Marilynn, implicitly if not explicitly, poses the question: "How is it that 
filmmakers are not considered 'artists' within the 'art world'?" To 
FRAMEWORKers, that question is surely rhetorical. Of course, filmmakers are 
artists, and it's simply silly for anyone to draw the sorts of distinctions for 
which Marilyn faults Balsom. But the art world DOES draw this distinction, and 
it's worth asking why. 
> The history of artists (i.e. painters and sculptors)
> 
A very important point slips by in the parentheses; it's not just filmmakers 
who are 'not artists.' Poets, novelists, composers, musicians, dancers, 
choreographers, playwrights, stage-directors etc. etc. Only painters and 
sculptors and the like really count. So, what is the operating definition here?

I submit it is this: An artist is a person who makes 'art.' 'Art' is a unique 
physical object that has commodity status. It can be sold, acquired, possessed, 
collected and accrue economic value in the process of exchange. Without those 
properties, creative work has no function within the instrumentalities of the 
art world: you can't do with it the things that art-world people do. So it's 
'not art.'

An 'art work' has to have a provenance, and it's history and value as an object 
becomes tied to the history of it's author. 'Artists' are important in the art 
world because their imprimatuer affects the commodity status of their work. As 
such a mediocre film by a painter is more worthy of attention than a great film 
by a filmmaker, because the painter has an established commodity cache.

I feel kind of gob-smacked that so many people seem not to 'get' the basic 
political economy of art -- or maybe it's an aesthetic economy, but anyway it's 
some kind of economy -- since Benjamin and Lukacs have laid it out so clearly.
Curators still don't what to do with Duchamp. When I visited the Tate a few 
years back, they had 'Fountain' on display, accompanied by a wall card that 
noted in very serious language that this was not the ORIGINAL 'Fountain' by 
Duchamp himself, but rather a 'limited' reproduction created by Richard 
Hamilton at Duchamp's behest and with his seal of approval. I almost fell over 
laughing.

Benjamin especially nailed how film upsets the whole aesthetic apple cart. No 
aura, no cult value: an artform by definition liberated from the old way. There 
was an implicit (if inchoate) leftist politics in the formation of experimental 
film institutions such as Anthology, FMC and Canyon. If filmmakers were hostile 
to the museum and gallery world, they had damn good reason to be, on a variety 
of higher principles. (This is a very different thing than being hostile to the 
art in the museums.) Here, as synecdoche, I'll just references the writings of 
Jack Smith, and note that in his later years he was chummy with the 
post-marxist folks at Semiotext(e), and suggested that they simply re-title the 
journal 'Hatred of Capitalism,' (which they later used as the title of an 
anthology).

But time moves on, situations change. It is no longer possible for 
institutions, much less artists, to support themselves by renting celluloid 
prints. The all-powerful market speaks, and most of us have to find some way to 
pay for rent and groceries. The only way for an 'experimental filmmaker' to 
thrive in the art world is to adopt the practices of that world, even though 
they may be antithetical to the apparent nature of the medium. As Chuck notes, 
photography faced a similar problem. Photographic prints though, unlike film 
prints, are subject to significant manipulation in enlarging from the negative. 
Thus, a photographic print can achieve auratic, commodity status: there is only 
one 'Piss Christ' and that has been destroyed...

Marilyn quotes Balsam:
> “recent exhibition practices have demonstrated the persistent vestiges of not 
> considering film to be a legitimate artistic medium on a par with, say, 
> painting or sculpture -- unless, that is, it is sold in limited editions on 
> the art market.  Despite the increasing interpenetration of the worlds of art 
> and experimental film, these lasting ramifications of their differing models 
> of distribution and acquisition continue to mark out a divide between the two 
> realms and their treatment in the contemporary museum.
> 
Woot. There it is. 

