Jörg Colberg has a new piece up, as he does every Monday. He appears to have found his gigantic astronomy brain in the closet or something, because for once he's not giving us yet another dreary review of some pretty book of glum photos. He's actually thinking thoughts and writing them down, and stuff. Anyways, it's worth your time to read it this week.
There's lots of things I could quibble with here and there in it, but mostly I am pleased he's actually thinking.
The stuff about authorship is well noted, and for once he's managed to work in a Barthes reference that isn't to Camera Lucida. At this point he kind of lurches a bit trying to connect the death of the author business to what he terms the "social photo" which is something I am myself very interested in. He makes the claim, unsupported as is traditional in photographic theory, that we take these photos because it is a socially expected act, like shaking hands.
I have no idea whether Jörg would agree with me or not here, but two things strike me. First, this is as usual more of a spectrum than a pair of buckets. It's not like there are Serious Art Photos and Social Photos with nothing in between. Second, I think you can say more than "it's social and that is the end of it."
There are myriad reasons for taking a photo, just as there are for doing anything. When I shake someone's hand, it is the end of a fairly frantic process of social evaluation. Do they want to, expect to, shake hands? Do I want to shake their hand? Am I shunning them, or trying to make nice with them, or what? How much do I like this person? Are my hands wet? Did I just sneeze into my hand? Are they going to try to turn it into a shake/embrace, and if so how do I feel about that? What will the result be, socially, of this momentary interaction?
Most of this is unconscious, or barely conscious. Just part of the normal navigation through society as executed by a standard East African Plains Ape.
In the same way, when I take some snap of a thing, there's a lot going on. I am testing my eyes, putting things into a frame just for practice. There's probably something here I might want to show someone, maybe. Who? Maybe I have an idea, maybe not. Do I want to share this visual with someone, and if so, what are my expectations for the result of that act? Is this a private photo, only for me? Is this Serious or Social?
As someone who styles himself a "working artist" with a wildly variable degree of irony, there's almost always some slight artistic conceit in play. There is also some notion, probably, of maybe showing this thing to some kind of audience, possibly an audience of one, possibly an audience of the world, possibly an audience I have not identified.
This segues into the second point, which is that social acts are never really just pro forma reactions that we do for no reason. Even the Gesundheit! Jörg refers to has a social purpose, no matter how reflexive it is. We want to be seen as a thoughtful person, or we simply want to reach out to people around us, or whatever, so we train ourselves to be one of those people who has that reflex — not everyone does.
The handshake, as noted above, is intensely social. It is, like a gear in a watch, one of those myriad little motions which both abets and embodies the functioning of society.
So what effect are we looking for when we photograph the Eiffel Tower on our Paris visit? We're going to show it to someone, maybe. Then they will know that we went to Paris, and that it was important to us. As Sontag notes, we make things Important by photographing them. The photograph is not merely a social reflex, signifying nothing. It signifies what we thought was important or notable.
I have long held that these social photos, and the sharing of them, is akin to a "look at that!" reaction. Imagine you're walking on the beach with a friend, and you notice a particularly striking shell. You point and say "look at that shell!" Your friend looks, and sees. You share a moment. You have selected the shell out of all the debris on the beach, in this moment, as notable, and it is the pivot around which a tiny interaction with your friend turns. There is no more to it than that, but you have shared the shell for a moment, and your relationship has absorbed this little transaction as it has absorbed 1000s of others. Your relationship with your friend is built on, embodied in, these myriad transactions.
And so also the social photo. These are the bricks upon which, and of which, our relationships are built. Our Facebook Friends know we went to Paris, or to the beach, and they click Like. It's not much, but then, "this tea is quite good" isn't much either.
A whole bunch of not-much adds up to a fair bit, in the end, though.
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Idea Theft!!!
I run across this in photography from time to time, and ran across it again recently: the accusation that somebody stole someone else's idea.
There are a couple of themes to explore here.
The first is that, as far as I know, people generally don't want to steal other people's ideas. Other people are idiots. However, everyone thinks that everyone else wants to steal their ideas. I saw this constantly in the software industry we must take great pains to conceal our intellectual property from our competition!
