lies like truth

Chloe Veltman: how culture will save the world

The Outsider

imagesVaslav Nijinsky was in many ways an outsider. The famous Russian dancer’s Polish roots, slightly Asiatic looks and  upbringing in a family of itinerant dancers made him a source of disdain among his peers as a boy.

In adult life, though the centerpiece of Serge Diaghilev’s world famous Ballet Russes and adored by his public, the dancer’s sexual orientation and mental instability made it impossible for him to lead a “normal” life.

The outsider nature of Nijisnky’s life is the focus of Hamburg Ballet director John Neumeier’s powerful work about the dancer which is currently here in the Bay Area as part of the San Francisco Ballet‘s season.

The Hamburg Ballet’s energetic yet sensitive company inhabits the psychological playground in which the work is set with brilliant acting and angular-muscular dancing that’s full of vulnerability.

The frame for the narrative is Nijinsky’s final public appearance as a dancer in January 1919 in a St. Moritz Switzerland hotel ballroom. From this point onwards, the dancer, falls ever deeper into a state of despair as events and characters from his life and work inhabit his fevered mind.

Nijinsky’s outsider status is made clear from the opening moments when the dancer performs a high-strung, frenetic solo to Chopin’s Prelude No. 20, the Polish music signifying the un-Russianness of the dancer.

In that scene, as in almost every subsequent section, there is at least one character on stage watching the action.  In the opening scene, the observers are the hotel guests and members of Nijinsky’s entourage. Later on, Diaghilev sits in a chair quietly watching Nijinsky. Towards the end, the protagonist himself, having lost his mind, sits down, a crumpled mess. The idea of watching something or someone from the outside makes the idea of Nijinsky’s lack of belonging seem extremely palpable and sad.

Speaking of outsider feelings: I’ve been listening to baritone Thomas Meglioranza and pianist Reiko Uchida’s heart-achingly beautiful new recording of Schubert’s Winterreise song cycle. Meglioranza’s voice is like The Hamburg Ballet ensemble’s dancing — it’s warmth channels feelings of loss and loneliness.

 

 

#LostWarrior

UnknownFiguring out how to combine different media into a compelling arts communications campaign isn’t easy. Most organizations settle for texts with accompanying video / audio clips and photos. Maybe a little tweeting is encouraged. Very little thought is given to what media best suits a particular message and how to create something that uses media in an integrated and compelling way.

That’s why I’m extremely impressed with the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s current campaign around its upcoming Terracotta Warriors exhibition. It combines video, text, performance art, interactive mapping, gameplay and social media to create an experience that’s fun and deeply immersive.

The museum’s project centers on a conceit concerning one of the famous Terracotta Warriors who’s lost his way in transit between China and San Francisco. The befuddled soldier is now wandering around The Bay Area and needs help with finding his battalion again.

A recent missive I received in my inbox explained the situation with playful gravitas:

The Asian Art Museum needs your help. One of our terracotta warriors is lost, and we have to find him before China’s Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor’s Legacy opens on February 22. What we know is this: a small group of terracotta warriors journeyed from their home in China to the museum—but somewhere along the way, this one took a wrong turn and is now missing. He’s 2,112 years old, about 5’ 5” tall, mud-colored, and doesn’t speak English. If you spot him, please post a photo on Twitter, Instagram, or our Facebook wall and tag it with #LOSTWARRIOR so we can track his whereabouts on this map. Even if you don’t have photos, share and tag your tips and leads with #LOSTWARRIOR. 

The Asian Art Museum campaign also includes fun, short videos by a variety of local figureheads such as the museum’s director Jay Xu, San Francisco Giants’ player Sergio Romo and restauranteur Martin Yan urging people to join in the search for the lost warrior.

I love this campaign because of the way it seamlessly integrates a variety of media in an organic way that doesn’t seem clunky at all. The maps work really well with the social media and performance art side of the project. And the videos add an extra dimension to the story as well as a touch of celebrity endorsement, which will doubtless help the museum to sell tickets.

I also appreciate the thought that there’s a guy dressed up in Terracotta Warrior drag wandering around the Bay Area having his photo taken by passersby. It’s a wonderfully offbeat way to merge experimental performance with publicity stunt.  And there’s something quite interesting, metaphorically-speaking, in the notion of a soldier that’s wandered away from his army  — it contrasts cliched views about Californian individualism with Chinese groupthink.

