(On March 17, 2013, the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography held a Scholars’ Day devoted to the work of Robert Heinecken (1931-2006), in advance of a retrospective that they’ll mount in March 2014. This intramural event was organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, and Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography. It involved a handful of presenters and a small, invited audience comprised of people with substantial personal and professional connections to the late photographer and educator. Presenters included Luke Batten, Director, The Robert Heinecken Trust, and Matthew Biro, Professor, Art History, University of Michigan. I gave the concluding talk, which I titled “Inside the Tent, Pissing In: Robert Heinecken as Black Sheep.” Part 2 appears below; click here for Part 1. ― A. D. C.)

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“Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken 1961–1976,” Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, 2011, exhibition poster.

Unlike Stieglitz, Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, and others who had pledged fealty to particularly strict approaches to photography, Robert Heinecken and other members of his cohort felt no obligatory loyalty to the medium and did not hold its tools, materials, and processes sacrosanct. I suspect they’d all agree with Man Ray’s dictum, “A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea.”

Heinecken’s rejection in his own practice of anything resembling the then-dominant approaches of “purism” and “straight” photography guaranteed his status as an outlier, even an outlaw, within the field. Unless afflicted with a perverse fondness for frustration, under those circumstances to what end would a teaching artist who hung out regularly with Wallace Berman and certainly knew the work of fellow Angeleno John Baldessari insist on calling himself a photographer?

“Robert Heinecken: Photographist,” catalog, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999, cover.

It’s true that Heinecken did describe himself for a time as a “para-photographer,” and that, late in his life, he became fond of art critic Arthur Danto’s 1993 neologism, photographist. Danto proposed a distinction between photographers, who produce “photography as art,” and those he named “photographists,” concerned with “photography in art.” There are numerous major flaws in this idea; to define photographers simplistically as picture-makers concerned with generating, in Danto’s words, “aestheticized work of the kind urged, for example, by Alfred Stieglitz,” is to ignore ― or be ignorant of ― not only the complexity of Stieglitz’s own thought but some five decades of subsequent photographic activity by people who called themselves photographers (Heinecken prominent among them), including serious hermeneutic and exegetic inquiry.

Danto’s essay serves as evidence that the pernicious art-world bias against photographers endures. The noted critic minted that term precisely to separate soi-disant “artists using photography” from picture-makers aware of photography’s history and working, however transgressively, within that medium’s rich field of ideas, which is where Heinecken had always positioned himself. Notably, Danto does not discuss or even name Heinecken in that essay; I’d wager he was then and still remains entirely unfamiliar with his work. Hence my disagreement with Heinecken’s acceptance of his coinage.

Heinecken’s effect on the field of photography, as both a picture-maker and an educator, depended to a considerable extent on his acute awareness of the medium’s history, morphology, and dominant tendencies. As he said in 1978, “I have taken advantage very much of the photographic medium, and photographers supply the ideas in my work. My ideas are photographic ideas, they are not drawing ideas, and most printmaking ideas are drawing ideas.” (Emphasis mine.)

For example, both his lecture-cum-performance critique of John Szarkowski’s reductivist formalism and his acidulous commentary on Susan Sontag’s uninformed diatribe sprang from an insider’s knowledge of photography’s field of ideas; both those projects of his, in turn, required for a full appreciation of their complexities and nuances an understanding of what Szarkowski’s problematic stewardship at MoMA and Sontag’s brief but high-profile foray into writing about photography meant to the medium in their time.

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In the 1960s, considering the option of firing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson famously decided that he’d “rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.” I propose that Heinecken adopted an alternative position, based on the premise that photography’s already fertile field of ideas, little-known to any save the medium’s adherents, would expand more rapidly if challenged and diversified by its own committed practitioners. Faced with the options of separating himself from what, for convenience’s sake, I’ll call the photography community, in order to pressure it from beyond its perimeter, or else to stay within the stockade to defend the tribe from marauders, Heinecken characteristically chose a third strategy, that of the self-appointed troublemaker ― standing inside the tent, pissing in. Electing to stay in the fold, he thereby made himself into one of its most visible black sheep.

Robert Heinecken, “Untitled,” altered fashion-magazine page, 1970.

Heinecken sometimes called himself a “guerrilla photographer,” gravitating as he did toward the tactics of remaining inconspicuous and unidentifiable; as he once said, “I like to go into something, shake it up and disappear.” Think of him as a kindred spirit to Terry Southern’s Guy Grand, the “Magic Christian,” who delighted in anonymously “making things hot for people” — as well as for himself. He combined that inclination with aspects of the tradition among Japanese woodblock artists of the classic period, who periodically changed both style and name in order to avoid the traps inherent in both. This project-specific diversity of materials and methods, which vitiated the very possibility of anything resembling a signature style, placed Heinecken even further outside the mainstream of photography, closer in spirit to Marcel Duchamp than to even such photographic experimenters as Frederick Sommer, Jerry Uelsmann, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, also marginalized by the medium’s gatekeepers in the early ’70s.

Thus, while pioneering many forms of what some now call “photo-based art,” Heinecken served photography as a kind of mirror-image or doppelgänger for artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and John Baldessari. All were insistent that the mass-media photographic image was an integral aspect of contemporary visual consciousness, and hence a logical, even necessary component of contemporary (visual) artworks; all proposed, in their different ways, that reworking and/or recontextualizing that imagery imaginatively and critically was a sufficient creative act in and of itself to qualify as a serious contribution to the current field of ideas.

Robert Heinecken, “He/She,” 1980, cover.

The most important difference between Heinecken and his art-world counterparts ― because, I think, it’s the least understood, especially by today’s audiences ― is how wide the gulf then was between those identified as artists and those labelled photographers, even when what the photographers were up to closely parallelled or even anticipated the artists’ inquiries. The photographic image as a communicative vehicle and a cultural function may have become hot and trendy by the middle ’60s, but, to return to my starting point, identifying oneself as a photographer then had definite consequences within the art world (certainly including the art market), virtually all of them negative.

One challenge any curator engaging with Heinecken’s work confronts today is that of bringing today’s audience to an awareness of that dichotomy, and what it signified when Heinecken began his project. As a corollary, one obligation facing any curator who does so for the institution hosting this conference is to explain to that audience the pervasive influence on the medium of this department as gatekeeper during the period 1965-85, because much of Heinecken’s activity can best be understood as an oppositional response thereto.

“Robert Heinecken checking prints,” 1982. © Copyright 1982 by Bill Jay.

It seems to me unquestionable that had Heinecken simply opted to switch labels and then produced the very same work he generated subsequently, he’d be far better known than he is today; playing with photographic images did no post-1960 experimental artist any harm, and made the careers of more than a few. But his challenges to photographic practice and theory would thereby have become significantly weakened in the eyes of most of the medium’s practitioners and commentators, as coming from outside the medium rather than from within it.

By staying inside the tent, pissing in, Robert Heinecken as volunteer black sheep went far beyond the the creation of his own durable, provocative body of work. He expanded the working definition of photographic practice, had a profound effect on photo education, and forced photo critics, historians, theorists, and curators to reconsider their assumptions concerning the medium’s parameters.

Though it’s taken a good bit longer, he’s gradually forced those who privilege art over photography, and artists over photographers, to confront their prejudices. The best way for both sides to thank this unlikely bodhisattva for his service would be to erase the arbitrary line that divides them.

(Part 1 I 2.)

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This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

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Before I begin, let me thank Eva Respini and Drew Sawyer of the Department of Photography here at the Museum of Modern Art for inviting me to participate in this gathering. Let me also congratulate the department for evolving to the stage where it can recognize and celebrate Robert Heinecken’s contribution to the medium.

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In the early 1970s, the art world began one of its most adroit yet least discussed maneuvers: accepting as legitimate, marketable, collectible, and worthy of preservation and study a class of artifacts that until then it had disdained and trivialized, while continuing its traditional treatment as second-class citizens of those theretofore committed lifelong to making these objects.

The objects in question were photographs, of course, and the dedicated makers thereof were known, at least until that point, as photographers. Up through the early ’70s, no photographer had achieved art-world recognition on an equal plane with painters, sculptors, lithographers, and workers in the other visual media. Indeed, one can reasonably assert that no individual who had primarily made photographs then qualified as an artist by art-world standards, though several who had pursued photography along with other media did not have their involvement with light-sensitive materials held against them ― most prominently Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, both of whom had professional-level skills and credits as photographers.

“Robert Heinecken checking prints,” 1982. © Copyright 1982 by Bill Jay.

The ’70s saw the emergence of a generation of picture-makers who in many cases incorporated photography into their practice, often centrally, yet recognized the pernicious art-world bias against the medium’s practitioners. The need to separate themselves from those designated as photographers while continuing to make photographs had many motives, one of them certainly economic: photographs by picture-makers labelled as artists achieved market prices considerably higher than they would have if identified as made by photographers, and the related benefits ― gallery and museum shows, sales to private collectors and institutional collections, auction prices, monographs, lectures, teaching gigs, fellowships and residencies, etc. ― followed suit.

Practically speaking, in other words, then as now, from a strictly financial and career standpoint only a fool would choose to define him- or herself as a photographer if another rubric would fit. And those evasive, exculpatory alternatives soon emerged, most commonly “photo-based art” and “artists using photography.”

“Robert Heinecken: Photographist,” catalog, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999, cover.