My retort was always to point out that if they published their code on their web site we would not even deign to download it. We know about them. They are idiots and their ideas are all shit. They no doubt offer us the same courtesy, and could not care less about our ideas. This is not quite literally true, we probably would have downloaded their code if they had published it, but we definitely would not have spent any substantive time examining it; and the reverse is also true.
Maybe there are working artists so desperate for ideas that they'd steal other people's stuff? I don't know, I only know me. But I know that I don't want anyone else's ideas, and it's not because I am pure or honest, it's because I genuinely think your ideas are trash. I assume you think mine are as well, and you wouldn't steal my ideas if broke into your house and left them in your kitchen.
Anyways, that's human nature.
So, why do we see things that look like they could be copies? Or derived one from the other?
Science and math have been dealing with this for centuries. It is not rare, it is in fact common, normal, for the same idea to crop up multiple times at more or less the same time. Sorting out priority is a well-established procedure. In Art it does not seem to be established at all, probably because the stakes are non-existent.
Anyways, it turns out that when a bunch of humans with similar training are hanging out in more or less the same intellectual stew they come up with more or less the same ideas, pretty often. It just happens.
Genuinely new ideas, those wild leaps out of nowhere, are incredibly rare.
Most new ideas are, in hindsight, pretty obvious combinations of A with B, or an equally obvious incremental change to C. We all have the same As, Bs, and Cs to play with. We all have the same set of tools for combining and incrementing. Of course we come up with the same shit. In Math, either someone definitely came up with it first, or we agree to co-author an article and we try to combine the best bits of our two approaches. In Chemistry they just split the Nobel.
If you definitely came up with it first, then my paper turns into "Some extensions and improved notation for a Theorem of Wossname" and I better make it good because it's not going to be easy to place. So it goes.
In Art, you jump on twitter and whine real loud about everything, and whichever artist has more social stature with the gatekeepers wins, The End. Your friends circle the wagons, agree loudly that you are right, and pet you. None of which does you any good at all.
Photographers don't seem to realize that everyone's playing with the same As, Bs, and Cs, and the same tools for going forward. They tend to think superficial similarities are clear signs of plagiarism when someone else does it. Of course, when the roles are reversed the phenomenon of parallel discovery is all too clear, and anyways mine is totally different I don't see any similarities what are you on about?
Of course it's easy to see similarities when someone accidentally replicates something that you think is important and that you worked hard at.
I worked very hard in Photoshop to get those muddy tones! He copied me!
Err, yes, I see the similarity in tonality, but his is about refugees and yours is about dogs?
Waahhhhh! He stole my idea!!!
From the outside, especially if you've spent any substantial time actually trying to have original thoughts inside a active intellectual sphere, it's obvious to you that these two ideas are neither one plagiarised from the other. They don't overlap all that much, although they share some accidental bits and pieces (likely because both artists lifted those bits from some other sources.)
Anyways, why are you so bereft about having your idea stolen?
I, at any rate, have far more ideas than I can execute. I get stuck, to be sure, but it's invariably in execution.
I dunno, maybe that's just me. Maybe if I had more time and energy to devote to executing artistic ideas I'd run the well dry?
There are a couple of themes to explore here.
The first is that, as far as I know, people generally don't want to steal other people's ideas. Other people are idiots. However, everyone thinks that everyone else wants to steal their ideas. I saw this constantly in the software industry we must take great pains to conceal our intellectual property from our competition!
My retort was always to point out that if they published their code on their web site we would not even deign to download it. We know about them. They are idiots and their ideas are all shit. They no doubt offer us the same courtesy, and could not care less about our ideas. This is not quite literally true, we probably would have downloaded their code if they had published it, but we definitely would not have spent any substantive time examining it; and the reverse is also true.
Maybe there are working artists so desperate for ideas that they'd steal other people's stuff? I don't know, I only know me. But I know that I don't want anyone else's ideas, and it's not because I am pure or honest, it's because I genuinely think your ideas are trash. I assume you think mine are as well, and you wouldn't steal my ideas if broke into your house and left them in your kitchen.
Anyways, that's human nature.
So, why do we see things that look like they could be copies? Or derived one from the other?
Science and math have been dealing with this for centuries. It is not rare, it is in fact common, normal, for the same idea to crop up multiple times at more or less the same time. Sorting out priority is a well-established procedure. In Art it does not seem to be established at all, probably because the stakes are non-existent.
