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By jdb, January 7, 2010

I think Noli Novak is justifiably pissed. This is an open and shut case of plagiarism…

http://hedcuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/jose-maria-cano-is-con-artist-he-uses.html

Beyond that, this art is nothing but stupid and passe. Appropriation was kind of hip all the way into the nineties but that was then, now it’s boring. As boring as that other insanely lame and plagiaristic appropriation art piece, the poster of Obama with the flag behind his head.

This trend in Obamacentric rip off art makes me wonder. Is this all my generation of artists can muster artistically, a statement saying ‘Look we copied some stuff, it’s art’? I’m completely ashamed. I wonder if maybe the ideas behind the 20th century appropriation ‘movement’ are so common and mainstream that lazy and stupid people can easily hide behind them. Just copy something, make sure it’s really BIG, slather it in some fifty year old ideas and presto, it’s great (and expensive) art!

It also makes me wonder, not so much about the people working for the Obama campaign, because they might be under the assumption that artists create something rather than just copy stuff, so it might not have occurred to them to ask, ‘hey, is this a rip off?’, I wonder about the artists who seem to get a lot of traction painting ripped off pictures of Obama. Are they so soft they not only believe they are making actual art, but more than willing to iconify the politician-du-jour? Is my generation so willing to embrace the cult of personality? Or is it just the current headline, maybe if Chewbacca was on the front page again we’d be getting that instead. An artist has to make a buck, right?

Maybe this particular plagiaristic artist’s website can enlighten. Mr. Jose Maria Cano, not to be confused with the real and genuine artist Pablo Cano who makes things that are real and genuinely cool, Jose Maria Cano seems to be primarily a pop musician. Now, when you say ‘pop’ in Spain, I think it really must mean POP. Complete with melodies you can hear in your head before they happen and all the schmaltzy accordions you can suffer. Exhibit A for the prosecution: MECANO. Maybe I’m just spoiled by Shakira, but… Anyway, according to Wikipedia, he then wrote an opera that nobody liked. In his quest for some sort of cultural legitimacy, he began to copy stuff from newspapers and call it art. Now, granted, he made his copies really BIG, so they are actually original right? Size counts?

This makes me wonder a bit about Spain. On the front of Mr. Jose Maria Cano’s site you can see Spain’s Minister of Culture apparently admiring his work. So maybe this is all her fault, maybe she went to art school too long. Maybe he smiled suavely under his wiggling eyebrows when he passed her an autographed CD – and some wine. How many CD’s did he have to give away for Parliament to get him to do that mural? Apparently all of them, because now that Spain has essentially made file sharing legal, the artist really does need to make a buck. Maybe this kind of thing is finally, at long last, hip and trendy in Spain. Whether or not that’s true, my faith in Spain’s ability to produce another artist of Picasso’s stature is pretty much ripped to shreds.

More from Hedcuts:

http://hedcuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/jose-maria-cano-is-con-artist-he-uses.html

http://hedcuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/from-boo-hoo-to-brouhaha.html

http://hedcuts.blogspot.com/2009/10/royally-fooled.html

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By jdb, April 6, 2009

(I originally posted this in 2002)

We’ve all seen the pictures of the mega-studio complexes of the 70′s and 80′s – huge consoles, multiple treated recording rooms that sound great, racks of real tube preamps. Some major label artists still work in those studios. Along with the great sound, however, came a tight structire that artists had to learn to work in, and a whole bunch of people that expected the music to be a certain thing. The best thing about being able to get high qualitygear for less money in the last decade is that it affords more people the chance to work however the hell they choose. Some people choose to work alone, like the musical composers of hundreds of years ago.

Fact is, there are lots of reason someone might choose to work alone. Artists often feel the need for control. a desire to see something through thats THIER baby. They can do that more easily now. Collaboration just isn’t appropriate in some cases, because the artist has a complete ‘vision’ and is able to execute it on his own. In all art forms besides pop music (and film) the work is most often the vision of one person. That ‘personality’, the style, is one of the things that makes a book or painting great. However, in music as in film, youve got this whole entertainment structure to carry along with you, and you end up basically financially beholden to all of them in one way or another. How does this make art better?

There is also personal preference. Some people prefer to be in bands, some people prefer to sit on a stool and play guitar, some people are singers who need a thousand people to work with them, some people sit at home making finished soundtracks or dance music all by themselves. To each thier own – my record collection is full of artists who either work alone or understand and control most aspects of record making. many of them at home. Some are very young. all of them are good and non-boring. A lot of them put music first. What I’m saying does not preclude the great things that can come from collaboration. Perhaps most people should collaborate. But it’s good that they don’t HAVE to.

One very important issue is sound quality. I don’t mean ‘quality’ as if theres some kind of objective standard, I mean the character of the sound. Unfortuneately, the last twenty years are littered with the remains of bands that had really great records until they signed with a major. After which their records sound like shit. There is absolutely no aesthetic reason to subject your music to the kind of manipulation that big record companies will foist upon you. ive heard this a lot from musicians, who are like ‘we dont want
that compressed sound’ or ‘we dont want polish’. Most musicians i know think the compressed, reverby studio sound is shit. To use a classic example, I personally think pearl jams ‘ten’ would have been a hell of a lot better if it hadnt been put through the wringer. you can hear live tapes and understand this. I absolutely don’t blame any of them, I don’t know what I would do if someone waved money like that in my face…

The fact is, because of the the proliferation of recording technology and computers, musician and audio engineer are no longer two mutually exclusive professions. What stopped this from happening more in the past was basically the exorbitant cost of studio gear and a misunderstanding of recording techniques that work well in ‘non-professional’ environments. Just as the hype surrounding new recording gear may be a little misleading, the hype surrounding the professional recording environment is equally so. Even though that perfectly controlled sound can’t be dupicated inthe bedroom, some living rooms sound really fantastic!

On a personal note, I remember at some point being very interested in the whole ‘artistic group effort’ concept… i think it was before the fall of communism and the berlin wall. There are technological changes that have happened in the last fifty years that have changed music forever, just as musical notation did in medieval times. What comes out of the studio onto the commercial plate isnt music as we understand it anymore, it’s a recording – not even a recording of music, but something all it’s own. You have an entire generation (or two) brought up on favorite albums that are more recording than music. Recordings are their own medium now, the ‘object d’art’. They aren’t music any more than a movie is necessarily drama – a recording can have music in it, just like a film can have drama, but the mediums have forked off into new territory – the recording contains and transcends the musical experience, making it concrete in the way that music has never been, making it more like a painting. And painters tend to work alone. We don’t need a bunch of people looking over our shoulders, we can make the thing by themselves. Our art. Our baby.