As this situation took shape, a number of the picture-makers whose activity and output I tracked in my role as photography critic, starting in 1968, seemed to me positioned to switch sides ― that is, to redefine themselves as makers of “photo-based art” and/or “artists using photography,” thereby escaping the perpetual ghetto to which the art world has historically relegated photographers. Of that cluster, for the sake of this discussion, I’ll single out Les Krims, Duane Michals, Kenneth Josephson, and especially Robert Heinecken as examples of recognizable figures who could have accomplished a transition to that presumably higher status with relative ease.

Of them, only Josephson had a classic grounding in photography’s field of ideas, his post-secondary education combining Minor White’s poetic extension of the purist attitude with Moholy’s polymathic, nonjudgmental relationship to all the medium’s performative options. Krims and Heinecken came to photography from printmaking; Michals, an autodidact, came to it from Pittsburgh. Krims and Michals both worked directorially, pioneering a mode then rising to prominence in contemporary art practice. Josephson’s work certainly qualified as conceptual. And Heinecken, whom I’d met in 1965 in San Francisco, was even back then appropriating and recontextualizing mass-media imagery in radical and inventive ways, prefiguring postmodernist practice by at least a decade.

John Szarkowski, “The Photographer’s Eye,” catalog, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1966, cover.

All of this work was viewed as at best outré and at worst transgressive and even anti-photographic by the photography establishment. That then-small cluster of gatekeepers certainly included John Szarkowski, director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography at the time, whose canonical theoretical text The Photographer’s Eye Heinecken would satirize in the mid-’70s via a frequently delivered public lecture in which he droned excerpts from the curator’s prose over slides of randomly selected found snapshots. Hardly a move calculated to endear himself to the midwestern impresario with the handlebar mustache. But by then Szarkowski had settled in to what Christopher Phillips would call “the judgment seat of photography” for the long haul, and had enunciated his commitment to a narrow, formalist, Greenbergian vision of the medium, which clearly excluded what dissenters like Heinecken, Josephson, Michals, and Krims were about ― so in for a penny, in for a pound.

I consider it a measure of a certain kind of stubborn integrity that those four (and others too numerous to list here) continued to self-identify as photographers instead of jumping ship and reinventing themselves as picture-makers in one or another of the art world’s approved categories. I got to know them all well enough to certify that this wasn’t a matter of unawareness of or disinterest in the field of ideas of contemporary art practice, nor of feeling more comfortable in a small pond than in a big one. They were all cognizant of how their work related to that of others identified as photographers, as well as to the output of artists past and present using photography in various ways. They also knew the dynamics and politics of the art scene, and understood the price they’d pay for their decision. Which made this an act of principle, oddly akin to the unapologetic embrace of the label “photographer” by such figures as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston several generations earlier, though they had little else in common with those predecessors.

Robert Heinecken, “Are You Rea #1,” 1966. © 1966 by Robert Heinecken.

Of the four photographers I’ve named, Heinecken was unquestionably the one to whom the label “photographer” as conventionally understood applied least. From the projections of found photomontages that I saw in 1965 through his Are You Rea portfolio of offset lithographs generated by a similar method, the altered newsstand magazines, and on to the “Inaugural Excerpt Videograms” of 1981 and the “Shiva” paper sculptures of his later output, Heinecken worked almost exclusively with found imagery drawn from the mass media.

He knew his way around a camera and darkroom, as demonstrated surreptitiously by the black & white half of his 1978 diptych, “The S.S. Copyright Project ‘On Photography,’” in the MoMA collection, and various other works. But the generation of original negatives describing event-space relationships that he observed directly, and the production of photographic prints therefrom, was not central to his practice, which instead emphasized the recontextualizing of existing materials from visual culture via strategies he derived from each specific project.

Heinecken said of this inclination of his, “Content can be built on the facture of a picture ― not on subject matter or anything else. I want to be identified by the attitude of a picture, not its stylistic appearance.” In effect, he wanted each work assessed on the basis of the approach it reflected toward the process of working with that specific concept ― for which inclination he saw Marcel Duchamp as a model. He termed this an “analytical facture,” which involved matching the production strategy to the particular idea, rather than conforming every idea to the Procrustean bed of a predetermined way of working or recurrent visual appearance. Some of his efforts, consequently, are as blunt and mechanical as any of Warhol’s Factory-made silk-screen prints. But then he turned around and produced exquisitely crafted, extensively hand-worked objects like the prints in the “Cliché Vary” series from 1974 and the later “Shiva” relief collages.

Robert Heinecken, “Food, Sex and TV,” catalog, Fotoforum, Kassel, Germany, 1983, cover.

Consequently, only his ongoing concern with a set of core cultural issues and his calculatedly shifting strategies of facture function as what the film theorist Christian Metz calls the diegesis, the running thread, connecting all of Heinecken’s works together. Perhaps that fact, in combination with his choice of the photography world rather than the art world as his testing ground, explains the comparative lack of public awareness of his contribution to the dialogue between photography and art ― despite the fact that the radical multiplication in the 1960s and ’70s of the active variety of physical forms of photographic work was traceable in considerable part to Heinecken’s example in his own practice, to his teaching method at U.C.L.A., and to his influence as a lecturer and visiting artist in many workshops and other tutorial situations during that period.

(Part 1 I 2.)

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This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

Alix Rule and David Levine, to whose cogent report on what they’ve named “International Art English” I referred, compiled a database of the 13,000 art-world press releases sent out in email bursts to “art professionals” since January 1999 through e-flux, the New York-based subscriber network. Then they ran that material through some language-analysis software called Sketch Engine, developed by a company in Brighton, UK, to identify its recurrent phrases and other commonalities, turning those into a statistical profile. (See Andy Beckett’s January 27, 2013 piece in The Guardian (UK), “A user’s guide to artspeak,” which includes snippets from his interview with Rule and Levine.)

The results are fascinating, delivered in highly readable prose, and well worth your time. One caveat, which does not impeach their findings: Rule and Levine insist that IAE constitutes “a unique language” that “has everything to do with English, but . . . is emphatically not English.  . . . [W]hat ultimately makes it a language . . . is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.” I have to disagree with them on this point, as I think most specialists in the field of linguistics would. With all its idiosyncrasies and neologisms, IAE so closely approximates English that it qualifies as a dialect thereof, rather than as a separate and autonomous language.

In fact, IAE ― which some call Artspeak ― is a subset of what we could dub International Postmodern English, or IPE, variant forms of which have arisen in almost all disciplines that fall within the arts and humanities, from literature to anthropology.

I’m pleased to note that Rule and Levine agree with something I asserted in my 1998 essay “The Destruction Business” ― that IAE has gatekeeping as one of its primary functions. Like IPE and its variants generally, it’s elitist, and exclusionary. No accident, that; it serves to create a cognoscenti, and to distinguish that in-group from the great unwashed. In a 1996 column for The Nation, Katha Pollitt asked, ”How else explain how pomo leftists can talk constantly about the need to democratize knowledge and write in a way that excludes all but the initiated few?”

Regarding the then-recent, inadvertent publication by the unwitting editors of the journal Social Text of a blatant parody of such obscurantist writing, Pollitt added,

the comedy of the [Alan] Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the postmodernists don’t really understand one another’s writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads. Lacan . . . performativity . . . Judith Butler . . . scandal . . . (en)gendering (w)holeness . . . Lunch!” (Click here for her article, “Pomolotov Cocktail.”)

Some of the locutions of IPE, and some of its underlying assumptions, have actually trickled down into everyday usage among swathes of the populace at large. (For example, an April 17 report in The Atlantic by Rebecca J. Rosen refers to an issue of a periodical seized by the Nazis and lately returned to a descendant of its original Jewish owner as “sort of a synecdoche for the person lost,” mingling the colloquial “sort of” with the highbrow, though how this improves on the more familiar word “surrogate” escapes me.) Despite that fact, IPE, which includes IAE, has more in common with the jargon or shoptalk of a specialized usergroup than it does even with a typical dialect, perhaps because it developed mainly out of written and printed expression rather than face-to-face verbal interchange. As a consequence (though not necessarily a desideratum), it thus narrows the readership and support base for criticism of the visual arts, photography among them.

Dung cakes being prepared for fuel in Brittany, c. 1900. Postcard.

Be that as it may, there’s no denying that IAE exists. Nor does it exist in a vacuum. Here you have the counterpart, in textual form, of the visual tropes that infest contemporary photographic work, about which I’ve written in another series of posts. Which came first ― theory-driven art by academically trained artists or academic theorizing about art? Asking the inevitable chicken-or-egg question gets us no closer to a useful understanding of groupthink in academe than it does to the origins of poultry.

More important to ask: Can we deem it sheer coincidence that this standardization of thought and expression in both modes came out of the same environment? I think not. They emerged at almost exactly the same time, from within the same hothouse ― the international post-secondary art-education system. Their virtually simultaneous birth merely manifests that sheltered microcosm’s belated recognition of something the hardscrabble working class has known for millennia: bullshit makes effective and inexpensive fuel, and if everyone’s using it the smell soon goes unnoticed.

BANK, “Press Release” Project (1998), stamp.

Artists are not unaware of this phenomenon; indeed, no one who’s gone through the art-education production line over the past four decades has completely escaped the force-feeding of it. Most succumb to the blandishments of IAE, recognizing its usefulness in getting one’s foot in the art-establishment door, as Rule and Levine note. But some resist. The short-lived London collective BANK (no relation to Banksy, so far as I know), concerned with “the sinister implications of this particular linguistic manifestation,” mounted an exhibition in 1999 titled “Press Release,” in which they displayed the result of a 1998 project that involved their correcting, rewriting, commenting on, grading, and faxing back to the sources an assortment of art-world PR. Predictably, IAE comprises much of the content of those releases.

