t imagine that any other legal music service that is gonna be simpler than these to use. Isn’t convenience already here!
Ultimately there are three “inconvenient” things that MUST happen for any legal service:
1.create an account and provide a payment method (once)
2.enter your password.
3. Pay for music.
So what you are really saying is that you won’t do these three things. This is too inconvenient. And I would guess that the most inconvenient part is….step 3.
That’s fine. But then you must live with the moral and ethical choice that you are making to not pay artists. And artists won’t be paid. And it won’t be the fault of some far away evil corporation. You “and your peers” ultimately bear this responsibility.
You may also find that this ultimately hinders your hopes of finding a job in the music industry. Unless you’re planning on working for free. Or unless you think Google is in the music industry–which it is not.
I also find this all this sort of sad. Many in your generation are willing to pay a little extra to buy “fair trade” coffee that insures the workers that harvested the coffee were paid fairly. Many in your generation will pay a little more to buy clothing and shoes from manufacturers that certify they don’t use sweatshops. Many in your generation pressured Apple to examine working conditions at Foxconn in China. Your generation is largely responsible for the recent cultural changes that has given more equality to same sex couples. On nearly every count your generation is much more ethical and fair than my generation. Except for one thing. Artist rights.
+++++++++++++++++++++
At the start of this I did say that I hoped to convert you to actively helping musicians and artists. That ultimately someone like you, someone so passionately involved in music is the best ally that musicians could have. Let me humbly suggest a few things:
First, you could legally buy music from artists. The best way to insure the money goes to artists? Buy it directly from their website or at their live shows. But if you can’t do that, there is a wide range of services and sites that will allow you to do this conveniently. Encourage your “peers” to also do this.
Second, actively “call out” those that profit by exploiting artists without compensation. File sharing sites are supported by corporate web advertising. Call corporations out by giving specific examples. For instance, say your favorite artist is Yo La Tengo. If you search at Google “free mp3 download Yo La Tengo” you will come up with various sites that offer illegal downloads of Yo La Tengo songs. I clicked on a link to the site http://www.beemp3.com where I found You La Tengo’s entire masterpiece album I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.
I also found an ad for Geico Insurance which appeared to have been serviced to the site by “Ads by Google”. You won’t get any response by writing a file sharing site. They already know what they are doing is wrong. However Geico might be interested in this. And technically, Google’s policy is to not support piracy sites, however it seems to be rarely enforced. The best way to write any large corporation is to search for the “investor’s relations” page. For some reason there is always a human being on the other end of that contact form. You could also write your Congressman and Senator and suggest they come up with some way to divert the flow of advertising money back to the artists.
And on that matter of the $2,139.50 you owe to artists? Why not donate something to a charity that helps artists. Consider this your penance. In fact I’ll make a deal with you. For every dollar you personally donate I’ll match it up to the $500. Here are some suggestions.
Nuci’s Space. This is Athens Georgia’s home grown musician health and mental health charity. This would be a nice place to donate money if you were a fan of Vic Chesnutt.
http://www.nuci.org/
Music Cares. You can also donate to this charity run by the NARAS (the Grammys). http://www.grammy.org/musicares/donate
Health Alliance for Austin Musicians. Friends speak highly of this organization.
American Heart Association Memorial Donation. Or since you loved Big Star and Alex Chilton, why not make a donation to The American Heart Association in Alex Chilton’s name? (Alex died of a heart attack) https://donate.americanheart.org/ecommerce/donation/acknowledgement_info.jsp?campaignId=&site=Heart&itemId=prod20007
I’m open to suggestions on this.
I sincerely wish you luck in your career in the music business and hope this has been enlightening in some small way.
David Lowery
thetrichordist.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/
Here's the link to the article the letter is in response to if you're interested - http://www.npr.org/blogs/allsongs/2012/06/16/154863819/i-never-owned-any-music-to-begin-with
If you've got some extra time you might want to check out my latest post on my blog, it's got all kinds of good politics and finance mixed in with Poland and the UK. See you Monday!
