Image Via; exhibition Via

This is an excerpt from a longer post by John Perreault on what may be my favorite art-critical blog (or one of them):

Jeff Koons: Having It Both Ways [Excerpt]

 [...]

Up on the Roof

When you step out on the roof, there is a "no photography" sign that no one pays any attention to. It was difficult to get a shot of Balloon Dog, Yellow (1994-2000) sans tourists. Singles, couples and groups took turns posing in front of the obscene Koons Dog made out of stainless steel sausages or penises.

So I concentrated on the Sacred Heart (1994-2007), a stainless steel representation of a chocolate heart wrapped in foil, but in spite of its jab at Catholicism, it is a lesser work. Like the Dog, it is an Oldenburgian blowup of a popular object. Still lesser is Coloring Book (1997-2005) -- the coloring book outline of Winnie-the-Poo's Piglet, with scribbled-in colors. Unlike Dog and Heart, the Piglet is not singular enough to have much impact, though it could pass for a good joke about abstract painting.

So here's another question: How come almost anyone can tell that these blowups are not Oldenburgs?

Claes Oldenburg is never nasty. And there is always a little something that lets you know that you are not looking at a straightforward blowup, some kink or glitch. On the other hand, a Koons is bland, seems unmediated and immaculate, as if untouched by human hands -- which is not really the case. We have a friend whose artist-nephew is thrilled to work in the Koons studio, polishing stainless steel, for hours and hours, day after day.

 

     

Vote With Your Camera

While waiting for the Balloon Dog to be clear of tourists exposing frozen smiles, it dawned on me that the number of students and other art fans posing in front of the Dog indicated that this was the hands-down favorite. It is iconographic. It is photogenic. And somehow it says: I am here. I am in New York on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No one, I swear, was having his or her picture taken in front of the Sacred Heart (I did imagine that some nuns might appear at any moment), and no one was posing in front of Piglet.

As everyone knows, the snapshot is a better voting mechanism than the museum postcard. Postcard images are preselected.

The public and I agree that Balloon Dog is the winner.

But it took me awhile, because...

I once had an art administrator friend who was dating a clown. He was actually an actor who did clown work to pay the rent, specializing in making balloon figures at kiddie birthday parties in Ringling Bros. drag. I thought he was both handsome and quite jolly. His good looks notwithstanding, my art administrator friend and her Bozo soon parted ways. She didn't like it when, out of clown drag and back in mufti, he would sometimes wear his clown shoes in the streets of Soho -- to embarrass her, she thought. I fantasized that perhaps it was because he had really big feet and his clown shoes were more comfortable than his wingtips or his sneakers.

Once I rose above that particular memory, I was able to look at Balloon Dog for what it really was: a beautiful monument to bad taste.

read full post.

via re-title.com:

Critical Art Ensemble / Institute for Applied Autonomy

Seized

7 June 2008 to 18 July 2008

SEIZED examines the physical artifacts of the 2004 FBI investigation of Buffalo artist Steven Kurtz. The items the FBI seized from his home are represented here in photographs of the negative spaces they left behind: missing computers, books, notes, props from performances, lab equipment and unfinished manuscript. Balancing these empty spaces is the voluminous pile of garbage left behind by federal authorities at the Kurtz residence, providing a rare window into the anatomy of a "bioterror" investigation. Hand drawn maps, "to do" lists, and countless articles of protective clothing are set against a backdrop of several hundred energy drinks and over thirty pizza boxes. To date, none of the seized items have ever been returned.

In addition, documentation and ephemera from the Critical Art Ensemble projects confiscated by the FBI and Department of Justice are on display. Finally, we present Marching Plague -- the project the FBI attempted to stop through seizure of the research and materials needed for its production and presentation.

Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center
341 Delaware Ave
Buffalo, NY 14202

[...] The resulting exhibition will offer a strange amalgam -- part survey of CAE's recent body of artwork, and part exploration of an attempted bioterrorism investigation.

www.critical-art.net
www.caedefensefund.org
www.appliedautonomy.com

Also (via email):

ARTIST CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 11, 2008

CONTACTS:
Email: media@caedefensefund.org
Dr. Steven J. Kurtz: (716) 812-2968
Lucia Sommer, CAE Defense Fund: (716) 359-3061
Edmund Cardoni, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center: (716) 854-1694

ARTIST CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE
Department of Justice Fails to Appeal Dismissal
Kurtz Speaks about Four-Year Ordeal