That those who create these lame semantic mashups often do so out of necessity, as a consequence of having to write about art they’ve never seen, may explain their actions, but doesn’t justify them, or the situation that engenders such behavior. Its net effect is not the enrichment of the discourse on art (including photography) but its impoverishment, with the consequent alienation of the audience from engagement with texts about art. That doesn’t bode well for the future of art criticism ― and, to the extent (considerable) that this tendency has trickled down into the discourse on photography, it doesn’t augur favorably for the future of photo criticism either.

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October, No. 1 (Spring 1976), cover.

I’d love to claim that it took great willpower on my part to resist the magnetic pull of IAE at its inception, and eternal vigilance to keep it from infiltrating my prose ever since. Alas, like George Washington I cannot tell a lie. From its very birth ― Rule and Levine consider the journal October as its cradle, making the date of its first issue, sometime in spring 1976, the birthday of IAE ― I have found IAE, with its recondite vocabulary and stilted syntax, not just off-putting but actually repellent. No aspect of it furthers anything I’ve sought to accomplish as either a working critic, historian, and theorist of photography and new media or as a prose stylist concerned with engaging my readership in an energetic discourse.

Avoiding it has therefore proved easy, especially as no editor with whom I’ve ever worked has required it from me. Indeed, given that, as noted in my last post, I’ve subscribed to e-flux since its debut in 1999, and have thus received (if not read) some 13,000 of their emails, most of them written in IAE, I may simply have an inbuilt immunity to jargon addiction. (Musician and composer Glenn Gould once defined jargon thus: “[A] fancy hermetic language of questionable usefulness even to specialists.”) Still, needless to say, there’s a price to pay when you opt out of the in crowd that way, even if effortlessly, and I’ve forked it over gladly. I’m a Marxist of the Groucho-deviationist tendency, meaning that I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member. For better or worse, now as ever, you’ll need no decoder ring to access my prose, and no secret handshake to enter the field of ideas in which I do my work.

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Postscript: After the last sentence above I was going to add “English spoken here.” But I learned only recently of the passing, almost a year ago, on May 16, 2012, of the Québécoise photographer, writer, and editor Denyse Gérin-Lajoie. (Click here for an obituary by photographer Vincenzo Pietropaolo.) Which reminded me of something pertinent.

Le Magazine OVO, Vol. 12 (1982), cover.

In the ’70s and ’80s Denise, with her life partner Jorge Guerra, made a small Montreal journal, OVO, into an influential platform for the discourse on photography ― one of a cluster of “little” magazines that served as important forums for photo criticism back then. Eventually, in the early ’90s, some years after its demise, I provided a letter of support for the placing of the OVO Archives at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, considering it imperative to conserve such resources for future study.

OVO concerned itself primarily with Canadian photographers, and published mostly Canadian writers. But an essay I wrote for the New York Times in 1973 ― “Must They ‘Progress’ So Fast?” ― struck her as relevant to the emerging Canadian photo scene. So she asked me for permission to publish it in both the English and French editions of OVO in 1974, doing the French translation herself. This marked the first time anything of mine had achieved translation, a notable moment for any writer.

Because I’m bilingual francophone, Denyse sent me down drafts of her French rendition for comment and eventual approval before going to press. Somewhere along the line, she remarked in a note that during the translation process she’d discovered that I didn’t write in English. “You write in American,” she observed.

What a useful insight. Perhaps that’s why the siren song of International Art English falls on deaf ears around these parts. So I dedicate the last in this series of posts to Denyse Gérin-Lajoie, who taught me something about my relationship to language.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

Which brings me to “International Art English,” a recent report by Alix Rule, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Columbia University, and David Levine, an artist based in Brooklyn and Berlin. Here’s their abstract:

The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language — what ultimately makes it a language — is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.

In what follows, we examine some of the curious lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features of what we call International Art English. We consider IAE’s origins, and speculate about the future of this language through which contemporary art is created, promoted, sold, and understood. Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke. But there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved. We are quite serious.

They are indeed, though often tongue-in-cheekily so. As a methodology, Rule and Levine concentrated exclusively on press releases issued through e-flux, which they describe as “a listserv that sends out roughly three announcements per day about contemporary-art events worldwide” and “the art world’s flagship digital institution.” They add, “When it comes to communication about contemporary art, e-flux is the most powerful instrument and its metonym.”

Involvement with e-flux takes place from two different directions, that of producers and that of consumers, though participants often play both roles in the international art world. Members of the client base ― nominally non-profit organizations and institutions (museums, festivals, alternative spaces, but not commercial galleries) ― pay e-flux an annual fee in return for the right to send out email bursts of their announcements a certain number of times per year. Those who want to receive these announcements ― which includes “90,000+ visual arts professionals,” a high proportion of them inevitably from the selfsame sources supplying the emails to this system ― subscribe (for free) to this information stream.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569), “The Tower of Babel,” circa 1563.

Rule and Levine subjected the entirety of what they refer to as the e-flux “corpus” (the total output since its inception) to various forms of statistical and linguistic analysis. I’ve subscribed to e-flux since its debut 13 years ago, which means I’ve received approximately 13,000 emails through this system. E-flux emails all look the same, since the distribution system conforms them layout-wise and typographically to a standardized “house style.” (Here’s a sample.) The source determines the content, however ― headlines, text, image selection and caption. Given the genuinely global client base, one would expect a diversity of vocabularies, phrasings, references, and other components in the releases. Instead, one finds a surprising sameness of thought and locution.

Most of these press releases, Rule and Levine point out in their preamble, are written by interns or junior staffers at these institutions, who with rare exceptions are still in or recently graduated from programs in studio art, art history, museum studies, or arts management ― programs in which the use of a certain “artspeak” vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and canonical reference points has become de rigeur. Moreover (and Rule and Levine don’t mention this, surprisingly), these jejune authors also number among the core demographic of recipients and readers of art-world press releases, certainly including the steady stream from e-flux itself. Not surprising, therefore, that the output of these epigones should prove so homogeneous.

October, No. 1 (Spring 1976), cover.

Rule and Levine ask, “How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?” I’m reminded of a colleague’s description of much written artbabble as ”aspiring to read as if translated from the German.” Along with American and UK English, French and German represent the languages that predominate in the production of art-related theory. Thus I don’t find it surprising that academic writing styles derived from translations of such materials infiltrate English-language production of such texts. “If e-flux is the crucible of today’s IAE, the journal October is a viable candidate for the language’s point of origin,” Rule and Levine propose, adding, further on, “October’s emulators mimicked both the deliberate and unintentional features of the journal’s writing, without discriminating between the two. . . . [T]he progeny of October elevated accidents of translation to the level of linguistic norms.”

How to Write about Art You Haven’t Seen

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007), cover.

What the authors don’t say, perhaps because they didn’t know it, is that many of these press releases get written by people who aren’t just art-world wannabes but individuals who have never laid eyes on the work in question. That is, they’re exercises in “How to Write about Art You Haven’t Seen.” That’s because the publicity cycle in the art world runs on a three-month time lag. Let me explain. (Note that I speak here as a recipient of art-world press releases for the past 45 years, and one who, in his more recent role as curator, has had an involvement in the writing and delivery of press releases as well. I speak also as one who has written for periodicals ranging in publication frequency from quarterly to weekly.)

The logistics of print-media production and distribution determine the schedule under which editorial content gets planned, assigned to writers, selected from incoming materials, and finalized for eventual publication. Monthly magazines such as the major art periodicals ― Artforum, ARTnews, Art in America ― wrap up about three months ahead of the date on which they hit the newsstands and kiosks and get mailed out to subscribers. So, as I write this in mid-April, the editors of those journals are pulling together their July 2013 issues.

For them to include the announcement of a show that will open that month, they need to have the press release in hand today. For them to have it now, someone had to write it and get it approved through channels awhile back, so that the release and its accompanying materials (images for illustration, artist’s CV, etc.) could wend its way through the mails or over the internet to that destination ― Artforum, let’s say. Periodicals that appear on a more frequent schedule (bi-weekly, weekly, daily) get press releases closer to their deadlines. But these will be the same releases drafted months earlier.

However, unless it’s a show drawn from an in-house collection, the works included almost certainly won’t have reached the venue three months ahead of opening day. Given that many institutions now sponsor the premieres of works made to order for them, and that many artists work right up to deadline when producing such commissions, or even generate them from scratch on-site, it’s often the case that no one, including the curators and the artist(s) involved, will have seen the work actualized in its final form until shortly before the opening. And if it’s a new work, and/or a site-specific one, and/or one that involves some ongoing aleatory or performance-based or audience-participation aspects, its idiosyncratic qualities and effects remain indeterminate until completed or concluded.

Imagine yourself, then, an intern at Alternative Space X or Museum Y or Biennial Z, charged with writing a press release today for a solo or group show scheduled three months hence, on whose content you’ve never laid eyes. You can perhaps find images of the work online, but, like the projected transparencies of the art-history courses of yesteryear, digital representations emulsify distinctions between visual works of art, deleting most of the relevant information about a work’s physicality or object nature, overemphasizing its iconography. Hardly enough to allow even a pretense of informed description. What to do?

Robert Atkins, “Artspeak” (1997), cover.