Letter to Emily White at NPR All Songs Considered.
Recently Emily White, an intern at NPR All Songs Considered and GM of what appears to be her college radio station, wrote a post on the NPR blog in which she acknowledged that while she had 11,000 songs in her music library, she’s only paid for 15 CDs in her life. Our intention is not to embarrass or shame her. We believe young people like Emily White who are fully engaged in the music scene are the artist’s biggest allies. We also believe–for reasons we’ll get into–that she has been been badly misinformed by the Free Culture movement. We only ask the opportunity to present a countervailing viewpoint.Emily:
My intention here is not to shame you or embarrass you. I believe you are already on the side of musicians and artists and you are just grappling with how to do the right thing. I applaud your courage in admitting you do not pay for music, and that you do not want to but you are grappling with the moral implications. I just think that you have been presented with some false choices by what sounds a lot like what we hear from the “Free Culture” adherents.
I must disagree with the underlying premise of what you have written. Fairly compensating musicians is not a problem that is up to governments and large corporations to solve. It is not up to them to make it “convenient” so you don’t behave unethically. (Besides–is it really that inconvenient to download a song from iTunes into your iPhone? Is it that hard to type in your password? I think millions would disagree.)
Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.
I’ve been teaching college students about the economics of the music business at the University of Georgia for the last two years. Unfortunately for artists, most of them share your attitude about purchasing music. There is a disconnect between their personal behavior and a greater social injustice that is occurring. You seem to have internalized that ripping 11,000 tracks in your iPod compared to your purchase of 15 CDs in your lifetime feels pretty disproportionate. You also seem to recognize that you are not just ripping off the record labels but you are directly ripping off the artist and songwriters whose music you “don’t buy”. It doesn’t really matter that you didn’t take these tracks from a file-sharing site. That may seem like a neat dodge, but I’d suggest to you that from the artist’s point of view, it’s kind of irrelevant.
Now, my students typically justify their own disproportionate choices in one of two ways. I’m not trying to set up a “strawman”, but I do have a lot of anecdotal experience with this.
“It’s OK not to pay for music because record companies rip off artists and do not pay artists anything.” In the vast majority of cases, this is not true. There have been some highly publicized abuses by record labels. But most record contracts specify royalties and advances to artists. Advances are important to understand–a prepayment of unearned royalties. Not a debt, more like a bet. The artist only has to “repay” (or “recoup”) the advance from record sales. If there are no or insufficient record sales, the advance is written off by the record company. So it’s false to say that record companies don’t pay artists. Most of the time they not only pay artists, but they make bets on artists. And it should go without saying that the bets will get smaller and fewer the more unrecouped advances are paid by labels.
Secondly, by law the record label must pay songwriters (who may also be artists) something called a “mechanical royalty” for sales of CDs or downloads of the song. This is paid regardless of whether a record is recouped or not. The rate is predetermined, and the license is compulsory. Meaning that the file sharing sites could get the same license if they wanted to, at least for the songs. They don’t. They don’t wanna pay artists.
Also, you must consider the fact that the vast majority of artists are releasing albums independently and there is not a “real” record company. Usually just an imprint owned by the artist. In the vast majority of cases you are taking money directly from the artist. How does one know which labels are artist owned? It’s not always clear. But even in the case of corporate record labels, shouldn’t they be rewarded for the bets they make that provides you with recordings you enjoy? It’s not like the money goes into a giant bonfire in the middle of the woods while satanic priests conduct black masses and animal sacrifices. Usually some of that money flows back to artists, engineers and people like you who graduate from college and get jobs in the industry. And record labels also give your college radio stations all those CDs you play.
Artists can make money on the road (or its variant “Artists are rich”). The average income of a musician that files taxes is something like 35k a year w/o benefits. The vast majority of artists do not make significant money on the road. Until recently, most touring activity was a money losing operation. The idea was the artists would make up the loss through recorded music sales. This has been reversed by the financial logic of file-sharing and streaming. You now tour to support making albums if you are very, very lucky. Otherwise, you pay for making albums out of your own pocket. Only the very top tier of musicians make ANY money on the road. And only the 1% of the 1% makes significant money on the road. (For now.)
