Late last year Andreas Gursky’s Rhein II fetched $4,338,500 at a Christie’s auction, breaking the record for the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. It doesn’t come is exactly news that art is selling for exorbitant prices. Actually it’s not just art it’s all sorts of things. Art however, is rather a special case because it never had a functional value in the 1st place; you couldn’t mail the letter with a Cézanne (well, actually you can, but that’s another story). Photography however is rather a special case and digital photography even more so. Photography is by its very nature mechanically reproducible; digital photography in a real sense is not simply infinitely reproducible, it in fact exists only conceptually as a numerical ordering. Beyond the specific instantiations of digital works simply don’t last. What then is one buying with $4.3 million? Status surely, though only amongst a very select group because as the buyer you’ll want to remain anonymous to everyone except the auction house and your “friends”. In some sense I suppose it’s rather like wearing a Piaget’s Emperador Temple watch or driving aBugatti Veyron Super Sports; both of which are slightly less expensive than the Gursky, but again the price differential makes a certain sense because with these items you can still tell time or drive to the 711 for a 6 pack; there’s that inescapable nagging use value.

The point  being that it’s rather hard to avoid talking about all of this out without sounding like you doing social criticism; when in fact all I really want to do is notice that the world along with the people in it are infinitely strange. What you or we do with that strangeness is beyond my competence to say or advise. It is however, rather hard to think of yourself as an artist without trying to engage the weirdness.

Welcome to 2012

If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery—isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.

Charles Bukowski

“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.’ ”

Hermann Hesse- The Glass Bead Game

A long hiatus often indicates a formal life change; such is here the case.  I have a new job: Director of Learning Environments and Media Production; a potentially unfortunate acronym though perhaps accurate.  We’ll see how things develop.  I’ve been at it (formally) for about 3 weeks and not surprisingly things have been a little rough.  Again not surprisingly, most of the difficulty stemmed from underestimating from and change.  In other words I spent the first 2.8 weeks acting like a manager rather than a director, and it turns out that there’s an order of magnitude difference.  To resort to a military metaphor, it’s the difference between the classes of NCO and Officer (in the Navy there’s an odd concatenation: Warrant Officer, which may point semantically to a significant difference between the Navy and the Army). Managers (NCO’s) are responsible for getting things done; Directors, CIO’s, and the like are responsible for deciding what things need to get done, when they need to be done, and more than occasionally how they need to get done.  It’s the last that’s tricky.  There’s a fine line between “getting things done” and “doing things”, particularly when you realize that the common tools in both cases are people who report to you.  Gathering firewood is easy; getting others to gather firewood is a bit more difficult; knowing when there’s enough firewood for the entire camp is a responsibility; making sure there’s the right enough, not too much, firewood to go around is a full time occupation.

I’m going to be going to one of those HR how-to-be-a-better-(fill in the blank) things next week; this one titled “Crucial Conversations”, which I assume has something to do with honest-communication or unafraid-plain-talk. Remember those? Put me in the re-mind that all these sorts of things are about: Affective Change, and that for the most part “intellectual realization” doesn’t help in mammal-space. “The therapeutic process cannot begin until the patient is willing to share his or her masturbation fantasies.”  To which Shel said, “Jesus, why does everything come down to sex with you?” It doesn’t; exactly.   MFs aren’t in this context about sex, but rather about personal space and privacy.  How much do you trust the other; how comfortable are you with yourself?

It’s facile  to say things like, “Privacy is dead;” I’ve been guilty myself, but as usual things are more multiplex.  danah boyd and Alice Marwick have useful draft: Social Privacy in Networked Publics:  Teens Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies