William Faulkner and Whitney Houston

A court in Mississippi has ruled that Woody Allen was not committing an act of plagiarism when he interpolated a nine-word quotation by William Faulkner into the script of his 2011 movie Midnight in Paris. It seems like a pretty sensible decision overall; it’s not as if Allen was ripping off a whole book. It was more of an epigram, a verbal sample; and since the phrase was immediately attributed within the script, thus alerting viewers to its provenance, it may well have boosted sales of Faulkner’s books. (Faulkner died in 1962, by the way; is it just me, or does it seem that the estates of dead authors are far more sensitive and litigious in instances such as this than living writers ever are?)

Maybe they were just taking advantage of the fact that it was a direct quotation rather than the appropriation of a plot device or a philosophical idea. I’ve just started reading Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which includes this passage:

The ritual passing of the DBA, Mama’s corkscrew curls, his granddaddy’s lower lip, ah buh-lieve thuh chil’ren ah our future. I’m quoting here from “The Greatest Love of All,” by 1980s pop diva Whitney Houston, track nine of her eponymous first LP.

It contains seven words from the song in question, albeit rendered phonetically for comic effect, but I doubt whether the copyright holders would be considering legal action. If Shteyngart’s really lifted anything from another source, surely it’s from Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, in which Patrick Bateman describes the same song as “...one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity.” It’s a quote about a quote about a quote. And since the target markets for Ellis’s and Shteyngart’s respective products are probably pretty similar (consumers of witty, deadpan, pop-culture-referencing lit fic) I’m pretty certain that plenty of readers of the latter spotted a nod to the former. But if Ellis had taken exception to the apparent borrowing, could he have done anything about it?

Digital technology has made the wholesale purloining of music and movies and other works very easy, but well before that, droll, nose-tapping intertextuality had become an inescapable part of the creative process. The problem now is how to clamp down on the former without squashing the latter. What do you think, Whitney?

Damien Hirst and Olga Dogaru: but is it art?

Damien Hirst is in trouble again, but not for a new piece of art. It’s an old piece of art; although I’m not clear whether the art is the head, or the two heads, or the photo of the two. OK, it’s some permutation of Damien himself with the head of a cadaver from a Leeds mortuary; and according to some concocted code of archaeological ethics, there have been calls for it to be removed from public view. This has led to the critic Jonathan Jones, whose exasperated contempt for Hirst’s recent stuff is well known, to defend the King of the YBAs. So in some shape or form this is art, maybe even good (qualitatively) art; but some people have decided that it’s bad (morally) art, so shouldn’t be seen out in public. OK, glad that one’s sorted.

And then we move on to the story of Olga Dogaru, who claims to have burned seven pictures that had been stolen from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam. Now, these certainly were art, because they were by the likes of Picasso and Monet, and were in the Kunsthal. But what happened to them after they were burned? Are the ashes art, whether because of some sort of aesthetic essence that pervades the charred scraps of painty canvas or because Dogaru’s act of burning itself can be perceived as some sort of Situationist prank, a sort of outsider take on what the Chapman brothers did to poor old Goya? Munch’s The Scream was badly damaged after it was stolen in 2004; how damaged does a work have to get before it ceases to be the work?

Or does their identity as art remain intact even after they’re gone, like the Colossus of Rhodes? Can we retrospectively apply conceptualist credentials to, say, Picasso’s Harlequin Head, because the idea behind it is stronger than the picture itself (the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak)? Or maybe the real art lies in the absence itself; in the gap where the pictures once existed.

PS: More about reflecting absence here.

PPS: And the always interesting Tim Gashead directs me to more bits of dead folk at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

New art from Thailand

Background stories from Coconuts Bangkok here and here.

PS: And more on the Hitler meme here.

Two songs from the late 1970s

All that potentially racist musing about funny foreigners making a desperate stab at authenticity raises all sorts of questions about perspective. Since the Englishness they are aiming for only truly exists in the collective id of a few thousand UKIP members, who’s to say they’re wrong? Maybe an England concocted from repeat viewings of Miss Marple and a frenzied dash round Bicester Village has just as much claim to be real, whatever that means. And the same, of course, goes for Brits who visit China, sample the wonders of the cuisine, but still yearn for the crappy chow mein from their local takeaway.

However wrong it is, that first experience has a hold on the soul that doesn’t let go easily. An example from another medium; the first time I consciously heard the song ‘Money’, it sounded like this:

Of course, subsequently I heard the famous version, by the Beatles; and after that, the original, by co-writer Barrett Strong. I know the history, the official version. But deep down, I’m still 11 years old, watching Top of the Pops, and this may not be *the* original, but it’s *my* original, just as Thames Town is the real deal to the people who want it to be.