Over the last 12 years I’ve watched revenue flowing to artists collapse.
Recorded music revenue is down 64% since 1999.On a personal level, I have witnessed the impoverishment of many critically acclaimed but marginally commercial artists. In particular, two dear friends: Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse) and Vic Chesnutt. Both of these artists, despite growing global popularity, saw their total incomes fall in the last decade. There is no other explanation except for the fact that “fans” made the unethical choice to take their music without compensating these artists.
Per capita spending on music is 47% lower than it was in 1973!!
The number of professional musicians has fallen 25% since 2000.
Of the 75,000 albums released in 2010 only 2,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. Only 1,000 sold more than 10,000 copies. Without going into details, 10,000 albums is about the point where independent artists begin to go into the black on professional album production, marketing and promotion.
Shortly before Christmas 2009, Vic took his life. He was my neighbor, and I was there as they put him in the ambulance. On March 6th, 2010, Mark Linkous shot himself in the heart. Anybody who knew either of these musicians will tell you that the pair suffered depression. They will also tell you their situation was worsened by their financial situation. Vic was deeply in debt to hospitals and, at the time, was publicly complaining about losing his home. Mark was living in abject squalor in his remote studio in the Smokey Mountains without adequate access to the mental health care he so desperately needed.
I present these two stories to you not because I’m pointing fingers or want to shame you. I just want to illustrate that “small” personal decisions have very real consequences, particularly when millions of people make the decision not to compensate artists they supposedly “love”. And it is up to us individually to examine the consequences of our actions. It is not up to governments or corporations to make us choose to behave ethically. We have to do that ourselves.
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Now, having said all that, I also deeply empathize with your generation. You have grown up in a time when technological and commercial interests are attempting to change our principles and morality. Rather than using our morality and principles to guide us through technological change, there are those asking us to change our morality and principles to fit the technological change–if a machine can do something, it ought to be done. Although it is the premise of every “machines gone wild” story since Jules Verne or Fritz Lang, this is exactly backwards. Sadly, I see the effects of this thinking with many of my students.
These technological and commercial interests have largely exerted this pressure through the Free Culture movement, which is funded by a handful of large tech corporations and their foundations in the US, Canada, Europe and other countries.* Your letter clearly shows that you sense that something is deeply wrong, but you don’t put your finger on it. I want to commend you for doing this. I also want to enlist you in the fight to correct this outrage. Let me try to to show you exactly what is wrong. What it is you can’t put your finger on.
The fundamental shift in principals and morality is about who gets to control and exploit the work of an artist. The accepted norm for hudreds of years of western civilization is the artist exclusively has the right to exploit and control his/her work for a period of time. (Since the works that are are almost invariably the subject of these discussions are popular culture of one type or another, the duration of the copyright term is pretty much irrelevant for an ethical discussion.) By allowing the artist to treat his/her work as actual property, the artist can decide how to monetize his or her work. This system has worked very well for fans and artists. Now we are being asked to undo this not because we think this is a bad or unfair way to compensate artists but simply because it is technologically possible for corporations or individuals to exploit artists work without their permission on a massive scale and globally. We are being asked to continue to let these companies violate the law without being punished or prosecuted. We are being asked to change our morality and principals to match what I think are immoral and unethical business models.
Who are these companies? They are sites like The Pirate Bay, or Kim Dotcom and Megaupload. They are “legitimate” companies like Google that serve ads to these sites through AdChoices and Doubleclick. They are companies like Grooveshark that operate streaming sites without permission from artists and over the objections of the artist, much less payment of royalties lawfully set by the artist. They are the venture capitalists that raise money for these sites. They are the hardware makers that sell racks of servers to these companies. And so on and so on.
What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting. Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it. And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?