You turn, for expediency’s sake, to what others have said about the work, cobbling together a collage of extracts from artist’s statements and interviews, published reviews, and previous press releases from prior exhibitions by the artist(s), possibly augmented by the notes for or early draft of the curator’s wall label for the upcoming show. You put this into the blender, perhaps adding a few choice items from a glossary such as ArtSpeak : A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present, slyly dropping in a dollop from the Postmodernism Generator, hit the purée button, and serve.

If you’ve done your job right, the result will sound just like the e-flux releases to which all involved in this semantic daisychain have become accustomed. Your supervisor in the institution’s publicity department will review and tweak it, as will the curator(s) of the show and, perhaps, even the artist him- or herself. Then out it will go, another dribble into the stream feeding into the river of e-flux PR that empties into the sea of International Art English, where it will mingle with the outflow of that seas’s other tributaries, evaporate, and return as fog, as dew, as rain, in an endless cycle.

Rule and Levine conducted their scholarly study under the sponsorship of Triple Canopy. I think we owe all involved a debt of gratitude for verifying what many of us have long suspected and some (myself included) have openly averred: That a preponderance of contemporary artspeak comes from people talking through their hats, or more crudely put, bullshitting, and doing so by dipping from a small repertoire of stock phrases and ideas, most of them long since emptied of any meaning they might once have had.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

In passing, I made mention of Alan Sokal’s classic, still-controversial piss-take on postmodern jargon and the pomo pretense of “doing science.” This merits some elaboration, especially because, despite the international furore that erupted in the wake of Sokal’s intervention, you’re unlikely to meet anyone “doing theory” or teaching it who includes the Sokal hoax in the syllabus.

In brief, back in the ’90s Sokal, a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University, became acquainted with an assortment of purportedly classic postmodern texts in the area commonly referred to as “cultural studies” ― works by such figures as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan. Noting therein a plethora of uninformed and erroneous references to scientific concepts, Sokal conceived of an experiment. Could he write a pseudo-scientific article filled with scientistic gibberish masked by postmodern buzzwords and tropes, ostensibly buttressed by endnotes referencing the usual postmodern authorities, and get it published in a prominent journal of postmodern “thought”?

The result, which he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was submitted to and indeed published in just such a forum, the highly reputed Social Text. It appeared in issue #46/47, pp. 217-252, spring/summer 1996, an issue devoted to what the editors described as the ”Science Wars.” Spoiler alert: standing atop a veritable mountain of postmodernist clichés, Sokal proposes therein that the force we call gravity is merely a social consensus, among other ridiculous notions.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, “Fashionable Nonsense” (1998), cover.

Once the article appeared in print, Sokal blew the whistle on himself and the editorial crew at Social Text, revealing the parodic nature of his hodgepodge in a subsequent essay, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” published in the journal Lingua Franca. This generated an uproar that ― fed by subsequent publications by Sokal, often in collaboration with Jean Bricmont, a Belgian theoretical physicist, philosopher of science and professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium ― continues to this day. (The academic left does not take kindly to its debunking, to put it mildly.)

You’ll find many of the relevant texts, including Sokal’s germinal hoax in its entirety as well as his disclosure thereof, at his New York University website. I commend them to you, as I do the first Sokal-Bricmont book, Fashionable Nonsense (1998) and its successors. No specialized knowledge of science required, and extremely readable to boot. Fun, in fact.

I bring up the Sokal affair, as it’s often called, to point out the longevity and pervasiveness of the insidious idea promulgated by Bayard, his confrères in the academic world, and their fellow travelers inside and outside the ivory tower ― all those who take pride in and celebrate their status as know-nothings, and advocate that position to others. Their posturing boils down to just another version of the pervasive anti-intellectualism of our time, different from the blatherings of a Rush Limbaugh or a Sarah Palin only in that they’ve managed to smear some faux-scholarly lip gloss on their oinker du jour.

DIY . . .

Just aborning as Sokal devised his hoax, the World Wide Web has enabled the production of an unprecedented volume of “fashionable nonsense.” By this I don’t just mean providing endless free space for the mostly mindless babble that swamps forums and the comment threads at periodicals, blogs, and other web publications. I’m referring specifically to online applications that purposefully use algorithms to generate meaningless prose which, randomly constructed from recognizable buzzwords and phrases organized into syntactically correct sentences, conforms to the style of a particular universe of discourse.

In my previous column I pointed out one such online system, The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator. Type any five-digit number into a field there, click a button, and you get a result like this: “I agree with some of the things that have just been said, but the sublime beauty of the purity of line seems very disturbing in light of the remarkable handling of light.” Or this: “With regard to the issue of content, the disjunctive perturbation of the sexual signifier threatens to penetrate the inherent overspecificity.”

Certainly sufficient to get you through a tight spot in a studio critique if called up surreptitiously on your smartphone. Lard enough of these gems of obfuscation judiciously into some prose that contains names, titles of works, etc., and you’ll have an essay likely to confound and impress the grad students who read and grade most college papers nowadays. You might even slip one past an editor at an art website.

The publishers boast, “We here at Pixmaven have developed The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator so you need never again feel at a loss for pithy commentary or savvy ‘insights.’ With this device you can speak about Art with both authority and confidence.” (Separated at birth from M. Bayard, were they?) But they’re stingy, doling out the gobbledygook one sentence at a time ― all of them quite generic, and none of them including the oh-so-necessary references, citations, and other scholarly apparatus.

For that you’ll have to turn to the Postmodernism Generator, every visit to which yields a brand-new, lengthy essay in classic pomo style, complete with title, fictitious author with fictitious academic affiliation, and endnotes. A sample extract:

“The Defining Characteristic of Expression: The cultural paradigm of reality in the works of Stone”

John E. Werther, Department of Politics, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Mass.

1. Stone and the cultural paradigm of reality

“Reality is unattainable,” says Foucault. Marx uses the term “the textual paradigm of consensus” to denote not, in fact, theory, but subtheory.

The characteristic theme of Drucker’s[1] model of Sontagist camp is a self-supporting paradox. But the premise of the postdialectic paradigm of context implies that the goal of the participant is deconstruction. An abundance of discourses concerning patriarchialist modernism exist.

However, in The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, Burroughs analyses the cultural paradigm of reality; in Queer, although, he examines the postdialectic paradigm of context. The subject is contextualised into a Debordist image that includes sexuality as a reality.

Therefore, Sontag uses the term “the postdialectic paradigm of context” to denote the bridge between sexual identity and class. D’Erlette[2] suggests that we have to choose between the textual paradigm of consensus and structural Marxism.

In a sense, Marx uses the term “the cultural paradigm of reality” to denote a mythopoetical whole. The neodialectic paradigm of context implies that truth is part of the economy of consciousness, given that reality is interchangeable with art.

But if the textual paradigm of consensus holds, we have to choose between the postdialectic paradigm of context and textual desublimation. A number of narratives concerning the common ground between sexual identity and class may be discovered. . . .

1. Drucker, M. ed. (1999) The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Burroughs. University of Illinois Press.]

2. d’Erlette, E. C. (1983) Neocultural Narratives: The cultural paradigm of reality and the textual paradigm of consensus. Loompanics.

(I’m particularly taken with this author’s affiliation with Miskatonic University, as I’d expect no less from anyone associated with H. P. Lovecraft’s alma mater.)

. . . with a Little Help from Your Friends

Based on an algorithmic structure called the Dada Engine, “a system for generating random text from recursive grammars,” the Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak of the Dept. of Computer Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, in 1996 ― the same year in which Sokal perpetrated his seditious deconstruction of the pomo façade. (Coincidence? You decide!)

“Chimpanzee Typing,” 1907. Courtesy New York Zoological Society.

You’ll find a paper by Bulhak explicating this program, “On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks,” here. Like Sokal’s work, it’s reasonably comprehensible to the lay reader, and enjoyable too. (Perhaps facetiously, Bulhak dated it April 1, 1996.) Meanwhile, like pomo monkeys with wordprocessors, macros, and ample time, Bulhak’s “Pomo Machine” produces endless pastiches not notably different from Sokal’s (except for the scientific terminology) and resembling very much the sort of stuff you find gracing the pages of Social Text and similar publications.

The Postmodernism Generator offers its output under a Creative Commons license, which includes remix permissions. So you can substitute your own name for those of the invented authors of these papers. Likely, therefore, that at least two generations of students have availed themselves of it for the creation of papers submitted in classes where they’re obliged to “do theory.” And conceivable that any given postmodernist text you happen upon in print came from this source. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, since postmodern theory hypothesizes that no original ideas exist, only regurgitated ones. A recycling machine for the standardized, predictable locutions of postmodernist theory comes as a logical extension of that philosophical position.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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This post supported in part by a donation from Michael Zastre.

Among other dangers, such a proposition, especially when it comes from an authority figure such as a French professor of literature, risks getting taken as permission to skip active, direct engagement with the works that constitute the primary source materials of any medium or discipline, directing attention instead to what are called secondary sources ― in other words, emphasizing what people say about those works over what the works say for themselves. Were this a legal context, this would represent prioritizing hearsay over hard evidence.

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007), cover.

If you’ve followed me this far, however reservedly, you’ve perhaps come to share with me the realization that Bayard’s formulation, though restricted by him to literature, applies no less to material in other media ― film, dance, music, art, and yes, even photography ― than it does to books. Taking Bayard’s treatise as a model, we could easily craft a counterpart ― “How to Talk about Photographs You Haven’t Seen” ― for our own field. Since that’s my bailiwick here, to what extent do we (and, if we teach, do our students) talk about photographs we don’t know at all, or have looked at carefully sometime in the past but since forgotten, or have only glanced at, or have merely heard of?