Buffalo, NY--Dr. Steven Kurtz, a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at
Buffalo and cofounder of the award-winning art and theater group Critical
Art Ensemble, has been cleared of all charges of mail and wire fraud. On
April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government's entire
indictment against Dr. Kurtz as "insufficient on its face." This means that
even if the actions alleged in the indictment (which the judge must accept
as "fact") were true, they would not constitute a crime. The US Department
of Justice had thirty days from the date of the ruling to appeal. No action
has been taken in this time period, thus stopping any appeal of the
dismissal. According to Margaret McFarland, a spokeswoman for US Attorney
Terrance P. Flynn, the DoJ will not appeal Arcara's ruling and will not seek
any new charges against Kurtz. [Download CAE-Cleared.rtf - full press release]

more info...

Image via

Posted here are two pieces: the first, an excerpt from today's Op-Ed by NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman, offers a view of the future of technology with (uncharacteristic) optimism; the other is a press release about several major record labels currently suing Spain's own P2P pioneer, Pablo Soto. An interesting juxtaposition. The money quote is about litigation not being a particularly "valid business model".

Bits, Bands and Books
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 6, 2008

Do you remember what it was like back in the old days when we had a New Economy? In the 1990s, jobs were abundant, oil was cheap and information technology was about to change everything.

Then the technology bubble popped. Many highly touted New Economy companies, it turned out, were better at promoting their images than at making money -- although some of them did pioneer new forms of accounting fraud. After that came the oil shock and the food shock, grim reminders that we’re still living in a material world.

So much, then, for the digital revolution? Not so fast. The predictions of '90s technology gurus are coming true more slowly than enthusiasts expected -- but the future they envisioned is still on the march.

In 1994, one of those gurus, Esther Dyson, made a striking prediction: that the ease with which digital content can be copied and disseminated would eventually force businesses to sell the results of creative activity cheaply, or even give it away. Whatever the product -- software, books, music, movies -- the cost of creation would have to be recouped indirectly: businesses would have to "distribute intellectual property free in order to sell services and relationships."

For example, she described how some software companies gave their product away but earned fees for installation and servicing. But her most compelling illustration of how you can make money by giving stuff away was that of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged people to tape live performances because "enough of the people who copy and listen to Grateful Dead tapes end up paying for hats, T-shirts and performance tickets. In the new era, the ancillary market is the market."

Indeed, it turns out that the Dead were business pioneers. Rolling Stone recently published an article titled "Rock's New Economy: Making Money When CDs Don't Sell." Downloads are steadily undermining record sales -- but today's rock bands, the magazine reports, are finding other sources of income. Even if record sales are modest, bands can convert airplay and YouTube views into financial success indirectly, making money through "publishing, touring, merchandising and licensing."

What other creative activities will become mainly ways to promote side businesses? How about writing books?

[read on...]

via PRWeb, June 5, 2008:

Major Record Labels Sue Spanish P2P Pioneer Pablo Soto, MP2P Technologies, Suit Seeks $20mm USD

Lawsuit, Believed to be Unprecedented, Claims "Unfair Competition"

Madrid, Spain (PRWEB) June 5, 2008 -- MP2P Technologies (http://www.mp2p.net/) announced today that it has been served with a lawsuit from what remains of the four major record labels. The lawsuit, WARNER MUSIC SPAIN S.A., UNIVERSAL MUSIC SPAIN, S.A., EMI MUSIC SPAIN, S.A., SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, S.A., PRODUCTORES DE MUSICA EN ESPANA (PROMUSICAE) v. PABLO SOTO BRAVO, OPTISOFT, S.L., PIOLET NETWORKS, S.L., MP2P TECHNOLOGIES, S.A. (filed in Madrid Court for Commercial Matters # 2807910001898), seeks $20mm in alleged damages from the technology upstart.

"We intend to vigorously defend ourselves against this shake down attempt by the major label cabal," said Pablo Soto, founder and CEO of MP2P Technologies. "Rather than embracing technology, they have chosen a path that will ultimately lead to their own demise, as evidenced by the labels consistent decline over the past decade. Litigation is in itself not a valid business model for them, however, it has been a dogged and futile pursuit of theirs since the advent of P2P."

"PROMUSICAE (Spanish branch of the IFPI; international arm of the RIAA) tried to proceed with civil suits against users of P2P networks in Spain and, after being halted by the Court of Justice of the EU, it has now decided to go against a neutral communication tool such as P2P technology," added Soto.