But it’s worse than that. It turns out that Verizon, AT&T, Charter etc etc are charging a toll to get into this neighborhood to get the free stuff. Further, companies like Google are selling maps (search results) that tell you where the stuff is that you want to loot. Companies like Megavideo are charging for a high speed looting service (premium accounts for faster downloads). Google is also selling ads in this neighborhood and sharing the revenue with everyone except the people who make the stuff being looted. Further, in order to loot you need to have a $1,000 dollar laptop, a $500 dollar iPhone or $400 Samsumg tablet. It turns out the supposedly “free” stuff really isn’t free. In fact it’s an expensive way to get “free” music. (Like most claimed “disruptive innovations”it turns out expensive subsidies exist elsewhere.) Companies are actually making money from this looting activity. These companies only make money if you change your principles and morality! And none of that money goes to the artists!
And believe it or not this is where the problem with Spotify starts. The internet is full of stories from artists detailing just how little they receive from Spotify. I shan’t repeat them here. They are epic. Spotify does not exist in a vacuum. The reason they can get away with paying so little to artists is because the alternative is The ‘Net where people have already purchased all the gear they need to loot those songs for free. Now while something like Spotify may be a solution for how to compensate artists fairly in the future, it is not a fair system now. As long as the consumer makes the unethical choice to support the looters, Spotify will not have to compensate artists fairly. There is simply no market pressure. Yet Spotify’s CEO is the 10th richest man in the UK music industry ahead of all but one artist on his service.
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So let’s go back and look at what it would have cost you to ethically and legally support the artists.
And I’m gonna give you a break. I’m not gonna even factor in the record company share. Let’s just pretend for your sake the record company isnt simply the artists imprint and all record labels are evil and don’t deserve any money. Let’s just make the calculation based on exactly what the artist should make. First, the mechanical royalty to the songwriters. This is generally the artist. The royalty that is supposed to be paid by law is 9.1 cents a song for every download or copy. So that is $1,001 for all 11,000 of your songs. Now let’s suppose the artist has an average 15% royalty rate. This is calculated at wholesale value. Trust me, but this comes to 10.35 cents a song or $1,138.50. So to ethically and morally “get right” with the artists you would need to pay $2,139.50.
As a college student I’m sure this seems like a staggering sum of money. And in a way, it is. At least until you consider that you probably accumulated all these songs over a period of 10 years (5th grade). Sot that’s $17.82 dollars a month. Considering you are in your prime music buying years, you admit your life is “music centric” and you are a DJ, that $18 dollars a month sounds like a bargain. Certainly much much less than what I spent each month on music during the 4 years I was a college radio DJ.
Let’s look at other things you (or your parents) might pay for each month and compare.
Smart phone with data plan: $40-100 a month.
High speed internet access: $30-60 dollars a month. Wait, but you use the university network? Well, buried in your student fees or tuition you are being charged a fee on the upper end of that scale.
Tuition at American University, Washington DC (excluding fees, room and board and books): $2,086 a month.
Car insurance or Metro card? $100 a month?
Or simply look at the value of the web appliances you use to enjoy music:
$2,139.50 = 1 smart phone + 1 full size ipod + 1 macbook.
Why do you pay real money for this other stuff but not music?
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The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:
Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?
Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?
Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?
This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:
Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!
Hardware: Giant mega corporations.Cool! have some money!
Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class.Screw you, you greedy bastards!
Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!
I am genuinely stunned by this. Since you appear to love first generation Indie Rock, and as a founding member of a first generation Indie Rock band I am now legally obligated to issue this order: kids, lawn, vacate.
You are doing it wrong.
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Emily, I know you are not exactly saying what I’ve illustrated above. You’ve unfortunately stumbled into the middle of a giant philosophical fight between artists and powerful commercial interests. To your benefit, it is clear you are trying to answer those existential questions posed to your generation. And in your heart, you grasp the contradiction. But I have to take issue with the following statement:
As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize the gravity of what file-sharing means to the musicians I love. I can’t support them with concert tickets and t-shirts alone. But I honestly don’t think my peers and I will ever pay for albums. I do think we will pay for convenience.