I’ll go first. Let me admit that in my schoolboy period, from pre-adolescence through early adulthood, I did in fact and not infrequently talk about books I hadn’t read. This seemed inevitable, given the archaic texts (Hiawatha, anyone?) and workload teachers imposed on me and my fellow students from junior high school onward, combined with the emphasis those various faculties placed on what constituted the necessary and expected thoroughness of a responsible scholar’s reading of any text.

H. W. Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha,” cover.

Once I left the hallowed halls, circa 1967, I vowed never again to talk about books I hadn’t read, because I found it more embarrassing to bullshit my way through such a discussion than to admit frankly my unfamiliarity with the work. In fact, I went further, deciding not to venture opinions on anything with which I hadn’t engaged (literature, music, art) or to which I hadn’t given sufficient attention and thought to qualify my opinion as considered.

As Bayard notes repeatedly (indeed, he presents it as the motive for his project), shame attaches itself unreasonably to an admission of ignorance of any individual work within the “collective library” of a given cohort. As a result, the habit of lying to disguise unfamiliarity with this or that book (or film, or song, or painting, etc.) becomes ingrained in most people, socially taken for granted to such an extent that truthfulness in this regard comes as a shock. Over the years a number of people have found this contrariness of mine disconcerting, not least my son Edward in his pre-teen years, when for some reason he expected me to have an informed position on everything and seemed crushed, even offended, whenever I proved that assumption wrong.

I made that same commitment as I moved into my professional role as a critic. In fact, careful description and formal analysis became central to my critical practice over time. Reflection led me to perceive in my own early work an emphasis on the imagery I encountered and the content I extracted therefrom, with a not necessarily consequent lack of close attention to the form of the work ― the particulars of the physical objects and spaces (books, prints, exhibitions) about which I wrote.

Presently, for example, I’m collating a volume of all my columns for the New York Times, 1970-74. Re-reading them, I’m hard-pressed to glean from them even the sizes of prints on display in a show or the number of works that constituted a given exhibition, much less the type of print and the printing strategies involved. As I came to understand the signification of the ways in which form and content mesh (or fail to do so) in photography, those issues came to the foreground in my consideration.

A. D. Coleman, Critical Focus, 1995

And though it’s hard to make description and formal analysis interesting to read, more so certainly than interpretation and evaluation, I began to build those into my writing. You’ll see the difference, I think, if you contrast the essays collected in my book Light Readings (1979), which includes much of the cream of my work for the Village Voice and the New York Times, with those in a subsequent collection, Critical Focus (1995), written from 1988 on, mostly for the New York Observer.

Description and formal analysis also became central to my concurrent practice as a teacher of history, theory, and criticism of photography, at New York University most extensively but also at other schools and venues for workshops and seminars. Whether done on paper, for readers, or in a Socratic dialogue with students, grounding a discussion in the blunt, ineluctable facts of what someone actually made has a salutory effect on the quality of the discourse. Conversely, wandering far afield from what you can point to and verify within the work leads (at least in my view) down the path to airy blather.

Aside from my own decision to anchor my commentaries in the concrete details of the works I chose to weigh, I pursued this approach in good part to counterbalance a disturbing tendency to avoid even mentioning the specific characteristics of photographic works that I saw in the writing of most of my colleagues in the 1970s, and still see today. The decreasing editorial space devoted to photography in most mainstream publications exacerbates that tendency by excusing it; how do you fit any telling amount of detailed description and formal analysis into a two-paragraph “review”?

Speedwriting ad, 1950s.

To my dismay, we’re heading rapidly toward critique by tweet ― or, now, the more expansive Summly review ― in whose compaction the Speedwriting advertised widely in the 1950s (“f u cn rd ths, u cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb w hi pa”) will find its apotheosis. But few of my colleagues chafe at such strictures; for most, I dare say, it comes as a relief.

I gave up reviewing books and exhibitions a long time ago, with occasional exceptions, so the shrinkage of available editorial space for such expository prose doesn’t affect me directly as a writer. The essays I work on and publish nowadays allow me sufficient room for the exploration of a work’s facture, its physicality, and its formal structure. Among other effects, I think this helps convince my readers that I have actually spent time focusing closely on the work under scrutiny. I also believe that my own example of careful attention to such specifics helps persuade readers that they too might profitably devote some time to a hands-on, eyes-on engagement with said works, rather than relying on reports about them.

Bayard’s position does put me in mind of much of the writing about photography of the past four decades ― by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and sundry others, many of them (perhaps significantly) French, like Bayard himself, or else intellectually francophile by inclination. Their commentaries concern themselves almost exclusively with what Bayard terms the “locations” of given photographs or bodies of work within what he calls the “collective library” of photographs about which the chattering classes natter. To put it another way, they eschew the act of attending closely to the specifics of said photographs or bodies of work, preferring instead to divagate on the presumed skein of relationships among them.

This isn’t a tendency of the French alone. As I pointed out back in 1997, you can peruse the entire English-language “discourse” around Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” without encountering any substantive engagement with the particulars of any one image of hers. Most people “doing theory” vis-a-vis photography exemplify this attitude. When they do talk about an image, they tend to discuss not its content but rather its contents, the literal subject matter, and their personal response thereto ― equivalent to assessing a Cézanne still life according to your preferences in fruit. And I can’t manifest much interest in reading essays by, or talking about photography with, anyone who finds concentrating on the actual work itself bothersome and tedious and fundamentally beside the point.

Roland Barthes, “Camera Lucida” (1981), cover.

I realize that this attention to the work, the specific artifact created by the artist, will sound laughably antiquated to many. But I view it as a technique for restraining oneself from the tendency to talk through one’s hat, and also as a way of detecting in others an inclination toward uttering what Alan Sokal has so pithily described as “fashionable nonsense.” Unmoored from the precise and verifiable, floating free of all accountability to a referent that can be checked for accuracy, the result invariably sounds like something out of The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator.

With that said, while I’ve never reviewed or otherwise discussed an exhibition or book or photo-related event that I didn’t actually visit or peruse or attend, I’d have to admit that some of them I merely skimmed in comparison to the attention I paid to others. Undoubtedly I got distracted from time to time during my involvement with them, even the most engrossing. And, by now, I’ve surely forgotten much about most of them, even those to which I attended closely at the time I encountered them.

Speedwriting subway ad, 1950s

Bayard’s not entirely wrong; no book’s reader, no picture’s viewer, achieves perfect stillness and full absorption of any work. I don’t consider that a justification for abandoning the effort; I’d rather live with my failures, striving for improvement, than convert them into a methodology and celebrate it.

Your turn.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

I’ve made the terrible mistake of reading and re-reading an extremely unsettling book, and want to warn you against engaging with it.

The volume in question is How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007). The copy I have is a paperbound “uncorrected bound manuscript” purchased for $1 at Strand Books in Manhattan ― that is, a review copy sent out in advance of the official publication date. The significance of this fact will become clear shortly.

Hippolyte Bayard, “Le Noyé (Self-portrait as a drowned man),” October 18, 1840.

Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII, also a psychoanalyst, and what we sometimes call a public intellectual. I’ve yet to determine whether he’s related to Hippolyte Bayard, the French inventor of photography who faked his own suicide in a photograph. Be that as it may, the book under consideration, though directed toward our relation to works of literature, pertains no less to our relation to photographs, as I’ll explain.

In this slender, elegantly reasoned, and eminently readable book, Bayard makes a complex but persuasive argument with several layers: (a) that those of us who talk (and write) about books must perforce often discuss works we haven’t read ― if only because the canon to which anyone cultivated pays respect has become so vast; (b) that this fact, commonly treated as a shameful secret and thus rarely stated, should be acknowledged, openly discussed, and embraced as truth, because (c) only then can we explore the reality of a discourse based on such fragmentary knowledge of the works in question and enjoy the benefits thereof.

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007), cover.

Bayard’s forthright owning up to this condition in his own case ― especially given his role as a professor of literature — thus constitutes both an act of courage and a breakthrough. As he announces early on, “Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the counter-gesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.” (For the audio of a National Public Radio interview with Bayard, and a transcript thereof, click here.)

Not content with those radical proposals, Bayard goes further. All reading, he asserts, is necessarily incomplete and otherwise flawed ― we make accidental word substitutions and otherwise misread, our attention lapses, we skip a passage. Having once read something, our memory of what we’ve read dependably elides most of what passed before us on the page, save perhaps for those rare eidetikers among us with photographic memories. (Recent fictional examples include Thomas Harris’s FBI consultant Will Graham and Stig Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, the ”girl with the dragon tattoo.”) Indeed, even if we could recall it verbatim we won’t have read the book accurately once, since, as information theory teaches us, the message sent (by the author) is never exactly the message received (by the reader).

Pierre Bayard, Vimeo, screenshot, 2013-03-25.

Re-reading doesn’t provide a solution, for, just as, per Heraclitus, we can’t step in the same river twice, we can’t read the same book twice, since both we and the book will have changed during the interval. (The second time you read any book, you know how it concludes; thus the outcome is no longer in doubt.) It follows, then, that no two people can conceivably claim to have read the same book, which would obviate any sane discussion of any book save for conventions that permit us to ignore these truths ― or, as Bayard recommends, to establish new protocols that build on them.