MP2P Technologies innovates technology offerings including Piolet (http://www.piolet.com/), Omemo, (http://www.omemo.com) and Blubster (http://www.blubster.com).

Pablo Soto is considered one of the pioneers of P2P, together with other distinguished luminaries such as Justin Frankel (Gnutella) and Shawn Fanning (Napster). He is a frequent panelist at national and international forums and serves from time to time as a visiting professor at the University of Valencia and the University of the Basque Country. His progressive accomplishments in technology have garnered worldwide press recognition, including CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, AP, USA Today, C/Net, Rolling Stone, CBS News, San Jose Mercury News, among many others.

About MP2P Technologies
MP2P Technologies' software offerings have been downloaded millions of times by scores of people from around the globe. Founded by renowned technology developer Pablo Soto in 2000, MP2P Technologies today remains a leader in the P2P sector and consumer technology. MP2P Technologies is headquartered in Madrid, Spain. For more information, visit http://www.mp2p.net.

For more info, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Music_Economy

reblogged via artreview.com:

One Less Alternative: The Lower East Side's Orchard Gallery Closes, As Planned                                                                   

Posted by artreview.com on 26 May 2008 at 5:00pm

By Joshua Mack

This past Sunday, Orchard, one of New York's most challenging counterfoils to the commercial art scene, closed, as planned, three years after opening.

The gallery was on the Lower East Side, in a partially renovated storefront at 47 Orchard Street – a thoroughfare once famed for the bargain basement clothing offered by immigrant merchants and now a gentrifying 'hood replete with yuppie restaurants and high end coffee roasters. Orchard was founded by twelve 'members' – among them artists Andrea Fraser, R.H. Quaytman, Christian Philipp Müller and Nicolás Guagnini, historian Rhea Anastas, filmmaker Jeff Preiss and one anonymous participant – in response to a shared distress over Bush's reelection in 2004, a booming art market, and the disconnect between daily life and the exclusive environment fostered by Chelsea galleries.

Spring Wound installation view / Outside the opening of Cookie Cutter, 2008

Spring Wound, Orchard's final show, was as enigmatic, cerebral and challenging as anything the hardscrabble space has produced: a survey of films by Jeff Preiss documenting past projects at the gallery. The show encapsulated the diversity of Orchard's curatorial program, featuring Andrea Fraser, queen of institutional critique, re-enacting May I Help You (1991), her skewering of art commerce and its aesthetic pretensions, and Anthony McCall's redo of Five Minute Drawing (1974).

Orchard's curatorial stance was rigorous, discursive and wide-ranging: one-person shows were eschewed for group exhibitions and newer work was placed in historical context. The relationship of art to political power was examined and critiqued: for example, September 11, 1973 (2005), curated by Guagnani, explored resonances between work made after the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973 and work made after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. Last year, an exhibition of Polish 'socialist conceptualism' from the 1970s highlighted how artists used their party affiliation to reveal the communist government's bankrupt social policies.

Such undermining from within echoes Orchard's modus operandi. It was intentionally organized as a for-profit gallery and was supported by sales and monthly contributions from its twelve members. As Guagnini explained over coffee earlier this week, by running the space for profit (whether it actually turned one or not), the founders sought to subvert the polarizing categories of commercial and non profit, the former designed to serve the market and the latter a kind of do-gooding lesser cousin. Instead, Orchard co-opted the formulas of the commercial space, the use of historic shows and the association of critics with specific artists – think Benjamin Buchloh and Gerhard Richter – to propose alternative criteria for valuing art.

Screening of Michael Asher's film 1973/2005 / Diego Fernandez, Portrait of My Father; both in the exhibition September 11, 1973 at Orchard

Perhaps the most vital aspect of Orchard's program has been the conviction that art could, and should, involve dialogue and social engagement. Much of what was shown fell under the heading of institutional critique, or engaged global and local political and economic marginalization. Gentrification and demographic change on the Lower East Side was a major topic, explored in photographs and walking tours by Zoe Leonard, Petra Wunderlich and Christian Philipp Müller. Orchard also set up a benefit auction for the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a program that advocates for low income and/or coloured transgender people as they navigate the public health and justice systems.

The place was not perfect and not without its critics, both internal and external. Shows were often organized around turgid concepts explicated in overly theoretical press releases. A limited budget – a painful reminder of what does sell today – often resulted in thin or slapdash shows. The head of a university arts program suggested to me that "It is/was just one of those innumerable new collectives, possibly happening as a counterpoint in the real physical world to virtual online social networks. And as cumbersome and 'closed' (elitist?) as anything that is material." Conflicts among members may have brought meaningful compromise for the most part, but Quaytman noted the early defection of founding member Gareth James as indicative of the internal hostility. Guagnini and Andrea Fraser also fell out over the project.