It’s interesting to me that the Asian Art Museum would devote so much creative energy (and resources, I imagine) to organizing a publicity campaign of this level of intricacy, when an exhibition as high profile as this one is most likely an easier sell than many of the institution’s other offerings. But perhaps that’s precisely why the museum feels able to invest so much in this endeavor.

In any case, I am looking forward to keeping one eye on the interactive map and another on the streets of San Francisco, panning the horizon smartphone at the ready for a short Asian dude in late third century BC Chinese military garb.

Gear Change

imagesThinking about evolution of song and singing culture is occupying a lot of my time right now and my research into this topic is taking me in some interesting directions.

I had a great conversation yesterday with Matthias Mauch, a computational music researcher at the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary College in London, about research he undertook in the evolution of one much-reviled aspect of pop song culture — namely, the cheesy “gear change” that has been part of pop song writing in the western world since the early days of the genre in the mid 20th century.

By “gear change,” Mauch means key change. Gear changes, e.g., when a song goes up by a semi-tone or tone in a reprise of its chorus, are widely disliked because they happen way too often and seem to be a crutch for unimaginative songwriters to build drama in a song.

In an intriguing and easily accessible blog post the scientist and musician wrote during his time as a research fellow at Last.fm, Mauch shows how a computational analysis of songs in the UK pop charts over several decades corroborates this widely held disdain for gear changes in pop songs.

Mauch writes:

“The proportion of songs with gear shifts is substantially declining over the history of the charts, from a staggering 15% in and around 1960 to consistently lower than 4% in the first decade of the current century.”

Interestingly though, according to Mauch’s research, gear changes are still popular around Christmas time. There’s nothing like the holiday season to bring out people’s sentimental side.

 

Who Needs An Audience?

imagesAn eminent music critic whom I had the pleasure of taking tea with a few days ago thinks there are too many choirs in his home town. “There just isn’t a large enough audience to go round” he said.

I’ve heard this complaint from a number of people over the years. But I don’t think you can ever have too much of a good thing; there are certainly too many wars in the world. Not too many choirs.

However, my friend’s assertion got me thinking about how certain kinds of art might lend themselves just as — if not more — engagingly to private participation rather than public performance.

Undoubtedly, there will always be a demand for some high-level vocal ensembles like The San Francisco Symphony Chorus, whose luminescent performance of Poulenc’s Stabat Mater I was lucky enough to catch at Davies Symphony Hall over the weekend in tandem with a polished take on the bombastic yet less inspiring Te Deum by Berlioz.

But there are countless other groups out there for whom attracting audiences shouldn’t always be the end goal.

Another friend of mine, who sings with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, has repeatedly asserted that choral music is much more fun for the people doing the singing than for the people out there listening.

I used to think he was being facetious. But now I think he has a point.

Group singing is one of the most rewarding activities out there and the beauty of it is that you can do it at all levels and sing all kinds of music. And when it comes down to it that should be enough.

Performing in front of a (paying) audience is fine, but does it really add to the essential pleasure and point of singing? It certainly gives choir members a goal towards which to drive. Yet perhaps there’s room for driving towards the goal of an internal performance just for the group’s members rather than competing with 30 other choirs for audiences on any given weekend.

OK, so maybe the performance could be videoed and put out into the world on YouTube or as a digital audio download if sharing the work is a sine qua non of an ensemble’s existence. All I’m saying is that drafty churches and uncomfortable pews patchily peopled with octogenarians wearing blue rinses need not habitually be part of the culture.

If choirs could change the way they view themselves, when occasional brilliant performances do take place, I guarantee that there will always be enough of an audience to go round.

 

 

Artist: A Slippery Word

UnknownAn interesting article I read this morning in The Australian lamenting the loss of credibility of certain words that are too easily bandied around by the media and others when talking about cultural endeavors (e.g. “heritage”, “star”, “creative”) got me thinking about a word that I’ve long been challenged by: “artist.”

In contrast to Europe, where it seems you can only use the word “artist” if you are making your full-time living as a dancer/filmmaker/composer/sculptor etc, in the United States, people tend to use the term very freely. I have heard many people with artistic leanings, even if those leanings are very much a part-time, non-remunerative component of their lives, describe themselves as “artists.” And the word is frequently applied to people who work in all kinds of businesses, from architecture firms to Internet media startups.