Perhaps mercifully, Bayard doesn’t address at all the fact that books also change in more literal ways. Not only are different editions differently laid out and designed, which affects their reception, but they come to us in different media ― on paper, as audiobooks, on the screen of a digital device ― which also affects our engagement with their content. Not to mention the process of translation, which de facto alters the original. And that content itself is mutable: variant editions add to, delete from, or otherwise revise the text, sometimes significantly.

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007),cover, detail.

Take the case in point, my copy of Bayard’s treatise. As I noted earlier, it’s an “uncorrected bound manuscript,” laid out and typeset but not yet subjected to its final proofreading by its author, the translator, and the publisher’s line editor. As a result, it contains several typographic errors that I spotted which may (but may not) get fixed in the published edition. It’s also possible that the author or his translator will revise some passages during that process, conceivably changing at least the nuances of his argument.

This book, then, exposes the dirty little secret of the literati: None of us have read all the books to which we refer knowingly. By the time you finish “reading” (I use the word advisedly now) Bayard’s wry, sly text, you may find his airing of that secret liberating. Yet it has the insidious effect of luring you down a Borgesian rabbit hole, traversing which you begin to doubt whether, in fact, you have ever truly read any book once in your entire life. Unless you’re prepared to confront that possibility, beware.

The consolation Bayard offers goes beyond the cleansing power of such confession. In addition to enumerating four classes of books ― those we don’t know at all, those we’ve read but forgotten, those we’ve skimmed, those we’ve merely heard of ― he suggests that, in our discursions about books, we access several “libraries.” The first of these he calls the “collective library,” by which he means the particular subset of books with which any of our particular cohorts (say, our fellow faculty members in a department devoted to a specific discipline) expects its members to have at least a passing familiarity.

“Moby Dick” (1956), movie poster.

The second mental bibliothèque Bayard labels the “inner library,” defined as “that set of books ― a subset of the collective library ― around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person’s individual relationship to books and to other people. . . . [T]hese private libraries . . . are primarily composed of fragments of forgotten and imaginary books through which we apprehend the world.” However partial and inaccurate our personal “inner libraries” may be vis-a-vis the texts from which they derive, they provide the reference points with which we navigate the social environment(s) in which we share one or more “collective libraries” with our contemporaries.

In those contexts, Bayard contends, “Being cultivated is a matter . . . of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system . . . .  It is, then, hardly important if a cultivated person hasn’t read a given book, for though he has no exact knowledge of its content, he may still know its location, or in other words how it is situated in relation to other books.”

So, to use an example Bayard gives in relation to James Joyce’s Ulysses (a book he says he’s never “read” and perhaps never will), it suffices for him to know “that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin in the course of a single day, etc.” If this resembles a relationship to a literary work akin to having seen the movie thereof, or perused the CliffsNotes synopsis, or the Classics Illustrated comic-book versions of my childhood, or some equivalent of Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, I don’t think Bayard would disagree. Au contraire, pal; Bayard holds that such substitutes not only prove socially expedient, but can profitably serve as a basis for serious discussion of any piece of writing.

Thomas, Hardy, “Jude the Obscure,” CliffsNotes, cover.

I wouldn’t recommend this for all books. Nor does Bayard ― though, perversely, he does suggest several times that engaging in depth with any given book can disrupt, even destroy, one’s overview of the field of ideas. Clearly he’s not an advocate of what Roland Barthes called “the pleasures of the text,” in which I’m apparently more wont to indulge that he. All the same, based on my own experience, I learned a lot more about writing from Walt Kelly than I did from Thomas Hardy, and would have profited more as a writer from reading Pogo than I did from ploughing through Jude the Obscure, had I worked up the chutzpah shown by some of my classmates and used the CliffsNotes rendering of the latter to free up time for the former.

Had I done so, however, that choice ― no matter how I rationalized it at the time, and no matter how reasonable it seems to me (and perhaps you) today ― would have resulted in my performing an act once quaintly known as “talking through my hat” as soon as I opened my mouth in class about Hardy’s tome, or wrote about it on an exam or in a term paper. Bayard’s book, then, represents a spirited defense of ― nay, an energetic advocacy of ― talking through one’s hat. Nowadays we use a more blunt locution as the name of that act: Bullshitting.

[Postscript, May 6, 2013: After wrapping up this series of posts, I remembered Thomas Wolfe's thinly disguised self-portrait as Eugene Gant in Harvard University's Widemer Library, in Of Time and the River (1935): "Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he  read, the less he seemed to know the greater the number of the books  he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be. . . . Yet this terrific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, his fury and despair increased from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with the food it ate. . . . This fury which drove him on to read so many books had nothing to do with scholarship, nothing to do with academic honors, nothing to do with formal learning. He was not in any way a scholar and did not want to be one. He simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this."]

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

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This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

A gradual, month-long computer meltdown that began in mid-January forced me to put this blog on hold in order to concentrate on matters technological and close to home. Making a very long story short, I ended up buying a low-end desktop Mac Mini to serve as my main computer, relegating my beloved MacBook Pro to the role of backup computer and road companion on my increasingly infrequent travels.

Because I back up my hard drive regularly, and have also cloned my hard drive, I lost no data. But it seemed advisable to do clean installs of my applications, while also transferring my data carefully and reviewing it to salvage anything damaged during the month of crashes. A tedious process, though it has resulted in a stripped-down instrument free of bloat.

Mac Mini

Just shy of of 8 inches square and slightly over an inch high, the Mini sits unobtrusively on my desk, its exterior giving no hint of its power. (My wife Anna says it looks more like a purse than a computer.) I’ve added two external monitors ― one 22″ and the other 19″ — to the Mini. This has transformed my visual environment; after 13 years of squinting at a laptop screen, it feels like moving from a studio apartment into a loft. All this space!

Augmenting the novelty, the Mac Mini came loaded with Apple’s current OS, Mountain Lion. I hadn’t upgraded the MacBook Pro from Snow Leopard, leaving me two iterations behind. Hence I’m accommodating to a number of revisions, some of them drastic, to the location and operation of assorted features and components.

In short, I’ve found myself rudely and unwillingly thrust into a radically revamped workspace, and forced to use a considerably revised toolkit to boot. Periodically, as readers of this blog will recall, I grouse about the computer industry’s relentless reconfiguration of hardware and software, with the consequent imposition of top-down changes, often substantial and not infrequently unwelcome.

ADC with ViewSonic Monitor. Photo © copyright 2013 by Anna Lung.

I think of myself as a creature of habit, from time to time muttering grumpily what my late colleague Richard Kirstel used to announce: “All change is for the worse.” Yet, in grappling with this situation, I’ve watched myself adapt with relative ease to these new ways of thinking and acting. (Certain physiological habits, such as keystroke combinations for shortcuts, took a month to fade away as their replacements became customary.) Fortunately, Mountain Lion deletes no features on which I relied heavily or found essential to my workflow. And it certainly adds some intriguing possibilities, among them Dictation, a built-in system-wide speech-to-text function that looks extremely promising.

This leads me to consider the possibility that, pace Kirstel, my brain does manage to wrap itself around these evolutionary shifts in digital technology without extreme difficulty. Which in turn suggests that perhaps this recurrent process helps to keep my brain active and young (or, more precisely, youth-like) by pushing me to learn new skills, to replace old habits with new or revised ones, and in one way or another to get some exercise for the mind. In short, I’ve begun to weigh the mental-health benefits of living la vida digital, with its steady reconfiguring of my neural pathways.

Meanwhile, I’m in the saddle once again, ready now to ride this blog through 2013 and beyond.

Liu Xia in Richmond, VA

Guy Sorman, Liu Xia opening, Richmond, VA, 2-28-13. Photo © copyright 2013 by A. D. Coleman.

This computer crisis came (don’t they always?) at an extremely inconvenient time ― in the midst of preparing a lecture and Keynote presentation for the opening of the exhibition “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia” at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia on February 28. I bought the Mac Mini primarily because I couldn’t wait 3-5 days for repair of my MacBook Pro, with that deadline breathing down my neck. It all worked out, though I left for Richmond on February 27 with nothing more than a thumb drive in my pocket on which I’d saved the text of my lecture and the Keynote slideshow ― first time I’ve traveled to a professional event without my laptop in well over a decade. (I put off repair of the MacBook Pro until after I returned.) Felt naked.

The director of the University of Richmond Museums, Richard Waller, did a fine installation of the images in the Lora Robins Gallery, using new digital prints made there especially for the occasion. They also published a small, handsome catalogue to go with it. The lecture and a subsequent panel drew an overflow crowd, and went well. (Click here for a PDF of my lecture.) The museum recorded these events, and they’ve posted at YouTube the video of my lecture, “Freedom Reflex: The Photographs of Liu Xia,” plus the panel discussion that followed with myself, political economist Guy Sorman, retired U.S. Ambassador Randolph Marshall Bell (president of the First Freedom Center), and Prof. Vincent Wang, Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond. (If the video doesn’t show below, refresh this page in your browser or click here.)

With these public presentations I concluded my year-long involvement with the international tour of this show, which I served primarily as tour manager and trouble-shooter, while also adding a curatorial essay to the accompanying writings by various authors. Liu Xia has been much in the news these past months; given the recent regime change in Beijing, the controversy surrounding her situation, and the uncertainty of her fate at the hands of China’s new rulers, it’s unclear whether the tour will continue. In any event, that’s out of my hands. It’s been an honor to work on her behalf; I hope that she and her husband, the imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize awardee Liu Xiaobo, are freed and reunited soon.