Some things were bound to go wrong – Orchard was founded as a laboratory. Rebecca Quaytman, the gallery director, was astounded at the public's hunger for an alternative to big box commercial venues. "People wanted it to be there. Our events were filled."

Kathy Halbreich, deputy director of MoMA, admired the way Orchard "…put the artist front and centre, not only as the maker but as the interpreter (there was always one of the partners present to talk to). The artists also reinterpreted the machine – and made a place for conversation, the latter being crucial, in my mind, to what I would hope for MoMA."

High praise and, one can only hope, a model for more established venues. But most of all, Orchard was about agency. Twelve people, dissatisfied with the artworld and the political world, and adrift after the death in 2003 of Colin de Land (the founder of American Fine Art, where many of them had exhibited), put their time, money, and commitment into creating a different situation. It's a classic model of grassroots activism and a call to all of us wringing our hands over the intellectual vapidity in many of our galleries and museums to visit and participate in the spaces, which thankfully do exist in New York, whose programs provide a meaningful alternative. Resistance, however, lies not in institutions – hence the original decision of Orchard's members to close after three years – but in action, change, movement. As the gallery closed this Sunday, Guagnini was canvassing the area, visiting sister galleries Miguel Abreu and Reena Spaulings. Then, at 6pm, when Orchard closed its door for the last time, his own solo at Fruit and Flowers Deli was opening.               

[image Via]

Larry Lessig does not support the Orphan Works bill:

via NYTimes:

Op-Ed Contributor

Little Orphan Artworks

By LAWRENCE LESSIG

Published: May 20, 2008

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CONGRESS is considering a major reform of copyright law intended to solve the problem of "orphan works" - those works whose owner cannot be found. This "reform" would be an amazingly onerous and inefficient change, which would unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.

The problem of orphan works is real. It was caused by a fundamental shift in the architecture of copyright law. Before 1978, copyright was an opt-in system, granting protection only to those who registered and renewed their copyright, and only if they marked their creative work with the famous ©. But three decades ago, Congress created an opt-out system. Copyright protection is now automatic, and it extends for almost a century, whether the author wants or needs it or even knows that his work is regulated by federal law.

The old system filtered copyright protection to those works that needed it; the new system regulates indiscriminately.The Congressional Research Service has estimated that just 2 percent of copyrighted works that are 55 to 75 years old retain any commercial value. Yet the system maintains no registry of copyright owners nor of entities from which permission to use a copyrighted work can be sought. The consequence has been that an extraordinary chunk of culture gets mired in unnecessary copyright regulation.

The solution before Congress, however, is both unfair and unwise. The bill would excuse copyright infringers from significant damages if they can prove that they made a "diligent effort" to find the copyright owner. A "diligent effort" is defined as one that is "reasonable and appropriate," as determined by a set of "best practices" maintained by the government.

But precisely what must be done by either the “infringer” or the copyright owner seeking to avoid infringement is not specified upfront. The bill instead would have us rely on a class of copyright experts who would advise or be employed by libraries. These experts would encourage copyright infringement by assuring that the costs of infringement are not too great. The bill makes no distinction between old and new works, or between foreign and domestic works. All work, whether old or new, whether created in America or Ukraine, is governed by the same slippery standard.

The proposed change is unfair because since 1978, the law has told creators that there was nothing they needed to do to protect their copyright. Many have relied on that promise. Likewise, the change is unfair to foreign copyright holders, who have little notice of arcane changes in Copyright Office procedures, and who will now find their copyrights vulnerable to willful infringement by Americans.

The change is also unwise, because for all this unfairness, it simply wouldn't do much good. The uncertain standard of the bill doesn’t offer any efficient opportunity for libraries or archives to make older works available, because the cost of a "diligent effort" is not going to be cheap. The only beneficiaries would be the new class of "diligent effort" searchers who would be a drain on library budgets.

Congress could easily address the problem of orphan works in a manner that is efficient and not unfair to current or foreign copyright owners. Following the model of patent law, Congress should require a copyright owner to register a work after an initial and generous term of automatic and full protection.

For 14 years, a copyright owner would need to do nothing to receive the full protection of copyright law. But after 14 years, to receive full protection, the owner would have to take the minimal step of registering the work with an approved, privately managed and competitive registry, and of paying the copyright office $1.