In a sense, there’s something quite gratifying about a society which considers activities of many different stripes to have creative merit. It’s possible to bring an artistic sensibility to just about everything in life when you think about it. It’s often said that “there’s an art to doing the books” or “there’s an art to going on a date.”

But being creative is not the same as being an artist.

Recently, out of the blue, I was lucky enough to be awarded a generous monetary prize from the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development. I had never heard of the Belle Foundation when the organization’s missive arrived in my mailbox one day in late January informing me of my accolade. I was overcome with pride, gratitude and amazement by the honor. I still have no idea how I came to the Foundation’s attention.

I was also caught quite off-guard by the letter that the Foundation’s Board sent, which referred to me as an “artist.” I lead a peripatetic life and could apply many words to describe my work. “Journalist,” “broadcaster,” “curator,” “writer,” “producer,” and “creative person” are some terms that come to mind.

But “artist” isn’t one of them. Should it be?

 

Cantometrics Revisited

Unknown-1The late American musicologist Alan Lomax’s attempt in the 1960s to find patterns by comparing the ways in which people sing in different folk traditions around the world — “Cantometrics” — was widely discredited by ethnomusicologists in the ensuing decades.

I’ve been learning about the Dutch geneticist Armand Leroi’s more recent work — which he calls “Neo-Cantometrics” — on applying the rules of evolutionary biology to Lomax’s theories. Leroi uses an algorithm known as “Grouper” and large amounts of computing power to hunt for patterns in the data sets containing just over 5000 folk songs from all over the globe collected by Lomax.

It’s fascinating stuff. In this 2007 video presentation, Leroi uses maps and song samples to illustrate similarities between the genetic makeup of geographically disparate groups of people and the vocal traits inherent in their singing.

I do feel somewhat skeptical of  Leroi’s ideas. The findings in his paper on the subject are inconclusive. And he is quick to dismiss musicologists’ criticisms of Lomax’s work on the grounds that humanists are “frightened of numbers,” which is ridiculous.

Still, I’m curious about how I might apply some of Leroi’s research to work that I am doing on the evolution of singing culture. If there are patterns in the ways people use their voices to sing, then are there also patterns in the participation and consumption habits around vocal music? And how have these evolved over time in different parts of the world?

P.S. Leroi has conducted another interesting project around vocal music, in which he created an experiment which draws on Darwinian principles of natural selection to “compose” the “perfect song.” The DarwinTunes project received quite a bit of media attention last year. An interesting 30-minute radio segment about this work, which aired last year on the UK’s Radio 4, can be heard here.

On Creating A Sense of Occasion

UnknownPictured left: The cast of The Motherf**ker with the Hat (San Francisco Playhouse‘s **, not mine).

I saw the show on opening night on Saturday and once again I marveled at the company’s amazing ability to create a sense of occasion, even when the play around which the occasion is being sensed lacks merit.

An evening spent at the new San Francisco Jazz Center on Friday experiencing a program of Gershwin numbers brought to life by four marvelous local jazz singers backed up by The Marcus Shelby Jazz Quartet was more artistically inspiring. SFJAZZ is still in the throes of its opening celebrations, but somehow, there was less pizzazz to the affair than that which accompanied the soiree at SF Playhouse.

The contrast between the two experiences has got me thinking about how important creating a sense of occasion is to an arts organization and the extent to which this feeling can be produced both during a show and around it.

SF Playhouse has produced four of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s dramas to date. This one, which follows the mostly self-sabotaging trajectories of a bunch of addicts and recovering addicts, is by far the most facile. Helmed by Gabriel Marin as a loutish yet lovable young alcoholic with anger issues trying hard to pull his life together, the  cast is strong yet prone to over acting. The sitcommy nature of the play, with its zingy one-liners and bravura plot turns, might be the cause of this.

Still, SF Playhouse knows how to throw a party. I always love stepping into this company’s world. The directors, Bill English and Susi Damilano, have a way of making every person feel welcome. The crowd is pretty diverse for a downtown theatre audience. And I think SF Playhouse is one of the very few theatres in town — it might be the only one — where cocktail dresses and suits don’t seem out of place, suggesting that the theatre’s audience is happily complicit in making the experience of going to see an opening night there feel important.

