Art

How will art and artists survive in the log-normally-distributed economy of attention?

My personal tips on writing books and creating substantial art.

Much art is important to you to the extent that you know the people making it.

The story of how a game-ending poem was gifted to the world.

For those following this blog, note that I’ve changed the canonical site name from blog.hecker.org to frankhecker.com. Any links and feed URLs referencing the previous domain name will still work for the foreseeable future, but if and when you have time you may want to update your bookmark list, RSS newsreaders, and related information to reflect the new name. A little history by way of background: I was around when the Internet was first being commercialized, and I had the opportunity to register hecker.com for myself if I really wanted to. However I passed because I didn’t have a server to associate with it and I thought I needed to be running an actual server in order to register the name (though I’m not sure that was the case even then). When I finally got around to having a personal server in the late 1990s I found that hecker.com had already been taken by a company that registered thousands of surname domains so that they could offer a shared domain service in which multiple people could have their own personal subdomains under a top-level domain: jane.smith.com, john.smith.com, and so on. So I settled on the next best thing and registered hecker.org instead for use as my primary domain, at the same time registering frankhecker.com (as well as the .org and .net variants) to prevent anyone else from getting it. ...

UPDATE: This was very much a stream of consciousness blog post, where I wrote down my thoughts as they occurred to me. Among other things, this meant that it lacked a good summary of what it is actually supposed to be about. The basic idea was/is to take Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation in business and apply it to music and (by extension) to other arts, with a goal of sketching out a “unified field theory” that (with suitable elaboration) could potentially explain how music evolves not only from an aesthetic perspective but also in terms of the sociology and economics of the communities of composers, performers, critics, educators, audiences, etc., who participate in particular musical traditions and movements. I referenced Kyle Gann a lot because for a while I’ve been reading his blog and his writings on “downtown” vs. “uptown” music, but the themes of the post are really more in line with the writings of people like Alex Ross and (in particular) Greg Sandow who’ve been writing about the future of classical music in relation to popular music and the rest of contemporary culture. ...

Apparently I have a thing for the British artist Jack Strange. After my post about Strange’s g and a follow-up, I’m back with more amateur (or should that be amateurish?) analysis of Strange’s work, this time his Spinning Beach Ball of Death. As with my first post on g, this is a cold reading without the benefit of seeing any artist’s statements or critics’ analyses. Spinning Beach Ball of Death is one of those works that most decidedly depends on one’s knowledge of “external facts” to elicit a proper appreciation. The naïve viewer will see simply a rainbow-colored paper circle spinning around. Clearly the circle is reminiscent of a beach ball, and as a first order analysis they might note the incongruity between the image of a child’s toy and the mention of death and conclude that the artist has given the work this particular title in order to invoke a particular set of emotional associations (e.g., a sea-side vacation tragically interrupted by a child’s death by drowning). ...

I recently posted some thoughts on the work g by the British artist Jack Strange. It was pretty much of a cold reading, without the benefit of having done any research on Strange or his work. Since then I’ve done some googling and discovered some useful commentary. Not to telegraph the punchline, but no one echoed my thoughts about g being (at least in part) a symbolic reenactment of the literal act of falling—which means that either I had a unique and valuable critical insight or I just pulled something out of my rear end. (I suspect the latter.) ...

Continuing my amateur ruminations on contemporary art: One of the things that’s fun about art is going on a journey from “OK . . .” to “aha!” from seeing something and not really understanding or even registering it, to both grasping an essential point about the work (even if it’s essential only for you) and seeing and appreciating the further associations and cross-connections it raises. It’s especially fun if you can get to that point on your own, without having to read the wall text or a critic’s article. ...

Now that I’m interested in art again, a few background comments might be in order, especially since my main interest is in contemporary art, a field both inscrutable and risible in the minds of many. In the work-related discussion I alluded to in a previous post, a colleague brought up Damien Hirst’s infamous shark in a tank; he seemed incredulous at this being considered art, but at the same time happened to remember the exact name of the work (something I myself had forgotten). This seems to encapsulate the paradox of contemporary art: it’s dismissed as silly and inconsequential, but at the same time has wormed its way into public consciousness. ...