This rule would not apply to foreign works, because it is unfair and illegal to burden foreign rights-holders with these formalities. It would not apply, immediately at least, to work created between 1978 and today. And it would apply to photographs or other difficult-to-register works only when the technology exists to develop reliable and simple registration databases that would make searching for the copyright owners of visual works an easy task.

A hired expert shouldn't be required for an orchestra to know if it can perform a work composed during World War II or for a small museum to know whether it can put a photograph from the New Deal on its Web site. In a digital age, knowing the law should be simple and cheap. Congress should be pushing for rules that encourage clarity, not more work for copyright experts.

Meanwhile, over at the Art Law Blog, Donn Zaretsky dispels some lingering misconceptions about the new bill (thanks Ed!):

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Orphan Works Update    

A House panel unanimously approved the orphan works bill yesterday.  Daryl Lang of Photo District News looks at the split among photo associations that the legislation has "exposed" (pun intended, I assume).

Lang also addresses some of the misinformation about the bill that's been floating around:

"One point of disagreement concerns whether the bill would require artists to register their work with commercial databases to get copyright protection .... Holland has used this point to argue against the bill in several articles. The APA used similar language in a five-page position paper published Tuesday: 'All works, professional or personal, published or unpublished, will have to be registered with as-yet-to-be-created private, commercial registries.' No such requirement appears in either bill currently before Congress, and Perlman and PACA attorney Nancy Wolff say the statement is untrue. Both versions of the amendment mandate the creation of private databases of copyrighted works to facilitate the search for rights owners, but registration would not be mandatory for all creative works."              

posted by Donn Zaretsky at 9:26 PM

[Image via]

via Slate:

politics: Who's winning, who's losing, and why.

Obama and Orwell
What the master Brit can teach Democrats about elitism.

By Jeff Greenfield
Posted Thursday, May 1, 2008, at 6:19 PM ET

Elitism has bedeviled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it's making mischief in the Obama campaign every bit as much as the omnipresence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The charge that liberal candidates don't connect with or understand the values and beliefs of regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like "limousine liberal," which I first heard aimed at New York Mayor John Lindsay in 1969. It was also at the core of "radical chic," the phrase made famous by Tom Wolfe in his savage 1970 account in New York magazine of a fund-raising party for the Black Panthers thrown by Leonard Bernstein and his wife in their Park Avenue duplex. (Wolfe didn't invent the term, but he gave it currency.) [download PDF of that article]

There's also an even older and more illuminating antecedent from across the Atlantic: the writings of George Orwell in England in the late 1930s, which describe a version of elitism that echoes powerfully in our current political battle.

Orwell's 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier is an account of his travels to England's industrial North, to the towns of Barnsley, Sheffield, and Wigan. Orwell - once a scholarship student at Eton - wrote of everything from conditions in the coal mines to the homes, diets, and health of desperately poor miners. He himself was a socialist who could also turn a critical eye on the British left, and in the middle of the book, he devoted a chapter to the failure of socialism to gain a foothold among the very citizens who would have seemed to benefit most from its rise. Substitute liberal or progressive for socialist, and the text often reads as though Orwell were covering American politics today.

"Everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, is a way out [of the worldwide depression,]" Orwell writes. "It would at least ensure our getting enough to eat, even if it deprived us of everything else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such an elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already." And yet, he adds, "the average thinking person nowadays is merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to Socialism. … Socialism … has about it something inherently distasteful - something that drives away the very people who ought to be flocking it its support."

One key to the movement's lack of popularity, Orwell argues, is its supporters. "As with the Christian religion," he writes, "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents." Then he wheels out the heavy rhetorical artillery. The typical socialist, according to Orwell, "is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism, or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler, and often with vegetarian leanings … with a social position he has no intention of forfeiting. … One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England." (Think "organic food lover," "militant nonsmoker," and "environmentalist with a private jet" for a more contemporary list.)

Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. Describing a gathering of leftists in London, he says, "every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses."

Real working-class folks, he says, might be drawn toward a socialist future centered around family life, the pub, football, and local politics. But those who speak in its name, he says, have a snobbish condescension toward such quotidian pleasures - even condemning coffee and tea. "Reformers" urged the poor to eat healthier food - less sugar, more brown bread. And their audience balked. "Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like organs and wholemeal bread, or [raw carrots]?" Orwell asks. "Yes it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would rather starve than live on brown bread and more carrots … a millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits. An unemployed man doesn't."