Anyways, it turns out that when a bunch of humans with similar training are hanging out in more or less the same intellectual stew they come up with more or less the same ideas, pretty often. It just happens.
Genuinely new ideas, those wild leaps out of nowhere, are incredibly rare.
Most new ideas are, in hindsight, pretty obvious combinations of A with B, or an equally obvious incremental change to C. We all have the same As, Bs, and Cs to play with. We all have the same set of tools for combining and incrementing. Of course we come up with the same shit. In Math, either someone definitely came up with it first, or we agree to co-author an article and we try to combine the best bits of our two approaches. In Chemistry they just split the Nobel.
If you definitely came up with it first, then my paper turns into "Some extensions and improved notation for a Theorem of Wossname" and I better make it good because it's not going to be easy to place. So it goes.
In Art, you jump on twitter and whine real loud about everything, and whichever artist has more social stature with the gatekeepers wins, The End. Your friends circle the wagons, agree loudly that you are right, and pet you. None of which does you any good at all.
Photographers don't seem to realize that everyone's playing with the same As, Bs, and Cs, and the same tools for going forward. They tend to think superficial similarities are clear signs of plagiarism when someone else does it. Of course, when the roles are reversed the phenomenon of parallel discovery is all too clear, and anyways mine is totally different I don't see any similarities what are you on about?
Of course it's easy to see similarities when someone accidentally replicates something that you think is important and that you worked hard at.
I worked very hard in Photoshop to get those muddy tones! He copied me!
Err, yes, I see the similarity in tonality, but his is about refugees and yours is about dogs?
Waahhhhh! He stole my idea!!!
From the outside, especially if you've spent any substantial time actually trying to have original thoughts inside a active intellectual sphere, it's obvious to you that these two ideas are neither one plagiarised from the other. They don't overlap all that much, although they share some accidental bits and pieces (likely because both artists lifted those bits from some other sources.)
Anyways, why are you so bereft about having your idea stolen?
I, at any rate, have far more ideas than I can execute. I get stuck, to be sure, but it's invariably in execution.
I dunno, maybe that's just me. Maybe if I had more time and energy to devote to executing artistic ideas I'd run the well dry?
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
I'm Sorry but No
Pursuant to my previous remarks, and the comments on it, I have to inform you that you can't buy any more camera equipment. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules.
Monday, October 26, 2020
Innovation!
I happened across a pair of articles, almost adjacent, on one of the ubiquitous photography news-review-thing-blogs. The first bemoaned the slow pace of innovation, blaming Sony, somehow. I did not follow the argument, mainly because I don't care. The second piece, two articles below the first. breathlessly urged readers to keep up with the fast pace of technological change in cameras. I did not read past the lede on this one, ibid.
While contradictory, the two pieces both hew to the idea of innovation in camera technology as an essentially good thing. Indeed, as a thing at all.
Let us review: a camera is a box, with a hole on one side that lets pictures in. That's it.
Yes, to be sure there are a few corner cases where technology is either necessary or a very great help. Now with really good autofocus, anyone at all can manage decent pictures of Birds In Flight with a little effort. With Amazing New Sensors people can take pictures of unspecified vigorous activities in almost total darkness. If you want to print Really Big you actually need more megapixels than my 10 year old bottom-of-the-line camera has. And so on.
Nevertheless, there are limited directions that innovation can actually go when you're dealing with a box with a hole. They're tried filling the box with sand, or maple syrup, instead of darkness but those experiments were by and large a bust.
And, further, if you actually look at the pictures people actually take, a different story reveals itself. Virtually any picture you actually see if you just go randomly looking for pictures, could absolutely have been taken with my 10 year old camera and the motley array of second-rate lenses I have lying around. While randomly trolling about, I happened across some aircraft photos and thought "ok, well, you'd need some gear for those" until I realized that they were heavily photoshopped pictures of models. We were back to "Yep, my D3100 and the old Micro NIKKOR 60 could totally do that."
Nope, barring a handful of exceptional cases, all technology really does it make it incrementally easier to do this thing or that thing, and all those things are quite niche, quite rare.
It might make you feel better about taking pictures to have the buttons just so rather than thus, and to have the control wheel there instead of there and a touch screen to move the focus point around might be good for some use cases, and so on. These things are all camera-forward, not picture-forward.
