Pong Tang Vase in Art Class at Northeastern University
This is what we know: On November 24, 2015, the Wu-Tang Association sold its latest album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, through an online auction house. As one of the nigh innovative rap groups, the Wu-Tang Clan had used concepts for their recordings before, merely the latest album would be their highest concept: information technology would exist as merely i copy—as an LP, that physical, authentic format for music—encased in an artisanally crafted box. This anthology would have but ane owner, and thus, perhaps, simply one listener. By legal understanding, the possessor would not be allowed to distribute it commercially until 88 years from at present.
Once—note the singularity at the starting time of the album'due south title—was purchased for $ii meg by Martin Shkreli, a young man who was an unsuccessful hedge fund manager and so an unscrupulous drug company executive. This career arc was more than enough to make him filthy rich by age 30.
Then, in ane of 2015'southward greatest moments of schadenfreude, especially for those who care about the widespread availability of quality healthcare and hip hop, Shkreli was arrested by the FBI for fraud. Alas, the FBI left One time Upon a Time in Shaolin in Shkreli's New York apartment.
Presumably, the album continues to sit there, in the shadows, unplayed. It may very well assemble grit for some fourth dimension.
This has fabricated many people unhappy, and some take hatched schemes to retrieve One time, ideally using the martial arts the Shaolin monks are known for. But our obsession with possessing the anthology has prevented usa from contemplating the nature of the album—its existence—which is what the Buddhists of Shaolin would, after all, adopt us to practise.
RZA, the leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, had tried to forewarn united states of america. As he told Forbes, "We're almost to put out a slice of art like nobody else has done in the history of music…This is like someone having the scepter of an Egyptian king."
Many accept sought ways that the public might listen to Once, simply few have taken RZA at his word. What if Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is meant primarily as fine art, as a precious artifact that only i person, like a king, can hold? And if nosotros consider this question, do nosotros really need to heed to the album to hear what it'due south saying?
* * *
In 1995, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei took an ancient, priceless Han Dynasty vase and dropped it onto a brick floor. It instantly shattered. He took a series of high-speed photographs of the vase drop, which he assembled into a triptych; in the middle photo the vase seems like it's in a levitating, suspended state. Information technology exists, but it is milliseconds from non existing. It is forever there, whole, and yet we know it is forever in pieces.
He shouldn't have destroyed that singular vase, you may be thinking. Y'all must think more securely, and enter the Shaolin temple of your mind.
* * *
In the old mill town of Northward Adams, Massachusetts, a cluster of nineteenth-century manufacturing plant buildings has been converted into the largest museum of contemporary art in the Us: Mass MoCA. Ane entire building, from top to lesser, is defended to the work of Sol LeWitt.
Sol LeWitt is an unusual artist in that he rarely painted, drew, or sculpted the fine art you see by him. Instead, he wrote out instructions for artwork, and and so left it to "constructors"—ofttimes fine art students, museum curators, or others, to practice the actual work of fabrication. LeWitt liked to be a recipe writer, not a chef.
"Wall Drawing 1180: Within a circle draw 10,000 straight black lines and 10,000 black non straight lines. All lines are randomly spaced and every bit distributed."
Somehow, incredibly, this ends up looking like a massive picture from the Hubble Telescope: an infinite field of stars emerges later weeks of drawing thousands of squiggly and straight lines with a pencil.
60-five art students and artists, none of them Sol LeWitt, fabricated the Sol LeWitt exhibit, and it is one of the most beautiful things yous'll ever meet. The patterns, the colors, the way that LeWitt's often deceptively simple recipes result in a sumptuous banquet for the optics, is remarkable.
Only the exhibit will only last for 25 years—eight of which have already ticked by—afterward which the museum will pigment over all of the art. Touring the showroom, you tin can't help merely think about this endtime: All of this beauty, and yet on some Monday forenoon in the not-really-that-distant future some guy with a 5-gallon bucket of white paint from Dwelling house Depot and a wide roller brush on the end of a long wood handle will embrace those walls forever. Will he sigh before making the first stroke?
Until that Monday morning in 2033, the Sol LeWitt exhibit exists. You have 17 years remaining, simply time moves more apace than nosotros like, doesn't it? I have told you to run into it, but will you make the trip to Northward Adams? Correct now, for those who have not seen it, it's Ai Weiwei'due south Han vase in mid-drib. It's just that the gravity is lighter, the fall slower. But the 3rd photograph, the smashed pieces, is coming.
Do you fear the loss of that magical field of stars and scores of other wall-sized artworks? Or have you lot airtight your optics, meditated, and concluded: Fifty-fifty if I never get to Due north Adams, LeWitt's recipes will however be, and they are the true art.
* * *
In 2008, as Mass MoCA was constructing the Sol Lewitt exhibit, they as well hosted an exhibit of the art of Spencer Finch. Finch was fascinated by Emily Dickinson, and wished to recreate the moments in which she looked out of her window, thinking and writing poetry. Could these ephemeral views exist recaptured, made physical for us so many years later?
"Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004)," tried to do so. Finch used lighting and calorie-free filters to brand a deject of just the correct wavelengths that Dickinson would have seen outside of her bedroom on a particular solar day.
You cannot capture a moment, you lot mutter softly, waving your hand, nor Emily Dickinson'southward thoughts.
* * *
Open your favorite streaming music app, and search for the blockbuster 2013 vocal "Get Lucky."
Brand a playlist that includes the original Daft Punk version, which should come up upward as the first hit, but also add together to the list iii other covers of the song by artists you have never heard of, which you will observe by scrolling downwards the search results page.
These versions exist because of something called a "compulsory license," which means that by paying a defined fee to an agency, you lot are allowed to record a encompass song without asking for, or receiving, permission from the artist who wrote information technology. The song becomes a recipe and you lot become the constructor.