And so, Orwell ruefully concluded, the snobbish socialists succeeded in depleting their own ranks. "The ordinary decent person, who is in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, is given the impression that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist party that means business."

The perennial struggle of Democratic contenders to appeal to ordinary Americans seems very much of a piece with Orwell's sharp descriptions. Election after election, Democrats argue that once Joe and Jane Sixpack fully grasp the wisdom of the latest six-point college-loan program, or of an 800-page health-care scheme, they will come to wave the Democratic banner. And, sometimes, these voters do just that - provided that the candidate in question has demonstrated a sense that he or she is not treating them as the subject of an anthropological study. Bill Clinton had a full steamer trunk of domestic programs; he also was a product of Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law School. But his 18 years in the vineyards of Arkansas politics gave him the tools to compete for support on a more visceral level. Then there were Clinton's obvious tastes for earthly pleasures- from Big Macs to more intimate diversions- which made it very hard to label him as an aloof elitist.

For Democrats at the moment, it is no doubt exasperating to watch working-class voters choose candidates whose economic tastes run to comforting the comfortable. And it may be cold comfort to learn that such impulses are not confined to time and place. But if you want to court these voters in a way that will resonate with them, you could do a lot worse than heeding the cautionary words of George Orwell.

And Barack? Ix-nay on the egg-white omelets.

KRIEGSPIEL
Guy Debord's 1978 "Game of War"
Produced for computer by RSG
Screen shot courtesy of m.river, flickr.com

via post.thing.net and interactivist info exchange, 04/23/2008:
{additional links courtesy of newsgrist}

Guy Debord's Widow Threatens NYU Professor with Copyright Violation Professor Is Accused of Infringing the Copyright of a Man Who Opposed Copyright

By ANDREA L. FOSTER, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i33/33a01603.htm

Guy Debord, a Marxist philosopher who died in 1994, was no fan of private property. But apparently his widow is one.

A lawyer representing the widow, Alice Becker-Ho, has threatened Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University, with legal action. Mr. Galloway says the lawyer has sent him a letter demanding that he stop distributing his online war game, which the lawyer says infringes a copyright held by the Debord estate. The French philosopher had created a similar board game 30 years ago.

But copyrights and some forms of intellectual property were anathema to Debord, says Mr. Galloway. The Situationist International movement, which Debord founded, in 1957, is a mix of anarchism and Marxism. Its followers scrawled "Abolish copyright" on walls during the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris.

The humor in defending the property rights of Debord, a Marxist, has not been lost on scholars, who have publicized the case on their blogs.

Mr. Galloway does not deny that the two-person computer game he developed is based on Debord's creation, the Game of War. The philosopher, an avid student of war strategy, released a few handcrafted copies of the board game in 1978. The object of the game, which resembles chess, is to corner and destroy opposing pieces. Debord and his wife wrote a book about it that was translated into English last year.

<Image via, tirée du film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, Guy Debord, 1978.

One of Debord's games, cast in silver and copper, is on display at Columbia University's Buell Center for the Study of Architecture, alongside Mr. Galloway's computer version, called Kriegspiel. The object of Kriegspiel, German for a generic 18th-century war game, is the same as in Debord's game.

A computer programmer, Mr. Galloway says he spent about a year designing the digital game, which can be downloaded from the Web at no charge. "It's part of my scholarly research into how antagonism is simulated in war games and computer games," he said. "It's also part of my research into the work of Debord."

Despite the similarities between his creation and Debord's, Mr. Galloway disagrees that he is breaking the law. "I don't think I'm infringing on anyone's copyright in the creation of this game," he says, declining to discuss his legal situation further.

John Beckman, a spokesman for New York University, says only that it received a similar cease-and-desist letter and has responded.

Wendy M. Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for
Internet & Society, is familiar with Mr. Galloway's case. The Debord estate, she says, is overreaching in accusing him of copyright infringement.

The idea for a game is not copyrightable, she argues; only the image of a game is. Mr. Galloway's game uses the idea of Debord's game, she says, but does not duplicate its artistry and detail. {note: this perfectly illustrates the Idea-Expression Dichotomy }

Ms. Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University School of Law, sees similarities between Mr. Galloway's case and one involving the Facebook-based word game Scrabulous. In that case, the owners of the board game Scrabble have accused the developers of Scrabulous of infringing their copyright. Ms. Seltzer says that claim, too, is without merit.