In almost all cases "I need a better/different camera" means "I want a different camera" which means "I am bored with my current camera or my pictures or both."
It is OK to be bored with your camera, or your pictures, or both. No, really. I have been bored my all my cameras for years and years. Unlike some people, I do not rely on my cameras for entertainment, but that too is OK.
What camera companies need to do is stop pretending that the new features have anything to do with pictures. Just add flashing lights, games, buzzers, and lots and lots of knobs, dials, and buttons. One touch screen? Screw that! We're putting three in there, and a shitload of options to configure what they all do! I'm putting ISO on this dial! But only in one direction, the other way adjusts the shutter speed!
Sure, they should continue to take pictures and all. There's got to be an excuse. But the main point is to dink around trying to get the perfect set of controls and menu items to truly optimize your shooting for various workflows, right? And then you can test all the workflows! And adjust the controls some more! And when, finally, you've wrung that rag dry, they'll have the new model out with four touch screens and two more configurable dials than the previous one!
I'm not saying that some technology isn't a bad idea. I love the autofocus with the lenses where it works, it's awesome. Metering is great. I'm sure ever more sensitive sensors with greater dynamic range is also wonderful. But it's all kind of minor stuff. You can make pretty good pictures of a lot of stuff with practically anything, and that's mostly what more people want to do, picture-wise.
You probably don't need a new camera, is what I'm saying.
While contradictory, the two pieces both hew to the idea of innovation in camera technology as an essentially good thing. Indeed, as a thing at all.
Let us review: a camera is a box, with a hole on one side that lets pictures in. That's it.
Yes, to be sure there are a few corner cases where technology is either necessary or a very great help. Now with really good autofocus, anyone at all can manage decent pictures of Birds In Flight with a little effort. With Amazing New Sensors people can take pictures of unspecified vigorous activities in almost total darkness. If you want to print Really Big you actually need more megapixels than my 10 year old bottom-of-the-line camera has. And so on.
Nevertheless, there are limited directions that innovation can actually go when you're dealing with a box with a hole. They're tried filling the box with sand, or maple syrup, instead of darkness but those experiments were by and large a bust.
And, further, if you actually look at the pictures people actually take, a different story reveals itself. Virtually any picture you actually see if you just go randomly looking for pictures, could absolutely have been taken with my 10 year old camera and the motley array of second-rate lenses I have lying around. While randomly trolling about, I happened across some aircraft photos and thought "ok, well, you'd need some gear for those" until I realized that they were heavily photoshopped pictures of models. We were back to "Yep, my D3100 and the old Micro NIKKOR 60 could totally do that."
Nope, barring a handful of exceptional cases, all technology really does it make it incrementally easier to do this thing or that thing, and all those things are quite niche, quite rare.
It might make you feel better about taking pictures to have the buttons just so rather than thus, and to have the control wheel there instead of there and a touch screen to move the focus point around might be good for some use cases, and so on. These things are all camera-forward, not picture-forward.
In almost all cases "I need a better/different camera" means "I want a different camera" which means "I am bored with my current camera or my pictures or both."
It is OK to be bored with your camera, or your pictures, or both. No, really. I have been bored my all my cameras for years and years. Unlike some people, I do not rely on my cameras for entertainment, but that too is OK.
What camera companies need to do is stop pretending that the new features have anything to do with pictures. Just add flashing lights, games, buzzers, and lots and lots of knobs, dials, and buttons. One touch screen? Screw that! We're putting three in there, and a shitload of options to configure what they all do! I'm putting ISO on this dial! But only in one direction, the other way adjusts the shutter speed!
Sure, they should continue to take pictures and all. There's got to be an excuse. But the main point is to dink around trying to get the perfect set of controls and menu items to truly optimize your shooting for various workflows, right? And then you can test all the workflows! And adjust the controls some more! And when, finally, you've wrung that rag dry, they'll have the new model out with four touch screens and two more configurable dials than the previous one!
I'm not saying that some technology isn't a bad idea. I love the autofocus with the lenses where it works, it's awesome. Metering is great. I'm sure ever more sensitive sensors with greater dynamic range is also wonderful. But it's all kind of minor stuff. You can make pretty good pictures of a lot of stuff with practically anything, and that's mostly what more people want to do, picture-wise.
