Welcome to the Pleasurefreedome
Welcome to another edition of this Mailing List!
With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
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First, I need to get something off my chest. Recently, a video went viral in Germany that showed a group of young rich people sing a Nazi song in a bar. This caused a huge uproar, but as could have been expected, it was no isolated incident.
There are elections coming up in Germany, so I decided to make a little poster. You don’t have to be able to speak German to understand the text (“AfD” is the name of the largest neofascist party in Germany).
You can download the file for the poster, print it yourself (or have it printed), and hang it up if you want. Or maybe tell someone living in Germany who might be interested in doing so.
I’m under no illusion that this will help or do anything. Please view it as the gesture of a German far away who is aghast at his country’s steady descent into a very dark place.
Related: Greg Allen wrote about art in the age of autocracy.
There’s a really interesting article about Eric McNatt who sued Richard Prince, yet another one of the many lawsuits faced by that guy. The article dives into McNatt’s business and general reaction when he found out what happened to the photograph he had taken. You’ll want to read the article for that part alone.
And then there’s the following, which I’ve been telling people for years and years:
Of course, none of this had to happen. “There’s a system in place to address that type of work, which is the licensure system,” said Burroughs. “All you have to do under that system is contact the originator of this work. And I’m sure everyone would have been happy.” But that’s boring, and Richard Prince would never. Artists and lawyers alike love mess.
After I shared the piece online, Jacob Birken wrote the following:
The big art world really needs to acknowledge that everything morally reprehensible about generative AI has previously been normalized within the contemporary art system itself, like these lawyers arguing that Prince's appropriation is different from the original because ... he sold it for more $$$
I still don’t really understand why one would want to pair a piece of writing that contains “photographic” elements with photographs. Where’s the appeal — besides the total obviousness of it all?
That’s also why I mostly find books that pair photographs with poems tedious: if two things are so similar, they complement each other in only such minute fashion that you don’t really gain anything.
But what do I know? Obviously, that’s why I’m not a curator… So here’s a conversation between Rebecca Bengal and Lou Stoppard about pairing Annie Ernaux’s writing with pictures.
You might remember some photographs from early on during the war in Ukraine. The photographer became a prisoner of war, was abused in captivity for months, and returned home. The documentary above has him speak about his experience.
Martin Herbert asks whether contemporary art constitutes a pleasure-free zone.
You probably know that emojis are a Japanese invention (“e” = picture, “moji” = letter/character). This article tells you all about emojis’ earliest years. It’s oddly fascinating.
I don’t know whether the following article warrants a trigger warning or not. Maybe in the strictest sense it does not. But after reading it I thought I needed to take another shower. It centers on Lucian Freud, the painter, and one of his many children, Rose Boyt, whom he painted as a nude when she was 18 years old. Basically all of the people come across as profoundly damaged. Boyt wrote a book about it all; I’m not sure whether I need to read it.
One quick comment, re: “The temptation, particularly in our censorious times, might be to condemn Freud out of hand for his most extreme behaviour.” I can’t and won’t speak for anyone else, but I’m 100% certain that my reaction to the situation would have been exactly the same 10, 20, 30 years ago.
You read these kinds of comments (“our censorious times”) often these days, and there might be a degree of truth to them. But I don’t think the fact that we’re collectively very cautious right now means that it’s the times that are the problem here — and not the artist and his desire (let’s call it that) to paint his 18 year-old daughter in the nude. Freud didn’t paint from photographs, so this would have involved hours of posing. You can see the painting in the article and come to your own conclusions whether it’s the times that’s creating the problem.
Lastly, this is an important article about looted artifacts/pieces of art that were returned to where they belong, Ghana. Too often, we only hear about the Western side.
And with that I’m going to conclude for today. Until next time!
Thank you for reading!
— Jörg