The world's most famous unknown artist:

YOKO ONO 
"Painting to Hammer a Nail"

The label on the piece:

Painting to Hammer a Nail, 1961/2009

Painted wood panel with 42 -inch chain and container

with 1½- to 2-inch finishing nails

Yoko Ono

American (born in Japan), 1933

Collection of the artist

Museum visitors are invited to pound a nail into this painting. 

While the idea might at first seem a destructive, physically aggressive act against the accepted traditions of painting and museums in general, in the end the concept opens up new potentials for painting, and for bringing others besides the artist into the creative act.

This piece by Yoko Ono is the perfect example of the historical survey of the attacks that painting endured in the years following World War II. 

For artists like Ono, painting had become a trap, and they devised numerous ways to escape the conventions and break the traditions that had been passed down to them over hundreds of years. This phenomenon occurred in all parts of the world, lead by artists that shoot, rip, tear, burn, erase, nail, unzip and deconstruct painting in order to usher in a new way of thinking.

In 1998 Yoko Ono’s “Painting to Hammer a Nail” was on displayed at LA MoCA – with one key difference. There was a small sign next to the piece saying “Please Don’t Touch.” 

Recently Ono's "painting to hammer a nail" was part of the Seattle exhibit  Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78, but now something different happened:

(someone says because people from Seattle didn't follow her instructions)

They started to hammering nails, but then they gave up,

Here's the piece on Friday:

Here it is Tuesday:

Instead of a place for pounding out the artist's message, 

it became a community bulletin board.

Individuals nailed business cards, ticket stubs, 

and other paper items to the wall of the museum. 

But that's not the weirdest thing about the new evolution 

of Ono's piece:

Feeling compelled by the artwork, Amanda Mae 

interacted with Ono (and the community’s) creation 

in her own way: by taking down some of the papers.

This article summarizes Mae’s actions:

“She worked at the museum, so she knew that the protocol was to pick up and save any papers that fell off in the course of new ones being hammered on, so as she removed papers she set them in piles (ticket stubs here, business cards there), intending to leave each pile like a gift at the base of the piece for the guards to carry off and put in the utility closet with all the others. She left the nails in their places. She called her installation Yoko Ono Excavation Survey, or Y.E.S.”

Amanda Mae’s actions were called vandalism and, according to The Stranger’s Online Blog (SLOG), the museum’s spokeswoman, Nicole Griffin, responded, “I can say that this is a work of art that’s hanging on the wall in our museum, and altering a work of art hanging on the wall of a museum is never really an okay thing to do.”

But wait. Wasn’t that the point of the piece: to alter the work of art hanging on the wall?

"CONCETTO SPAZIALE", LUCIO FONTANA

from first 7 pages of google browser (a culture industry effect)

a Scene from Apocalypse Now, F.F. Coppola - 1979:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5JXrP8yv8o

The Hollow Men, T.S. Elliot - (1925)

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy 

I  We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together 

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! 

Our dried voices, when 

We whisper together 

Are quiet and meaningless 

As wind in dry grass 

Or rats’ feet over broken glass 

In our dry cellar  

Shape without form, shade without colour, 

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;  

Those who have crossed 

With direct eyes, to death’s other 

Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost 

Violent souls, but only 

As the hollow men 

The stuffed men.        

II 

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams 

In death’s dream kingdom 

These do not appear: 

There, the eyes are 

Sunlight on a broken column 

There, is a tree swinging 

And voices are 

In the wind’s singing 

More distant and more solemn 

Than a fading star.  

Let me be no nearer 

In death’s dream kingdom 

Let me also wear 

Such deliberate disguises 

Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves 

In a field 

Behaving as the wind behaves 

No nearer—  

Not that final meeting 

In the twilight kingdom        

III  

This is the dead land 

This is cactus land 

Here the stone images 

Are raised, here they receive 

The supplication of a dead man’s hand 

Under the twinkle of a fading star.  

Is it like this 

In death’s other kingdom 

Waking alone 

At the hour when we are 

Trembling with tenderness 

Lips that would kiss 

Form prayers to broken stone.     

IV 

The eyes are not here 

There are no eyes here 

In this valley of dying stars 

In this hollow valley 

This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms  

In this last of meeting places 

We grope together 

And avoid speech 

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river  

Sightless, unless 

The eyes reappear 

As the perpetual star 

Multifoliate rose 

Of death’s twilight kingdom 

The hope only Of empty men.        

V

Here we go round the prickly pear 

Prickly pear prickly pear 

Here we go round the prickly pear 

At five o’clock in the morning.  