You probably don't need a new camera, is what I'm saying.
Friday, October 23, 2020
FUN!
So as you know I have the filthy habit of poking in to photography forums from time to time. Honestly, the whole genre is kind of dying off, so there are far fewer things to make fun of here, but this morning I struck gold!
Here's a thread you can enjoy, if you like. On, let us review, a publically accessible forum which anyone can look at and read without an account.
Someone went out and took a bunch of portraits of someone in a place. The photographer used a variety of lenses and apertures, and moved to achieve similar framing in all the exposures. The point is to illustrate the different ways the face is rendered, and the different effects of depth of field and so on.
So up rolls Mr. 480Sparky, who is one of the dumb bastards who will go on about how long they've been shooting, but who doesn't actually know anything. He says, "you've got it wrong, because the depth of field blah blah blah" which, while certainly true, misses the fact that the depth of field doesn't actually tell you directly how far out of focus stuff is. The pictures are perfectly correct, and Sparky is both stupid and ignorant.
If he'd bothered to look at the Hyperfocal Distance helpfully calculated by the same DoF tools he's using to throw shade and sneer, he might have gotten a brisk hint. But, he didn't. Alack, and alas.
To be fair, these things are legitimately complicated and the answers are not obvious. I had to draw a couple pictures to work out what's going on, although I have enough of a feel for these things that the pictures looked ok to me.
That said, it's obvious if you actually go look at the tool the hapless victim laboriously created, you can tell immediately that they were done correctly. You can tell that if you cannot work out why a thing is a thing, then it's probably because you don't understand it and maybe you should go have a think before you go spouting off in public. But old fuckers who won't shut about about slide film never do, they're pretty sure they've got all the answers.
Also, Sparky appears to have absolutely no feel for how actual pictures look at various focal lengths and apertures.
Here's a thread you can enjoy, if you like. On, let us review, a publically accessible forum which anyone can look at and read without an account.
Someone went out and took a bunch of portraits of someone in a place. The photographer used a variety of lenses and apertures, and moved to achieve similar framing in all the exposures. The point is to illustrate the different ways the face is rendered, and the different effects of depth of field and so on.
So up rolls Mr. 480Sparky, who is one of the dumb bastards who will go on about how long they've been shooting, but who doesn't actually know anything. He says, "you've got it wrong, because the depth of field blah blah blah" which, while certainly true, misses the fact that the depth of field doesn't actually tell you directly how far out of focus stuff is. The pictures are perfectly correct, and Sparky is both stupid and ignorant.
If he'd bothered to look at the Hyperfocal Distance helpfully calculated by the same DoF tools he's using to throw shade and sneer, he might have gotten a brisk hint. But, he didn't. Alack, and alas.
To be fair, these things are legitimately complicated and the answers are not obvious. I had to draw a couple pictures to work out what's going on, although I have enough of a feel for these things that the pictures looked ok to me.
That said, it's obvious if you actually go look at the tool the hapless victim laboriously created, you can tell immediately that they were done correctly. You can tell that if you cannot work out why a thing is a thing, then it's probably because you don't understand it and maybe you should go have a think before you go spouting off in public. But old fuckers who won't shut about about slide film never do, they're pretty sure they've got all the answers.
Also, Sparky appears to have absolutely no feel for how actual pictures look at various focal lengths and apertures.
Cheap Edumactaion
So, as regular readers of this blog will well know, I see eye-to-eye with Jörg Colberg on essentially nothing.
That said: you are, as a reader here, are in no way obligated to agree with me on this point (obv.) and I assume that some readers rather agree with him on a point here and there.
He is offering a little menu of educational opportunities here, it happens. The prices are, to my eye, insanely low. $95 for a one hour consult (not including prep time) and a little suite of 12 week long "mentorships" that include 6 one hour meetings, for $300.
Given that a normal human would rightly demand a million dollars or more to talk to someone about their photography for a solid hour, I think these rates are very very good.
I am half considering trying to sign up myself, on the grounds that no matter how sharply one diverges, there's bound to be something of value in six freakin' hours of talking. What's holding me back is that I don't think I can really honestly sign up to work steadily on a single project for 12 weeks. I do have a thing in mind, though, so maybe. I am debating it.
