{ brad brace } wrote:
>
> ... oh sure; a self-appointed "collective" of ten who unilaterally
> censure the entire list.
>
Well, not selfappointed. I wouldn't have ventured to appoint myself to anything
of the sort. And that's "censor" you mean, I think--you are, for instance, now
censuring me. There is, however, a way in which censure is censorship, because
insult can be a silencing force.
There has always been a person who handles administration duties. What happened
after the general nastiness some time ago, which threatened to end the entire
list--in effect to censor an entire community of people by wearing them down
with aggravation and insult--was that such administration duties were spread
among a group of people who'd been fairly committed to the list for some time.
This was done by the founders of the list, who asked people if they'd be
interested in taking some responsibility for the health and vitality of a list
on which they'd spent some appreciable amount of time, effort, and good faith.
There seemed to be no alternative other than to let the list die in a welter of
boredom and insult. One or two people can be, after all, very powerful in
shutting down discussions through insult and redundancy.
Brad, why are you treating this as a freedom-of-speech issue? No one is trying
to silence you; the one instance you're on about did not involve anything but
the equivalent of an obscene phone call. Have you ever been the target of such
calls? Do you think one has the responsibility to "hear them out"? Yeah,
right.
How's about instead instantiating some discussion of your work, rather than
promotion of it? Solicit, perhaps, discussion of how your imagery relates to
the valorization of the mundane that's lately been under discussion? Or how it
may relate to the art-into-life impulse that characterized Fluxus? Does your
work present itself as evidence of the world or transformation of it? Really,
just anything that would indicate a good-faith relation with others who write
here, rather than simply a judging relation--which is, after all, a
hierarchical one, just the sin you're charging others with.
Would you be interested in discussion of other photographers' work? That of
Diana Thorneycroft, for example, who plays at the boundary of evidence and
theater, very different from you but with relations to what you do. Jesus
christ, it's a big world.
AK