And then YouTube has its rhizomatic way with me and I happen across this (probably because the Marshall out of Marshall Hain went on to be a Flying Lizard for a bit):



And I remember what an extraordinarily bleak and depressing record this is, in an entirely good way. Has the phrase “have fun tonight” ever been uttered with such a sense of foreboding? Has a handclap ever been less celebratory? Has a song with the word “dancing” in the title ever made you feel less like dancing?

And I’m not sure whether any of this is relevant to anything, apart from the fact that both songs were released in the late 1970s, just as the great experiment of capitalism with Chinese characteristics was shuddering into shape, a phenomenon that leads us to Thames Town.

Thames Town: Dreaming of Britain

Westerners may mock the Chinese tendency to recreate manifestations of Western culture in their own back yard, but it’s a common trait of burgeoning empires that they need to demonstrate their global reach. Think of 18th-century British architects incorporating pineapples into their designs, to imply that their clients could afford such expensive delicacies; or a pseudo-oriental pastiche such as the Brighton Pavilion. But it’s still tempting to mock the earnest attempts to create a perfect simulacrum of some English utopia that probably never really existed in the first place; even the architect of Thames Town, on the outskirts of Shanghai, feels compelled to voice his misgivings:

It doesn’t look quite right. It looks false. The proportions are wrong. The use of the different stones is all wrong. It would never be used like that in the genuine English church...

But surely it’s that not-quite-rightness, that sense of close-but-no-cigar, that makes things special. A development such as Thames Town should be like an English village where the Doctor alights, takes in the sights, enjoys a nice pint and only then realises that the whole thing’s made of plastic and Sarah Jane’s been replaced by an android. And what is it that tips him off? It’s somebody saying something ever so slightly wrong such as:

I really hope I can visit the real Thames River one day, sit along the banks, drink a cup of coffee and enjoy the British sunshine.

Let’s get serious (or at least pretend to)

According to a recent survey, a fifth of adults admit to pretending to be more cultured than they are, although the ways in which this pretence manifest themselves seem to be a bit of a ragbag. OK, there’s the straightforward fakery of pretending to know about wine, a classic indicator of social one-upmanship. And there’s also the crime of reading an intellectually demanding tome on the beach or on public transport, although I don’t see why wielding a book as an accessory with which to define one’s own projected image is any worse than using a t-shirt or a handbag; and in any case, aren’t Kindles and iPads working towards making such display rituals essentially meaningless?

But then things get really silly. Apparently it’s pretentious to retweet something clever on Twitter. Not to tweet something clever; but to identify something else as clever and recommend it to one’s friends. So intelligence is OK, but a discriminating critical intelligence (coupled with an instinct for digital evangelism) isn’t. And quoting Shakespeare is bad as well, we’re told; although is it acceptable to quote Shakespeare if you don’t know you’re doing it?

In fact, the exceedingly clever people behind this survey (apparently commissioned in the name of a brand that used to be a search engine but gave up trying) seem to believe that we occupy a strictly binary universe composed on the one hand of people pretending to be clever and on the other people who don’t bother to pretend. Regarding the admirable 80% of individuals who claim not to fake their knowledge of wine, nobody has seen fit to ask how many of them don’t fake it for the simple reason that they do actually know quite a bit about wine, thank you, or Shakespeare or jazz or any of the other things that some people supposedly pretend to know about to impress others, and as such have no reason to bluff. Come to think of it, one of the areas of intellectual pretence the survey doesn’t cover is the act of banging out a series of spuriously authoritative opinion poll devoid of scientific or statistical merit, that exists solely to offer cheap filler to impecunious newspapers. Which in my book is almost as bad as the grievous sin of quoting Shakespeare.

PS: Another perspective on the same survey; from someone apparently pretending to be a fictional character, which is a level of bluff that the original article didn’t cover.

PPS: And some more examples of people trying too hard, from Buzzfeed.

Google: don’t be dirty

I’ll admit it; I’m feeling a wee bit left out. A few days ago, Google sent out thousands of letters to bloggers threatening to delete their digital babies as part of a crackdown on pornographic advertising. The recipients include such luminaries as Girl With A One-Track Mind, who you may remember from that weird moment a few years ago when we honestly thought blogging was going to make us all extremely rich. Yeah, that.

Of course, the whole brouhaha is really a symptom of a wider panic about online porn, which has been exacerbated by the woeful ignorance of most politicians about how the internet actually works, not to mention the difficulty in defining pornography in the first place. But still, given my past brazen efforts to increase traffic to this site by posting saucy images of underclad actresses d’un certain age, I would have hoped for at least a gentle warning. Clearly I’m just too nice.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the Two Fat Ladies

(Via Buzzfeed. The Kafka earrings are pretty cool too.)