Category: Art

Find a Real Cause

                   

Let’s compare.  Both of these videos are technically marketing pieces. I would know as I’ve made a few hundred marketing videos in my career.  But what is each video selling, and how is each doing its job?

The video on the left is produced by Kim Dotcom and is selling one message:  Free Kim Dotcom.  The video on the right is produced by The What Took You So Long Foundation, and it is selling one message:  TEDx is a force for positive change in the world. Dotcom’s video has nearly one million views; the TEDx video, just over one thousand.  The former is an example of what I consider the most destructive and cynical manifestations of the digital age, while the latter represents what I perceive as the best in next-gen, progressive spirit connected and empowered by technology.

Dotcom’s video is more than a little creepy. It uses the desaturated hues we associate with post-apocalyptic movies, a fake TV-noise plug-in to give Dotcom himself a subversive, underground appeal; repeated images of angry mobs hiding behind Guy Fawkes masks to enhance the theater of revolution; and a catchy, electronica tune with lyrics that speak of humanism in contrast to the almost threatening, dystopian montage.

Dotcom may have the gall to compare himself to Martin Luther King, but the video is actually more reminiscent of a terrorist training film than a promo for social change, and that’s why it’s effective.  It takes a cynical, pseudo-revolutionary video to appeal to a cynical psychology — one that actually believes that streaming stolen creative media via torrent sites is somehow striking a blow for freedom and justice in the world.

By contrast, everything we see in the TEDx video is exactly the opposite in sensibility and intent.  First, we see faces, a lot of faces of real people who left their desktops and traveled to Doha to participate in something and engage in physical interaction. Not that the TED enterprise is without its flaws, but this video itself taps into what I would describe as a progressive deconstruction of institutions — a global “think different” consciousness that very likely will bypass traditional means to solve real problems like hunger, disease, and poverty.

When Eiso Vaandager says toward the end of the video that he “envisions the UN coming to TEDx organizers to solve a problem they can’t,” this is the kind of audacious claim worthy of our attention; and it only underscores just how offensive it is to hear Kim Schmitz use the same media to compare himself to civil rights leaders and other legitimate heroes.

I suspect the jaundiced supporters of the Dotcom video imagine themselves somehow allied with the proactive folks in the TEDx video because, of course, people have a tendency to believe in associative relationships among things that sound similar (both are bucking systems, aren’t they?); but there really is no comparison.  Dotcom’s video targets Americans — people who already enjoy freedom, and it aims to convince them that his incarceration would be their prison, too. The TEDx video targets a global community, and it aims to convince people that energy, willingness, and intelligence can solve real issues.

Of course the word freedom is a slippery little bugger. It gets used by everyone from peace activists to corporate fat cats to terrorists; and Dotcom is merely following in a long tradition of vested interests abusing the concept to defend personal gain and deflect attention away from the harm he does. As an artist and an American, I cherish the First Amendment above all other laws; and it is destructive both to creative works and to the First Amendment when a guy like Schmitz presumes to hide his theft of the former behind the humanistic benevolence of the latter.

If what you envision is legit social change, there are plenty of progressive and tangible ways to take action — everything from just supporting a crowd-funding campaign for a cause to lending actual knowledge, assistance, or muscle to a project of interest. But streaming free entertainment in order to fill the pockets of a guy who has produced exactly nothing in the world counts for less than zero on the social change meter.

There is actual oppression in the world, real sorrow, real evil worth your attention and action. Right now, thousands of human beings worldwide are being trafficked as sex or labor slaves; too much of the technology we take for granted is being produced by hands in poor working conditions; climate change is real; terrorism is real; hunger is real; there’s a revolution in Syria you might have heard about; the Iranian government is playing a dangerous and complex game; we have thousands of homeless and suicidal veterans here in the U.S.; Russia just sentenced musicians to prison for performing a protest song; oh, and the world economy is still pretty shaky.  If you’re looking for heroes and villains, they’re out there; but if Dotcom and Hollywood fit those definitions for you respectively, you’re more than a little naive.