I’m sorry, but what is inconvenient about iTunes and, say, iTunes match (that let’s you stream all your music to all your devices) aside from having to pay? Same with Pandora premium, MOG and a host of other legitimate services. I can’t imagine that any other legal music service that is gonna be simpler than these to use. Isn’t convenience already here!
Ultimately there are three “inconvenient” things that MUST happen for any legal service:
1.create an account and provide a payment method (once)
2.enter your password.
3. Pay for music.
So what you are really saying is that you won’t do these three things. This is too inconvenient. And I would guess that the most inconvenient part is….step 3.
That’s fine. But then you must live with the moral and ethical choice that you are making to not pay artists. And artists won’t be paid. And it won’t be the fault of some far away evil corporation. You “and your peers” ultimately bear this responsibility.
You may also find that this ultimately hinders your hopes of finding a job in the music industry. Unless you’re planning on working for free. Or unless you think Google is in the music industry–which it is not.
I also find this all this sort of sad. Many in your generation are willing to pay a little extra to buy “fair trade” coffee that insures the workers that harvested the coffee were paid fairly. Many in your generation will pay a little more to buy clothing and shoes from manufacturers that certify they don’t use sweatshops. Many in your generation pressured Apple to examine working conditions at Foxconn in China. Your generation is largely responsible for the recent cultural changes that has given more equality to same sex couples. On nearly every count your generation is much more ethical and fair than my generation. Except for one thing. Artist rights.
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At the start of this I did say that I hoped to convert you to actively helping musicians and artists. That ultimately someone like you, someone so passionately involved in music is the best ally that musicians could have. Let me humbly suggest a few things:
First, you could legally buy music from artists. The best way to insure the money goes to artists? Buy it directly from their website or at their live shows. But if you can’t do that, there is a wide range of services and sites that will allow you to do this conveniently. Encourage your “peers” to also do this.
Second, actively “call out” those that profit by exploiting artists without compensation. File sharing sites are supported by corporate web advertising. Call corporations out by giving specific examples. For instance, say your favorite artist is Yo La Tengo. If you search at Google “free mp3 download Yo La Tengo” you will come up with various sites that offer illegal downloads of Yo La Tengo songs. I clicked on a link to the site http://www.beemp3.com where I found You La Tengo’s entire masterpiece album I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass.
I also found an ad for Geico Insurance which appeared to have been serviced to the site by “Ads by Google”. You won’t get any response by writing a file sharing site. They already know what they are doing is wrong. However Geico might be interested in this. And technically, Google’s policy is to not support piracy sites, however it seems to be rarely enforced. The best way to write any large corporation is to search for the “investor’s relations” page. For some reason there is always a human being on the other end of that contact form. You could also write your Congressman and Senator and suggest they come up with some way to divert the flow of advertising money back to the artists.
And on that matter of the $2,139.50 you owe to artists? Why not donate something to a charity that helps artists. Consider this your penance. In fact I’ll make a deal with you. For every dollar you personally donate I’ll match it up to the $500. Here are some suggestions.
Nuci’s Space. This is Athens Georgia’s home grown musician health and mental health charity. This would be a nice place to donate money if you were a fan of Vic Chesnutt.
http://www.nuci.org/
Music Cares. You can also donate to this charity run by the NARAS (the Grammys). http://www.grammy.org/musicares/donate
Health Alliance for Austin Musicians. Friends speak highly of this organization.
American Heart Association Memorial Donation. Or since you loved Big Star and Alex Chilton, why not make a donation to The American Heart Association in Alex Chilton’s name? (Alex died of a heart attack) https://donate.americanheart.org/ecommerce/donation/acknowledgement_info.jsp?campaignId=&site=Heart&itemId=prod20007
I’m open to suggestions on this.
I sincerely wish you luck in your career in the music business and hope this has been enlightening in some small way.
David Lowery
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