Anyways, anyone who sees more eye-to-eye with Jörg than I do, and that ought to include virtually everyone in the world, should give this some serious consideration. It's not that he's an oracle, it's that he's willing to talk to you about your pictures, at length, for a very good price. It might well be worth it.
That said: you are, as a reader here, are in no way obligated to agree with me on this point (obv.) and I assume that some readers rather agree with him on a point here and there.
He is offering a little menu of educational opportunities here, it happens. The prices are, to my eye, insanely low. $95 for a one hour consult (not including prep time) and a little suite of 12 week long "mentorships" that include 6 one hour meetings, for $300.
Given that a normal human would rightly demand a million dollars or more to talk to someone about their photography for a solid hour, I think these rates are very very good.
I am half considering trying to sign up myself, on the grounds that no matter how sharply one diverges, there's bound to be something of value in six freakin' hours of talking. What's holding me back is that I don't think I can really honestly sign up to work steadily on a single project for 12 weeks. I do have a thing in mind, though, so maybe. I am debating it.
Anyways, anyone who sees more eye-to-eye with Jörg than I do, and that ought to include virtually everyone in the world, should give this some serious consideration. It's not that he's an oracle, it's that he's willing to talk to you about your pictures, at length, for a very good price. It might well be worth it.
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
"Deaccession"
Christopher Knight, the LA Times Art Critic who is, when you look closely, actually an Art Industry Commentator, wrote a piece on a couple of Museum Deaccessions. This is getting a certain amount of social media traction as "pfft, white guy complains about dead white guy art being sold off" which is to completely miss the point of Knight's article.
First of all, "deaccession" refers to a museum selling off bits of their collection.
Second of all, let's take a look at universities.
Something like 50 years ago the professional bureaucrat really started getting a foothold in the University system. Modern bureaucrats, invariably, see their job as enlarging the institution for which they labor, which mainly means enlarging the revenues, reducing expenses, and hiring more bureaucrats with the liberated funds. This is universal, there have been books written on the subject.
It manifests in Universities as an endless pressure to perform the education portion of the show as inexpensively as possible consistent with the goals of maximizing revenue. In this case, revenue comes mainly from: student tuition, research grants (universities clip around 50% of grant money to pay bureaucrats with), and alumni donations. These, of course, require some students and a degree of education to be performed. Experiments with student-less universities were performed (at least once) but did not work out in the long run.
This does not mean the bureaucrats oppose good education. They merely oppose spending much money on it. So now we have a situation where increasingly the education — once the core mission — is carried out as much as possible by temps. The mission is now to enhance the University Brand, to attract: paying students (or students who can borrow, it doesn't matter which), professors who get large grants, and alumni donations. Secondarily, to maintain the supply of alumni.
Museums, it turns out, have long had a deliberately constructed firewall between "selling shit in the collection" and "spending money" and Knight's point is precisely that this firewall is being removed. Museum bureaucrats have suddenly noticed that the collection constitutes, effectively, an enormous piggy bank which can be used to pay for more bureaucrats.
There will be some hand-wringing, some assurances, and so on. There will be deaccessions in order to fund the acquisition of works from marginalized artists (yay!) and probably north of 10% of the money will actually go to do that! The rest will go to bureaucrats, new wings, walnut panelling, and really nice desks. Maybe some Technology Initiatives.
The thing is, once a bureaucracy gets hold of a source of money, they'll never let it go. They're going to sell as much of the collection as frequently as possible as is consistent with maintaining the museum's brand. They will have an endless, literally, litany of excuses and covers, but this is the new model. They're going to sell things from the collection to fund what they see as the mission: enlarging the institution in every way except the one that matters.
I predict that Museums are about to move down market and earlier in the art cycle.
Formerly the private market mostly set the price for things and decided who and what was "good," followed by museums acquiring those works as an archive of culture.
Over the next few years we're going to see museums selling off the Monets in order to acquire emerging artists. They will begin to take a larger role in the price-setting business. The MOMA will compete directly with Zwirner and Gagosian. Collectively, they will acquire emerging artists cheaply, and produce value by blessing these artists with the respective imprimaturs, and then sell the works off at much higher prices into the private market. The work will pass through the museum, rather than being archived in it.
The wealthy will cease to donate their Picassos, because it will become clear that donating your Picasso now merely means it gets sold in 20 years and vanishes back into private hands.
