"Is there anything worse than being sued? How about being sued and losing. No, even worse than that. What about never having the chance to sue someone? Exactly. Because the way it used to be, the worst that could happen was that someone took your work away from you, and then profited at your expense. Nowadays, if your career could use a real boost, you can't ask for a more golden opportunity than the chance to take someone to court."
Bob Nickas, art critic and curator who visits Monday 3/26, talks on Vice.com about the lawsuit of French photographer Peter Cariou against artist Richard Prince, which the New York Times has called "one of the most closely watched copyright cases ever to rattle the world of fine art."
Nickas writes a regular column for Vice: "KOMP-LAINT DEPT." Read more.
Photo: Prince's collage "Inquisition" which appropriates and alters Cariou's photographs of Rastafarians.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
What is Theft? What is Art? What is Theft of Art?
Monday, March 5, 2012
Margaret Atwood on Science Fiction
Joyce Carol Oates, who appears annually at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, reviews Margaret Atwood's essay collection, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2012) in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.
Atwood spoke to a stand-room-only Page Hall crowd in November 2005.
In her admiring essay on Le Guin—“The Queen of Quinkdom”—Atwood notes that Le Guin speaks of science fiction as a genre that “should not be merely extrapolative” and should not attempt “prophetic truth”: “Science fiction cannot predict, nor can any fiction, the variables being too many.” Atwood concurs with Le Guin that “the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed” in what is called “science fiction.” “Thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.” More.
'Suffering Into Self-Knowledge' at Harvard Law School
"[I]f one has a character flaw, Harvard Law will expose it. The long hours, the quantity and difficulty of the work, and the pressure to excel are a recipe for frayed nerves, shortened tempers and durable frustrations. I maintained very respectable grades for a semester but lagged thereafter. To my considerable pain, my argumentative agility and my competitive fire — qualities I thought I possessed in abundance — were not strong enough to place me at the top."
John Matteson, professor of legal writing at John Jay College and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer talks about "suffering into self-knowledge" at Harvard Law School in the New York Times. Matteson visits Thursday, March 22nd.
Read more.
Jon Stewart with Masha Gessen
Jon Stewart questions Masha Gessen, who visits Thursday, about Vladimir Putin's penchant for not wearing a shirt, among other things.
Gessen will speak in Albany about her new biography, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012).
See the video here. (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart).
Livesey: Music to Read By
Margot Livesey, who visits Thursday, March 20, recommends a playlist of music to accompany her novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, on the blog, Largehearted Boy.
"Gemma's earliest years are spent not in Scotland but Iceland - her father is Icelandic – and in thinking about that lonely, volcanic country I spent a good deal of time listening to the Icelandic band Sigur Ros (Victory Rose). The voice of the lead singer, Jonsi Birgisson, has an almost other worldly quality which seems to fit perfectly with the fact that many Icelanders believe in the existence of elves. And Jonsi himself is obsessed with birds and animals. Two evocative songs stand out for me: 'Go Do' in which Jonsi insists 'You should always know you can do anything,' and 'Saeglopur' which means lost at sea, or shipwrecked." More.
Russia: What Happens Now?
"[T]here is the habit that revolutions have of turning on their own. I have first-hand experience of this. Our revolution has not yet won, and fellow organizers have already on occasion asked me to keep my lesbian, Jewish, and American-passported self off the front pages."
"I realize that in throwing myself headfirst into organizing protests, as I have done in the last couple of months, I have given up the rarefied environment of a certain subset of Moscow intelligentsia, with its cultivated air of tolerance. In the worst-case scenario, the new Russia will be a xenophobic society that will have no place for someone like me. In the best-case scenario, I and others like me will have to come out of our shells and use a newly created public space to educate people about our differences." More.
So writes Masha Gessen today in her blog for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. The Russian journalist visits Albany on Thursday 3/8.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Remembering Marie Colvin, "The Best There Was"
Writing in New York magazine, journalist Eliza Griswold, who visited the Writers Institute in September 2011, joins with journalist Emily Troutman to eulogize journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed recently by rocket fire in the Syrian city of Homs.
"Just to start off with a few words about Marie, who was the best — not one of the best — woman in the field today. I first met her in a minefield in northern Iraq, eye patch and all. Stories about Marie's courage, almost insane courage, precede her. She had her eye shot out when reporting on the Tamil Tigers, she married the same man twice — which is very brave — she wedged herself into Gaza's tunnels."
"But she was in no way a gonzo crazy person — one of those, I hate to say it, mostly American war reporters (not women usually) who is all about themselves. She was about the people living and dying in the field, and it is in no way surprising to me that she died doing what she felt called to do. She was tough as hell, but not the empty bravado, bearing-witness-in-leather-pants type of reporter. For an entire generation of women, she was the best there was, and that there could be." More.