I will continue to maintain, enhance, and update the website devoted to Liu Xia’s work that I designed and published a year ago. It’s become the most substantial online English-language source of information about her art and her situation, so it will remain available until further notice. If the exhibition’s tour does extend past Richmond, you’ll find news about it there.

Liu Xia opening, Richmond, VA, 2-28-13. L-R: Vincent Wang, A. D. Coleman, Guy Sorman, Richard Waller, Randolph Marshall Bell. Photo © copyright 2013 by Taylor Dabney.

A Tale of Two Scrolls

Jack Kerouac, scroll of On the Road. Photo used courtesy of a Creative Commons license from Thomas Hawk.

I didn’t know it when I posted my meditation on Jack Kerouac’s typewritten 120-foot “scroll” of his 1957 novel On the Road, but the Dharma Bum had a literary precursor in employing that physical format for a novel ― none other than the Marquis De Sade. Sade wrote his infamous 120 Days of Sodom over a 37-day stretch in 1785, inscribing it in minute characters on both sides of a 39-foot-long roll of paper while imprisoned in the Bastille during the French Revolution. (According to one person who viewed it, it was ”impossible to read without a magnifying glass as the writing was so tiny.”)

Marquis de Sade, “The 120 Days of Sodom” (1785), scroll. Courtesy Fondation Martin Bodmer.

Sade, transferred to an insane asylum just days before the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, feared it had been lost or destroyed during. But, hidden in a crack in his cell, it survived and was eventually retrieved in 1832, though not published (in German) until 1904.

For someone writing by hand, starting a new page doesn’t constitute the same interruption of flow as inserting a new sheet into a typewriter. Sade’s use of a roll of paper wasn’t technologically innovative, as I argued Kerouac’s was in 1951. Still, both authors created their scrolls by pasting together loose sheets of paper. And both produced these particular works in short, concentrated periods of time, working at white heat. Something about that continuous unreeling of prose seems consonant with the urgency of their separate narratives.

Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press in Paris published the first English translation of 120 Days of Sodom in 1957, translated by Austryn Wainhouse (under the pseudonym Pieralessandro Casavini), with an introduction by Georges Bataille. It seems improbable that Kerouac would have had access to that edition in time for it to influence him, more likely that he could have read a French edition. (Kerouac, of French-Canadian descent, spoke and read that language.)

But it’s not Sade’s narrative or literary style that connects the two works; it’s the idea of the scroll as a workspace. Sade’s notoriety certainly preceded the Olympia Press publication of 120 Days of Sodom; he had already become legendary in European and American avant-garde literary circles. The story of this book’s creation on a scroll had circulated widely enough that Kerouac had almost certainly encountered it.

Olympia Press, Marquis de Sade, “120 Days of Sodom” (1957).

In any case, cross-pollination or not, there’s a definite resonance to the fact that, in 1957, two revolutionary books drafted on scrolls 166 years apart achieved their first publication in English.

Sade’s scroll has made headlines lately, due to a bid by La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, that country’s national library, to repatriate the work, smuggled by a thief into Switzerland in 1982 and sold there to a private collector. Currently it’s in the holdings of the Fondation Martin Bodmer, a Swiss cultural foundation. The French consider it a ”national treasure” and “part of our cultural heritage,” according to Bruno Racine, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale; the library wants to acquire it in time for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Sade’s death next year.

In this book, as in his other works, Sade wrote scathingly about debauchery within the Catholic Church. The bicentennial festivities planned in France will coincide with mounting global scandals over widespread sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. On that subject, it would appear, Sade was right on the money.

(I had planned to publish this post and its predecessor in January 2012. For reasons that will become clear as you read on, it took over a year to complete the process I began in December 2011. — A. D. C.)

A Go Daddy-Free Zone

Though, as I indicated in an earlier post, we opposed the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill before Congress in late 2011, and its Senate counterpart, the equally dangerous Protect-IP Act (PIPA), webmaster John Alley and I didn’t participate in the one-day January 18th, 2012 protest blackout spearheaded by Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing. Instead, we busied ourselves with the activities described below.

We also didn’t join the official Go Daddy boycott that ran from December 22-29, 2011 — not because we didn’t support it (we did) but because we couldn’t manage it logistically. Moving a single domain name to a new registrar isn’t that hard; here’s a step-by-step how-to, specific to Go Daddy but applicable to any registrar. (And here’s a more detailed, explanatory one from Glenn Fleishman at Macworld.) But our situation has complications, so we had to assess the available alternative hosts and registrars.

Wikipedia goes dark, January 18, 2012.

The process gets considerably more involved when you’ve registered, as we have, close to 300 names. It’s more intricate still if, like us, you have an account that covers the hosting of one or more websites. Leaving Go Daddy behind would require literally weeks of effort by webmaster John Alley and myself, plus an astonishing amount of the pixellated equivalent of paperwork. It also would have incurred the expense of paying all at once for domain hosting and domain-name registration of all our domains and names, which we usually do on a staggered schedule — approximately $3000 per annum.

One advantage of working with Go Daddy is that they offer the economy of scale — cheaper domain-name registration and web hosting than we could find from other vendors. Going elsewhere would raise our running costs by something like 20 per cent. So we needed to review our options and reconfigure our budget.

Having done so, then working in increments over the past 14 months, we’ve now moved our website hosting to HostMonster, and most of our registration of domain names to DomainMonster, with a few of those registered (for technical reasons) at Koofoo Domains. Thus I can declare that, officially, this blog, its parent website (The Nearby Café), the three other websites that form the consortium Photo Education Online, and all our domain names collectively have become a Go Daddy-free zone at last. I’ve sent a letter to Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman detailing the reasons for our actions.

Some argue that, as Go Daddy has reversed its position, withdrawn its support of SOPA, and effectively apologized, they deserve a chance to redeem themselves, and I agree. But the taxpayer monies squandered on SOPA-PIPA, with the encouragement of Go Daddy, remains wasted, and Go Daddy surely has no plans to replace those funds in the government’s coffers. Nor did Go Daddy expend a dime, or actively lend its name, to the fight against SOPA-PIPA.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT)

Even PIPA’s main sponsor, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT.), has basically shelved that misguided bipartisan bill, acknowledging on January 12, 2012 in an official press release that “this is in fact a highly technical issue, and I am prepared to recommend we give it more study before implementing it.” He goes on, “I will therefore propose that the positive and negative effects of this provision be studied before implemented.. . . However, the bill remains a strong and balanced approach to protecting intellectual property through a no-fault, no-liability system that leverages the most relevant players in the Internet ecosystem.” (I realize that the last sentence appears as grammatically correct English, but I have absolutely no idea what it means.)

Furthermore, Go Daddy has not contributed in any way to the development and furtherance of an alternative bill, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, that takes a much more sane, measured approach to the problem of online piracy and infringement. (Click here for a PDF of a draft, “Fighting the Unauthorized Trade of Digital Goods While Protecting Internet Security, Commerce and Speech,” intended as the basis for public debate of this bill, and click here for keepthewebopen.com, a remarkably savvy site set up as a forum for debate about this bill.) So Go Daddy’s welcome to seek redemption in the eyes of the internet community. Let them do so on someone else’s dime.

Go Daddy’s “Bwana Bob” Parsons

I’d been disturbed by the public actions of ex-CEO Bob Parsons for years: the overweening ego on constant display at his blog, his ongoing effort to get Go Daddy ads featuring big-breasted women into the Superbowl ad lineup. Not incidentally, Go Daddy’s 2005 SuperBowl TV commercial featured the aging, prudish members of a fictitious governmental “Broadcast Censorship Committee,” appalled by the “wardrobe malfunction” of a pulchritudinous young Go Daddy representative appearing as a witness. Yet in flexing his corporate muscle by involving himself in the drafting and marketing of SOPA-PIPA, Parsons opted to hobnob and collude with the very same fossilized Washington types he mocked in that ad. There’s a fine word describing precisely such behavior: hypocrisy.)

Bob Parsons with dead trophy elephant, Zimbabwe, 2011.

Then there are the elephant and leopard killings in Africa. (The elephant killings, by the way, though presented by “Bwana Bob” Parsons as acts of Great White Hunter/White Man’s Burden benevolence, are entirely unnecessary. Here’s a report showing how donation of a small amount of money to set up a simple fence connected to a ring of beehives can effectively keep elephants away. Heedless of that, Parsons conducts his destruction of what he likes to call “problem elephants” annually, in Zimbabwe.)

These self-aggrandizing macho behaviors don’t impinge in any direct way on our sites, but they do suggest a mindset, as does Go Daddy’s work on SOPA. (Go Daddy actually helped craft the bill’s language, under Bob Parsons’s leadership — he turned the reins over to current CEO Warren Adelman only in July 2011 — and, as reward, Go Daddy was made exempt from the bill’s strictures. Ah, the benefits of cronyism. So its complicity runs deep.) More importantly, while I’ll support thoughtful efforts to stop online piracy, SOPA is over the top. (See this assessment of its effects by Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, & David G. Post in the Stanford Law Review.)

The reaction of the internet community was predictable, but Go Daddy clearly didn’t see it coming — which suggests that, even with new CEO Adelman at the wheel, the company is opting to lead (by participating in SOPA) when it should be following. So we thought it time for us to leave, and we did. Go Daddy likely won’t even notice, but we prefer to work with vendors whose policies and practices we can endorse, or that at least don’t offend our sensibilities on so many levels.