The effect of this is that Museums will have smaller collections of Past Culture on display, but larger (albeit somewhat ephemeral) collections of contemporary work.
In 10 or 50 years the desire to buy work from "marginalized artists" may fade, who knows? But the Monets and the Picassos will be gone, as will the money. Even the BMWs the bureaucrats bought with the money will be junked. But museums will still be buying cheaper, emerging, artists; creating value; and turning the work over for a profit.
It's not even clear that this is a bad thing? I don't know. I like Monet just fine, but it's a big world. Maybe the rich will still loan their Monets back to museums. Or maybe they'll loan them to Gagosian instead.
I do think that Museums are about to begin a transition to being little more than art dealers with a non-profit license and a spiffy brand.
First of all, "deaccession" refers to a museum selling off bits of their collection.
Second of all, let's take a look at universities.
Something like 50 years ago the professional bureaucrat really started getting a foothold in the University system. Modern bureaucrats, invariably, see their job as enlarging the institution for which they labor, which mainly means enlarging the revenues, reducing expenses, and hiring more bureaucrats with the liberated funds. This is universal, there have been books written on the subject.
It manifests in Universities as an endless pressure to perform the education portion of the show as inexpensively as possible consistent with the goals of maximizing revenue. In this case, revenue comes mainly from: student tuition, research grants (universities clip around 50% of grant money to pay bureaucrats with), and alumni donations. These, of course, require some students and a degree of education to be performed. Experiments with student-less universities were performed (at least once) but did not work out in the long run.
This does not mean the bureaucrats oppose good education. They merely oppose spending much money on it. So now we have a situation where increasingly the education — once the core mission — is carried out as much as possible by temps. The mission is now to enhance the University Brand, to attract: paying students (or students who can borrow, it doesn't matter which), professors who get large grants, and alumni donations. Secondarily, to maintain the supply of alumni.
Museums, it turns out, have long had a deliberately constructed firewall between "selling shit in the collection" and "spending money" and Knight's point is precisely that this firewall is being removed. Museum bureaucrats have suddenly noticed that the collection constitutes, effectively, an enormous piggy bank which can be used to pay for more bureaucrats.
There will be some hand-wringing, some assurances, and so on. There will be deaccessions in order to fund the acquisition of works from marginalized artists (yay!) and probably north of 10% of the money will actually go to do that! The rest will go to bureaucrats, new wings, walnut panelling, and really nice desks. Maybe some Technology Initiatives.
The thing is, once a bureaucracy gets hold of a source of money, they'll never let it go. They're going to sell as much of the collection as frequently as possible as is consistent with maintaining the museum's brand. They will have an endless, literally, litany of excuses and covers, but this is the new model. They're going to sell things from the collection to fund what they see as the mission: enlarging the institution in every way except the one that matters.
I predict that Museums are about to move down market and earlier in the art cycle.
Formerly the private market mostly set the price for things and decided who and what was "good," followed by museums acquiring those works as an archive of culture.
Over the next few years we're going to see museums selling off the Monets in order to acquire emerging artists. They will begin to take a larger role in the price-setting business. The MOMA will compete directly with Zwirner and Gagosian. Collectively, they will acquire emerging artists cheaply, and produce value by blessing these artists with the respective imprimaturs, and then sell the works off at much higher prices into the private market. The work will pass through the museum, rather than being archived in it.
The wealthy will cease to donate their Picassos, because it will become clear that donating your Picasso now merely means it gets sold in 20 years and vanishes back into private hands.
The effect of this is that Museums will have smaller collections of Past Culture on display, but larger (albeit somewhat ephemeral) collections of contemporary work.
In 10 or 50 years the desire to buy work from "marginalized artists" may fade, who knows? But the Monets and the Picassos will be gone, as will the money. Even the BMWs the bureaucrats bought with the money will be junked. But museums will still be buying cheaper, emerging, artists; creating value; and turning the work over for a profit.
It's not even clear that this is a bad thing? I don't know. I like Monet just fine, but it's a big world. Maybe the rich will still loan their Monets back to museums. Or maybe they'll loan them to Gagosian instead.
I do think that Museums are about to begin a transition to being little more than art dealers with a non-profit license and a spiffy brand.
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