Hi Crowd!
One of my favorite art things is the conversations that happen between images when one artist is reminded of another or references another in their work, and one of the (few) good things about social media right now is the ability for that to happen in real time. Yesterday the artist PIV posted his newest piece titled “Propaganda Punk” which immediately reminded me of Shepard Fairey’s 2002 CAMADANTE series and I was inspired to make my own PUNKADANTE series, the first piece of which all sold almost right away to other artists who watched it play out. This is the kind of thing the internet is still awesome for.
Speaking of Shepard, he’s got signed copies of Triple Trouble, the catalog (it’s big book actually) from his show with Damien Hirst and Invader available from his shop shipping from Los Angeles right now. I wrote the forward to this and last time I mentioned it some people pointed out that it was only shipping from the published in the UK and for some people that meant shipping was more expensive than the book itself so getting a signed one shipped from LA is probably much better. Also I did notice it’s available on Amazon now too, which probably means it’s available from other distributors and retailers so if you aren’t in the UK or the US, there’s probably a somewhat local place you can get it from more reasonably. And I recommend you do, it’s wonderful book with beautiful images of the work from the show which was fantastic. Speaking of punks and book, I have a very few of the signed/numbered edition of PUNKS NOT DED available and I’d love for them to find homes that do not involve a box I need to keep moving around my office. NOT DED is of course the nerdy companion to the more academic CRYPTOPUNKS FREE TO CLIAM (which I also co-wrote and is a must have).
In somewhat related art news, Bre just launched his personal gallery site bre.art and it’s wonderful. The question of how to properly document and display personal art collections, especially ones with a lot of digital pieces, is something I’ve been thinking a lot about. While I appreciate the work that sites like Raster.art and ab500 have been doing show work in a venue that isn’t explicitly a marketplace, the pricing and market activity is still very integrated there. I’ve been building out Arts Haus explicitly to address that, pointing out that the reason (good) art galleries don’t put prices on the walls is not to be elitist but to keep the conversation about the art. If you slap a price on the wall then the conversations all shift to discussions about the prices being too high/low and people stop talking about the art. Online galleries and archives should be the same. I also wanted to allow more active curation, rather than just all or nothing so I’m building in features to let collectors choose which pieces by which artists they want to show, and also allowing people to write about the artists and the pieces if they want to add additional context to the work and why they collected it. Arts Haus is still in closed beta but it’s coming together and I’m pretty happy with where it’s heading.
Quick follow on to last weeks note about Anthropic adding watermarks to text outputs from Claude, they confirmed that if you give Claude human written text and ask it to translate it, the output is watermarked as AI generated. Especially concerning since they explained how watermarking works by using specific words in specific orders that are “not meaningfully different” and unnoticeable to readers – but in their example they were like “we might say “cloudy” instead of “grey” to describe a sky and writers are pointing out that those are in fact very meaningfully different changes.
Similarly if you write something and then ask Claude to copy edit it (ie take this 2000 word piece and make it 1500 words / fix run-on sentences / make sure it doesn’t switch from 1st to 3rd person / etc ) the output you get back is watermarked as being written by AI. So yeah, this is going to add a lot of annoying confusion to lots of texts. Just as quick there is a tool to remove the watermarking so we’re fully in cat and mouse land here and that’ll probably get worse by next week. As I’ve written before AI or not AI is a useless designation because we’re seconds away from AI being in everything and people not even knowing they are using it (in most cases spellcheck is AI now, for example). The important thing is knowing how and to what extent AI was used, and how that impacts the final work.
In the New Republic, Astra has written about how (some) animal rights are suddenly being taken up as a cause by a number of MAGA personalities and what that means for Dems to find themselves once again to right of outspoken right wingers due to inaction on issues their constituents have been begging them to address for years.
And to wrap this up on other horrific news, the shock gloves that ICE just bought tons of are horrific. On their own they are nightmarish. The company who makes them saying essentially that they are “safe” as long as they are only used this one specific way on dangerous subjects means that they are absolutely going to be used unsafely on everyone, and that people convulse uncontrollably when touched by them means we’re going to see these thugs shocking people while yelling “stop resisting” and then use perceived resisting as an excuse to shoot people. Also if you think that’s bad, it’s not just ICE, apparently school correctional officers are using them too. So yes, they are electro shocking children to keep them in line. Just horrifying.
Totally unrelated, and I don’t know the specifics but I saw some discussion among activists/protesters that apparently direct skin contact is required for similar tech to work (shirt fabric is enough) and that non-conductive coatings like petroleum not only protect against shocks but also gum up the contacts and is very hard to wash off. #themoreyouknow
Have a great week everyone!
-s