Marilyn, (putting the real skinny in parentheses again):

> [Further to these points, the selling by filmmakers of limited editions of 
> their work (on celluloid) to museums may, indeed, become more of a norm, as 
> the use of digital reproductions increasingly becomes the norm elsewhere.]
> 

In a nutshell, somebody has to pay the bills, and right now the best bet is the 
'art-world'. And the only way to extract resources from the art-world is to 
give them what they value: objects that "fit the art world model of purchasing 
and ownership."(MB)

What then do 'film artists' (or their estates) do? Withdraw all prints from 
circulation, and sell the entire materiality of the work -- the camera 
original, internegs, masters, whatever -- to the highest bidder. (At least 
celluloid HAS a materiality -- if photochemical film posed a problem for the 
art-world, digital origin in a total nightmare.) So MOMA could be THE owner of, 
say, Dog Star Man. 

This is certainly not the way I wish for things to be, but taking a pragmatic 
view I think it's potentially not so bad and even has an upside. For here we 
have to consider the economy not of the art-work itself, but the economy of the 
relationship between the work and it's reproductions. Reproductions are subject 
to the economics of pure information, which has really only made itself 
apparent in the age of the Internet: information forms accrue value by breadth 
of circulation, not by scarcity. Id software remains the paradigm, as it's 
founders became rich beyond their wildest dreams by giving away 'Doom' 
absolutely free, thus establishing it's popularity and appeal, thus allowing 
them to get paid handsomely for part 2. It's pretty obvious that auratic art 
objects become more valuable as the reputations of the maker, and of the 
specific object, increase, and every reproduction adds to that reputation. 
We've all seen reproductions of 'Crows Over a Cornfield' but that only makes 
the original canvas worth more, not less.

Thus, the commodification of celluloid art actually 'incentivizes' its 
distribution via reproduction: DVD and/or Blu-Ray at popular prices. Which I, 
for one, would welcome. A couple weeks back I asked a question about what 
values can be found in the corpus we call experimental film. Nobody offered a 
reply. There was a bit of the usual blah-blah-blah about 'medium specificity.' 
But a) that's not really a value b) it doesn't really distinguish 'experimental 
film' as a whole from other rubrics c) to the extent that SOME experimental 
works foreground a medium specificity, the number and importance of works that 
do, and the degree to which this the key to their aesthetic significance is 
wildly overestimated by the celluloid cultists.

Fred said: "It is simply my claim that many of the best avant-garde (and other) 
films come through far better in their intended format." I wholeheartedly 
agree. But, first, I believe 'their intended format' is a GOOD print, not one 
full of dust, tram line scratches, torn sprocket holes and crappy tape splices. 
At least that was the case when I made films... Second, look how weak 'far 
better' is as a claim. And I think Fred is being honest here. There's a whole 
spectrum of deviation away from the ideal, and just because one form is 'far 
better' doesn't mean another form is 'bad.' (Either the faded and worn print or 
the projection from DVD). It's not an ideal world and there are aways 
trade-offs. Shall we take the slides away from the art history professors? Or, 
more to the point, is a gay teenager in rural Nebraska better off watching a 
DVD of 'Flaming Creatures' or never having even heard of Jack Smith because his 
work will never be shown in its 'intended format' in flyover land? I submit 
that the values that make the corpus of experimental film truly worthwhile are 
by a very large margin things that survive substantive measures of image 
degradation quite well. 

IMHO, the real battle is not 'film vs. digital', but 'cinema vs. iPod'. My 
personal experience is that the experimental films I value most highly do not 
suffer much from slight image degradations, but do suffer greatly when 
withdrawn from the context of cinema: i.e. display on a large screen in a 
darkened room. You have to concentrate to 'get' a lot of this stuff. It NEEDS a 
certain scale, needs to trap you in your seat without the available AV 
distraction of everyday life, to force you to deal with it's otherness. 

As such, I find Marilyn's endorsement of gallery-type film installations 
disturbing. I've seen a number of them (including Brakhage) and I thought they 
all were awful, basically reducing the work to 'TV': small screen, too much 
ambient light, people wandering in and out distractedly... (The one exception 
being an Anthony McCall piece where the constant influx of people in and out of 
the room, figuring out the sculptural nature of the thing, then playing with 
the beam seemed just right.) If anybody has the responsibility to present the 
material in a way that maximizes it's integrity, it's museums. But they don't 
value the work in that sense, because they can't value it in the other sense, 
so maybe we'd get better screenings under a regime of "purchasing and 
ownership." (???)
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