We dug deep into our readings this week, and inaugurated our expedition into the ideas in Walter Benjamins classic text by watching Keith Sanborn's 1996 The Artwork in its Age of Mechanical Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin as told to Keith Sanborn by Jayne Austen 1936, which he calls "an attempt to problematize ownership and authorship in the age of digital reproduction". Special thanks to Michael for leading us thru some of the many concepts, especially aura.
Authorship of course was taken up by Roland Barthes in his Death of an Author article and though we merely mentioned it in passing, get ready for me to ask you what he means by this on Wednesday! We started thinking about authorship in terms of 'readymade' art objects with Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, R.Mutt 1916 , and with a found object film by artist Hollis Frampton that he called Works and Days (1969) . In his statement on this film he remarks upon his relationship to authorship by citing the precedent of Chinese vermilion seals as marks of the connoisseur , like so:
We ended the evening's explorations by watching B-movie , a short documentary of
the-graffiti- artist -known-as-Banksy. ;)
Nice work on the Lethem responses last week--oh and by the way I meant to bring your attention to one of Jonathan Lethem's projects inspired by his research on open source culture, called The Promiscuous Materials Project, just in case you need a story to adapt into a film or something, check it out.
Our next topic is collage and cut-ups so catch up on all your readings so you can be awesome in the discussions, and please comment below on The Synthetic Century: Collage from Cubism to PostModernism, especially people who haven't tried their hand at QCQ format yet !
(ps. I will be checking them on Tuesday night)
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