Between the idea 

And the reality 

Between the motion 

And the act Falls the Shadow       

                            For Thine is the Kingdom 

Between the conception 

And the creation 

Between the emotion 

And the response Falls the Shadow 

                                 Life is very long  

Between the desire 

And the spasm 

Between the potency 

And the existence 

Between the essence 

And the descent Falls the Shadow                               

    For Thine is the Kingdom  

For Thine is Life is 

For Thine is the  

This is the way the world ends 

This is the way the world ends 

This is the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but a whimper. 

I would like to share with you this essay I'm reading:

http://barneygrant.tripod.com/cultureindustry.htm

expecially the part "Television as part of culture industries":


"It seems unreasonable then, at least in hindsight, to expect any type of television to perform a role exterior to the social conditions of the time. Rather, television is a form of social, commercial and political manipulation, a form which aims at integrating its audience. The semiotics of “mass communication” are rarely examined: such a description of TV's role and actions is one successfully kept from its consumers, who are encouraged to believe that all they see and hear is normal, and when change occurs, progressive. Cultural expectations are thus aligned with the expectations of investors, the goals of entrepreneurism and the purposes of technological innovators."

Hiroshima & Nagasaki

(the audio is disabled for some stupid copyright issue)

Arnold Schönberg - A Survivor from Warsaw Op. 46

show must go on

is culture industry process still goes on?

is the replacement of mass consuption of commercial culture by users' mass production of cultural objects a progressive development?

or does it merely constitute a further stage in the evolution of the culture industry?

if twenthtieth-century subjects simply consumed the products of culture industry, twenty-first-century prosumers and pro-ams are passionately imitating it, creating their own cultural products that follow templates established by professionals and/or rely on professional content.

On the current cultural industry

http://e-flux.com/journal/view/209

An interesting article from Clair Bishop (art theorist) on the contemporary cultural industry in England. She argues that the cuts to culture cannot be seen as separate from an assault on welfare, education, and social equality “The rhetoric of an “age of austerity” is being used as a cloak for the privatization of all public services and a reinstatement of class privilege: a sad retreat from the most civilized Keynesian initiatives of the post-war period, in which education, healthcare, and culture were understood to be a democratic right freely available to all. “

Bishop explains how Thatcher enforced a populist, profit-making model, how New Labour also viewed culture as an economic generator, while recognizing the role of creativity and culture in commerce. The age of “creative economy” and “knowledge economy” has started.

The slogan was “everyone is creative,” presenting the government’s mission as one that aims to “free the creative potential of individuals.” “However, it is important to recognize that this aim of unleashing creativity was not designed to foster greater social happiness, the authentic realization of human potential, or the utopian imagination of alternatives, but rather to accelerate the processes of neoliberalism.” -…-

“It became important to develop creativity in schools, not so that everyone could be an artist (as Joseph Beuys declared), but because the population is increasingly required to assume the individualization associated with creativity: to be entrepreneurial, embrace risk, look after their own self-interest, be their own brands, and be free of dependence on the state.^”

One of the Arts Council’s new goals is to promote private philanthropy—“a new culture of voluntarism, philanthropy, social action.”

She argues on how experimental projects rarely receive support, while private sponsorship encourages self-censorship and the triumph of market imperatives.

The new moto is: Sacrifice=Volontear

Bishop explains the shift in education towards the shrinking of Arts and Humanities and the sponsoring of un-political, market oriented research. Just see also what Phds are sponsored in Switzerland!

“Under neoliberalism, the university is no longer tied to the production of culture and moral values, but to the profit motive (or what has been called “academic capitalism”)”

Now it is the free market that will organize education. See where the money go in our HEAD school in Geneva and what courses have visibility. Any comment on the new plasma screens and advertisement tables near CCC?

Bishop argues on the fact that those who support the cuts in the arts they say that in this crisis arts are a luxury. She argues on how this “actually creates and perpetuates this lie: without public subsidies, culture and the humanities are actually transformed from human necessities into luxuries, becoming the preserve of a wealthy few. The fight against cuts to arts and humanities funding is not a question of defending a luxury, but should be seen as part of a broader opposition to the destruction of the welfare state and the whole principle of austerity measures in general, in which the working and lower middle classes have to bear the brunt of the bank bailout to sustain the status quo. The “age of austerity” is only a screen for the further dismantlement all public services in the UK (from the NHS to free education to public funding for the arts), the most civilized of Britain’s accomplishments in the twentieth century. The end of public funding is the end of the public sphere, our most progressive institutions, and their commitment to non-commercial activity as a good in its own right. “