It’s Not About Big Labels

To those who comment unceasingly that copyright and anti-piracy efforts are exclusively about big labels and big studios, meet the owners of ESL.  This is an indie label that has a blanket 50/50 deal with all of its artists.  Eric Hilton comes from the technology sector, so they’re anything but Web luddites.  They are literally telling young, talented musicians they meet, “Forget it.  Get a different job.  You can’t make a living at this anymore.”

In Defense of (a little) Elitism

Imagine your diet will henceforth be determined by the tastes of a majority of American ten-year-olds.  This may sound as unlikely as it does unappetizing, but the prospect is not really all that different from the basis for at least one of the arguments of the copyleft crowd with regard to distributing creative content via the Web.  One assumption behind DIY culture seems to be that the best work is being systematically squashed by big media conglomerates, and that the level playing field of the Web will allow great art to emerge through the ultimate, democratic means — popularity supported by algorithms.  This theory has proven generally untrue for journalism, music, and publishing; and we’re now on the leading edge of its proving untrue for filmed entertainment.

Gavin Casleton, in this article shared on The Trichordist, sums up his observations about popularity combined with search algorithms thus:  “When you release the valve without well-tuned filters in place, you get what we have now:  muddy waters (not the artist, the metaphor).  You have tracks from seasoned artists like Radiohead distributed side by side with garbage (not the band, the metaphor), and you have transferred the burden and blessing of filtering from more official gatekeepers to the consumer….[but] when almost all new aggregators are adopting the algorithm that sorts results by Most Popular, you tend to end up with the same results.”

The apparent good in this digital-age model — that it is populist — is also its own weakness when we look at results in various media.  Most obviously, it doesn’t take more than a glance at the effects of extreme populism on journalism to realize that we now have news tailored to every taste — conservative, liberal, alternative, user-generated, subversive, and just plain wacko. No one can argue that the consumer isn’t “getting what he wants, and for free,” but the democratization of journalism has broadened the concept to include literally anyone with a computer.  As with Caselton’s Radiohead example, the best journalists in the world now swim in murky waters amid every crackpot, amateur netizen who considers himself a reporter.

Likewise, overemphasis on populism does not inherently produce the best art, either for the creators, the industry in question, or for society as a whole.  Anyone who has taken an art-history or literature class knows that many works immediately unpopular in their time are now among the canon of world masterpieces. The digital-age conceit (because the Web is an egomaniac’s paradise) is that the consumer always knows best; but this apparently fair and reasonable-sounding attitude may well be a greater culture killer than all the suits in Hollywood have ever been.  Why?  Because, just like solid news reporting, great art is not created by popular consent; to the contrary, it is often created in spite of it. When we shift the “burden and blessing” of gatekeeping from a finite number of professionals involved in the process to an infinite number of amateurs detached from the process, we are simultaneously creating work by committee in real-time while undermining the principle of investment in that work in the first place.

It is necessary that both artist and investor take risks. Sometimes art will succeed and money will fail, sometimes the other way around; and occasionally both will succeed or fail together.  Specifically, of course, I am thinking about my own industry and the fact that filmmaking, on a scale greater than other media, requires substantial investment and collaboration among professionals to produce damn good, let alone exceptional, work.

When the film director proposes some creative choice, he may meet resistance from any number of gatekeepers — from his most trusted Director of Photography to some guy in the studio marketing department who has never taken a decent vacation photo, let alone made a movie.  Ironically, though, the web-based, populist model would take what might be wrong with the marketing guy — that he thinks he knows the audience — and exacerbate the problem exponentially by insinuating audience taste even more invasively into the creative process.   Frankly, I’d rather deal with the marketing guy than an algorithm.

The consumer/audience is, of course, the ultimate arbiter of work once it has been produced, but history demonstrates that too much attention to the whims of viewers within the process is less likely to produce the next Citizen Kane so much as the next Fear Factor.