Hang ‘Em From the Yardarm

With that said, the cause on behalf of which Go Daddy collaborated in the making of and endorsed SOPA — prevention of internet piracy — is one in which I believe. Misguided though that remedy may be (and Go Daddy’s new opposition thereto hardly killed this bill, nor PIPA, which Go Daddy has yet to oppose), IP theft constitutes a global plague that costs IP makers and rights holders billions each year. I’ve published repeated posts here about my own struggles to prevent web magpies from stealing my own work; my problems in this regard are small-scale compared to what happens to others. Adam C. Engst, editor/publisher of the Mac-specific site Tidbits, speaks eloquently to this issue from the perspective of the small publisher in his January 16, 2012 op-ed, “The Other Side of SOPA and PIPA.”

Captain Kidd hanging in chains, 1701.

Ron Paul, bless his libertarian-geezer soul, came out straightforwardly against SOPA — the only Republican presidential candidate to do so. But he’s presented nothing I’ve heard of to engage actively with online piracy. Fact is, no one on the anti-SOPA side of this brouhaha has offered any proposal of any kind aimed at that problem, save for the Larry Lessig-Electronic Freedom Foundation “information wants to be free” crowd, who recommend termination of copyright law as the simple answer to all this fuss they keep hearing about ineffectual puberty rites, and the faux-Proudhon anarchist “property is theft” fringe to their left.

Until they provide some solution to online piracy, they’re part of the problem, and you can have my DMCA when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I’ll continue to sail the online seas and hang anyone pirating my IP from the virtual yardarm here at Photocritic International. “Arrrrrrr!” yourselves, you swabbies. You’ve been warned.

(Part 1 I 2)

(I had planned to publish this post and its second part in January 2012. For reasons that will become clear in the second part, it took over a year to complete the process I began in December 2011. — A. D. C.)

The Halt Lead the Blind

Things can move quickly in the legal sphere when it involves intellectual property. Not only that, but IP-related legislation, both actual and proposed, all too frequently imitates Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock‘s fictional young nobleman by passionately ”riding madly off in all directions.” This makes it (a) hard to keep up, and (b) difficult to determine and pursue a consistent, principled set of policies in relation to all of this.

As my readers know, I’ve long supported the basic premises of copyright law, having found them essential for my own survival as an independent/freelance writer, subsequently redefined as a “content producer” and a “maker of intellectual property.” As a journalist and scholar, I also recognize the necessity of the “fair use” exception to the copyright law, which enables a reasonable amount of quotation on my part from the work of others (and, even-handedly, a comparable amount of citation of my work by others) for the purposes of analysis, commentary, and parody.

And I have no dispute with the copyright law’s eventually transferring copyrighted IP (including mine) to the public domain, where it becomes available for use by all without restriction, after a period of time during which its maker and his or her heirs and assigns get to enjoy the benefits of its creation. (Indeed, I found the prescribed copyright period sufficient in the period preceding the “Sonny Bono” extension thereof.) However, while I think the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) constitutes overkill in some regards, I’ve found from direct experience that invoking it almost instantly terminates online piracy of my own IP; some such instrument, therefore, seems necessary for the protection of myself and others from the thieving magpies infesting the web.

SOPA/PIPA: Just Say No

Since I find the DMCA entirely adequate for those purposes, I don’t see the need for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which to my way of thinking constitutes not just overkill but the equivalent of turning a blindfolded Dick Cheney loose with a loaded shotgun — a menace to society.

By contrast, an alternative bill, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, takes a much more sane, measured approach to the problem of online piracy andinfringement. Co-sponsored by U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and U.S. Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), this bipartisan House/Senate draft deserves serious consideration. Click here for a PDF of a draft, “Fighting the Unauthorized Trade of Digital Goods While Protecting Internet Security, Commerce and Speech,” intended as the basic for public debate of this bill, and click here for keepthewebopen.com, a remarkably savvy site set up as a forum for debate about this bill, including software that enables proposing revisions to specific clauses, as well as commenting on its components.

The initiation by the bill’s creators and sponsors of such a forum, with its invitation to participate in the bill’s making, shows an understanding of both the unique capacities of the web as a tool for social change and a respect for the populace that uses that tool and helps it evolve. With that act, these legislators demonstrate that they’re ready to earn the trust of the wired world — exactly the opposite attitude from that of the crafters of SOPA and its supporters (including Go Daddy), who take the position that they know what’s good for us.

Lamar Smith, Official Portrait, 112th Congress

Masterminded by Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, SOPA empowers both the U.S. government and copyright holders to seek court orders against any and all websites associated, even if unknowingly, with infringing, pirating, and/or counterfeiting intellectual property — even if they only linked to an infringing site. I’d be disinclined under any circumstances to take seriously any web-governance guidelines devised by a 64-year-old Tea Party and NRA endorsee from cow-country Texas and his DC cronies. Having read the present draft of the act carefully, I can say with confidence that, crafted as it was by Foggy Bottom geezers like the toupee-wearing Smith, clueless (as the hearings revealed) about even the basic workings of the interwebs, SOPA promises to create far more problems than it endeavours to solve. (The fact that Lamar Smith has been outed as a serial copyright violator himself doesn’t exactly engender confidence in his bona fides.)

Understandably, therefore, SOPA has raised a storm of opposition. Indeed, it’s so ineptly devised that the Obama administration has issued an unqualified denunciation of both SOPA and the equally dangerous Senate version of this bill, called the Protect-IP Act or PIPA. (See David Kravets’s January 14, 2012 report in Wired, “White House Blasts Internet Blacklisting Bills.”) The administration’s rejection of both bills severely embarrasses all those involved in their making — which was done, I remind you, at substantial expense to the taxpayers. Here’s a partial list of those websites and organizations that oppose SOPA-PIPA.

So it was with considerable chagrin that webmaster John Alley and I learned that Go Daddy (godaddy.com), the web-hosting service and domain-name registrar we used for this and our other sites, and for all our domain-name registrations as well, had come out in favor of SOPA-PIPA. Here’s the statement Godaddy filed with the House on behalf of SOPA. This resulted in a boycott in which Go Daddy customers transferred over 100,000 domain-name registrations from the company in a matter of days. That mass migration began on December 22, when the U.S. House Judiciary Committee responsible for SOPA (and chaired by Rep. Smith) released a list of companies that have publicly expressed their support for the legislation — almost without exception titans of the media and entertainment industries.

Go Daddy Blinks

While we were giving thought to switching to another hosting service and registrar, this boycott, and the threat of massive further customer migration, led Go Daddy to reverse its stance and officially withdraw its support of SOPA on Dec. 23, effectively apologizing to the internet community for approving it in the first place and promising to endorse revisions of this legislation, or any similar bills, only “when and if the Internet community supports it” — which, knowing the “Internet community” as I do, will happen on the proverbial chilly day in the hot place. A few days later, Go Daddy formally announced its opposition to SOPA, with this short statement in its forum from Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO:

Go Daddy opposes SOPA because the legislation has not fulfilled its basic requirement to build a consensus among stake-holders in the technology and Internet communities. Our company regrets the loss of any of our customers, who remain our highest priority, and we hope to repair those relationships and win back their business over time.

Go Daddy founder and ex-CEO Bob Parsons

This reversal of position and act of contrition would seem to resolve the matter, though some of the departed domain-name owners, including Wikipedia, swear they won’t be back, and others still intend to leave Go Daddy, partly out of understandable distrust in Adelman, and also as a consciously punitive measure. As Jeff Gamet at The Mac Observer put it, “The fact that Go Daddy helped craft the bill’s current wording hasn’t helped the company’s case, either.” A loosely organized boycott took place on December 29, with tens of thousands of transfers out. Given that Go Daddy  is the registrar for over 32 million domain names, the migration — which I’ll estimate at 100,000 — represents a mere drop in the bucket. (In fact, Go Daddy took in more domain-name registrations during those days than it lost, leading John P. Mello, Jr. of PC World to announce on December 30 that “‘Move Your Domain’ Campaign Against GoDaddy Flops,” hardly the case if it forced a mortifying public reversal of corporate policy.)

However, a number of major websites — including Wikipedia, Reddit, and Boing Boing — along with 10,000 others declared a 24-hour blackout on Wednesday, January 18, 2012, and followed through on that symbolic action. As a consequence, U.S. congressional and senatorial supporters of both SOPA and PIPA began to run away from these bills just as fast as their little legs can carry them, starting with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who’s actually disowning a piece of legislation he himself had co-sponsored. Talk about egg on your face; this doesn’t look good for the newbie getting groomed as the Republicans’ poster-boy Hispanic.

SOPA-PIPA protest screenshots, 1/18/2012.

On Jan. 18 the New York Times reported,

With the growing reservations, a bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously and without controversy may be in serious trouble. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader and Democrat of Nevada, has scheduled a procedural vote on the Leahy version for early next week, but unless negotiators can alter it to satisfy the outraged online world, no one expects it to get 60 votes.

“I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor,” Mr. Rubio wrote. “Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.”

Shouldn’t this right-wing Floridian Speedy Gonzales cop to his central role in creating this fatally flawed bill and hustling it through the Senate, instead of pretending that this is all the doing of Harry Reid — not coincidentally, a Democrat? This was a classic case of “We’re from the federal government, and we’re here to help.” and it has Rubio’s name and modus operandi all over it. You can run, little Speedy, but you can’t hide.

And indeed, on January 20, 2012 Harry Reid in the Senate and Lamar Smith in Congress tabled the vote on both bills. In short, it died in committee — with the taxpayers having funded both its production and the days spent touting it by the witless Lamar Smith and his co-sponsors.

(Part 1 I 2.)