Now visit a friend. Play the "Go Lucky" playlist on shuffle mode. When all iv songs accept been played, ask your friend to identify the original version. The guitar and bass and singing will sound surprisingly like in each version. Your friend will probably enquire, increasingly frantically: "Which is the one truthful song?"
Practise not answer. Give thanks your friend, bow, and leave.
* * *
"Go Lucky" was co-written past Nile Rodgers, the mastermind backside some of the greatest pop music of the last 40 years, starting with Chic, the disco ring that gave u.s. infectious trip the light fantastic toe hits similar "Good Times." Shortly after "Good Times" was released equally a single, the enterprising music producer Sylvia Robinson brought a funk band into a recording studio and had them copy Chic'southward bassist Bernard Edwards' memorable bass line from that vocal. She too sampled its string section. Adding some rappers no ane had ever heard of before, she created "Rapper'southward Delight," which seemed laughable to those who really knew the inventive, emerging hip hop scene, but which rather finer prepare rap music on a form for mainstream (and white) popularity.
Rodgers initially hated "Rapper'south Please," assertive it was a wholesale re-create of "Proficient Times," and he and Edwards sued for copyright violation. Later on, later he won and was listed as a co-author of the song, he declared himself proud of "Rapper's Delight." He realized it was a brilliant theft that changed pop music forever, and yet didn't diminish Chichi's original work.
"Rapper's Delight" was far from the only hip hop song to borrow; in fact, the reuse of older recordings was standard within the new genre, and part of its enormous creativity. The technique reached its apogee in arguably the three seminal rap albums of the belatedly 1980s: Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold U.s. Back, De La Soul's 3 Feet Loftier and Rising, and Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique. Each of these albums had over a hundred samples, mixing and matching from different genres to make sounds that were totally new.
They were large, y'all nod, they contained multitudes.
* * *
In 1992, the science fiction writer William Gibson, who had coined the give-and-take "cyberspace," released a new work entitled Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). The text was issued, most famously, in a deluxe edition on a 3.five" floppy disk encased in an artisanally crafted box. The deejay would encrypt itself upon a single reading, so you merely had one shot to read the text as it scrolled across your screen.
This Agrippa toll $2000, and simply a very small number were made. Gibson publicly revelled in the work'southward combination of the ephemeral and the valuable. He loved that the book, afterwards viewing, would become like a television tuned to a expressionless aqueduct.
Almost immediately, still, the text of Agrippa was surreptitiously released on an underground electronic message board called MindVox. Anyone can now read it online, and view the deluxe packaging as well.
What is the nature of art, y'all consider, without its packaging? What is its value?
* * *
The British artist Damien Hirst is probably all-time known for putting a expressionless shark in a big tank of formaldehyde and giving it the existential championship "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." In 2007, he asked the jewelers who fabricate items for the British monarchy—scepters for the king—to brand a homo skull out of diamonds and platinum, based on a real skull he bought. The skull's teeth were added to the final product. Hirst called this artwork "For the Love of God." Many critics called it "tacky."
But "For the Honey of God" was as much an practice in the finance that goes along with the gimmicky art scene, where prices for works regularly head into 8 or even ix figures at sale. The fabrication of the skull apparently cost £14 million, and Hirst tried to sell the bejeweled skull to bidders for £50 million. Although at that place were rumors of a sale, ultimately there were no takers. A mysterious consortium so plain bought the skull, but for less than £50 meg, perhaps much less, and oddly, Hirst seemed to be one of the investors. Some analysts believe that Hirst really lost money on the deal.
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was also rumored to be for sale for a much college number, perhaps as much as $5 million, but Shkreli ultimately bought it for $2 one thousand thousand, which is far less than the Wu-Tang Association would brand from a regular anthology release.
* * *
What is In one case Upon a Time in Shaolin really worth? Is its scarcity its worth, and its worth its truthful art and value?
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin may non be as scarce as we imagine. It surely exists beyond the sole copy in Martin Shkreli's apartment. It exists in the sense that members of Wu-Tang created it and still take its music in their heads and could likely recreate information technology if they wanted. Maybe RZA is bustling some of the songs in his shower correct now. It exists as a recipe.
But it may likewise be in actuality, albeit in pieces, similar the wisps of a deject. The master recordings may take been destroyed, merely the way that digital recording works mean that elements of Once existed more than than one time on magnetic media and probably, somewhere, continue to exist regardless of what Wu-Tang Clan has done with the completed principal. Parts of the album can probably be dug up, like the scepter of an Egyptian rex, or the disappearing verse on a phosphorus screen.
If samples were used, they be on other recordings; if a drum machine was used, those beats exist, identically, on many other machines. Any computers involved surely have files that take not been truly erased, and that could be dug upwards past digital archaeologists. There may exist assembly to be washed, and perhaps the final product would be different from the "original." Or would information technology?
And mayhap as well many traces of the full Once Upon a Fourth dimension in Shaolin be for it not to leak, just as Agrippa did.
Of course, then it will simply be another stream of bits among the countless streams in our ephemeral era, severed from its unique packaging. It volition accept its identify on millions of playlists, its songs sitting alongside tens of millions of other songs.
Nosotros will have gained something from Once'southward liberation, just then we volition accept lost something too.
* * *
The abstruse artist Ellsworth Kelly, who recently died, was once asked almost the nature of fine art. "I call up what we all want from fine art is a sense of fixity, a sense of opposing the chaos of daily living," he said, with more than a bit of Shaolin wisdom. "This is an illusion, of course."
Source: https://dancohen.org/2016/01/04/for-what-its-worth-a-review-of-the-wu-tang-clans-once-upon-a-time-in-shaolin/
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