Over at the SF Jazz Center, the crowd was, surprisingly, whiter and older. But the room hopped thanks to the subtle and streamlined playing of Marcus Shelby’s brilliant cohort and the showmanship of vocalists Paula West, Dan Hicks, Jamie Davis and Kim Nalley. These singers all brought very different colors and styles to the Gershwin’s well-known cannon. I loved Hicks’ trademark incorporation of yodeling and Nalley’s a cappella version of “Summertime,” which rounded out the show.

SF JAZZ and SF Playhouse are of course two very different kinds of arts organizations producing two very different kinds of art. But I think there’s something that they could learn from each other based on the two experiences I had this past weekend.

The most  important thing, of course, is that the audience should feel engaged with the art. This happened for me at SFJAZZ but not at SF Playhouse this time around.

But there’s definitely something to be said for making your audience feel like they’ve entered an exciting new realm from the moment they step through the door. SF Playhouse is very good at doing this. SFJAZZ may well also find a way to make this possible, especially once the convivial cafe is open for business. I’m looking forward to attending more shows there and finding out.

Of Angry Waiters and Oblivious Arts Managers

images

A few days ago, I overheard a conversation between a guy who works at a swanky restaurant in Hayes Valley — let’s call him Jordan — and some of his friends.
Hayes Valley is a central neighborhood in San Francisco where many of the big performing arts institutions and venues are located, including the San Francisco Opera, the San Francisco Symphony, The Herbst Theatre, The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, The San Francisco Jazz Center and the San Francisco Ballet.
It’s also where some of the city’s best restaurants are to be found.
Jordan was commending the new Jazz Center, which opened just last week, for its generosity to his restaurant’s employees.  “They said we were welcome to come and see shows there anytime,” he said. This seems like friendly behavior from the new kid on the block, especially since the Jazz Center is about to open its own cafe with a revolving cast of esteemed chefs.
Jordan’s appreciation for the local arts scene then turned sour.
He said that unlike the Jazz Center, the other arts institutions in the neighborhood had made no attempt over the years to ingratiate themselves to his restaurant. “We stay open sometimes well into the middle of the night so that the people from the Opera, Ballet and Symphony can come in and have a late dinner and entertain themselves,” Jordon explained to his friends. “We’ve existed side by side with these organizations for years but not once has anyone from those places offered us free tickets or really thanked us for what a great job we’re doing catering to their crowd.”
I asked another local restauranteur, who happens to be a friend of mine, to share his feelings about the relationships between the arts organizations and the restaurants in Hayes Valley. He asked to be quoted anonymously. Here is what my friend said:
“SFJAZZ has been great thus far. We got some tix for helping them out during the gala. One of my employees got to attend the gala as guest.  I am not sure if it is because they are new, but our relationship is very good with them. In regards to the other arts, we do not really have a relationship with any of them, whether good or bad. I just do not know who they are.”
Hmm.
Now I understand that the arts organizations already do a lot for the restaurants by populating them with hungry pre- and post-show arts mavens. If the arts organizations left Hayes Valley tomorrow, it’s fair to say that the local dining landscape would suffer a blow.
Even so, I think the arts organizations that have been around Hayes Valley for a while and frequent places like my friend’s and Jordan’s restaurants (which I happen to know are both popular among the Opera and Symphony crowds for their proximity and high-end appeal) should take this feedback on board and comport themselves in a more neighborly manner.
Arts organizations and restaurants in Hayes Valley are all part of the same cultural ecosystem. They ought to interact symbiotically with each other and strive to maintain friendly relations. After all, don’t the Opera, Ballet and Symphony want the waiters at swanky eateries like Jardiniere, Absinthe, Rich Table, Nojo and Bar Jules to recommend their latest productions? If so, they should  follow SFJAZZ’s lead.

Points of Connection

imagesLately on Sunday mornings when I’ve been on my usual run through Golden Gate Park to the Pacific Ocean, I’ve passed by a group of about 40 elderly people dancing and singing with abandon in a concourse across the street from the De Young Museum. The music that has accompanied their activities  on several occasions is the hit K-Pop song “Gangnam Style” which can be heard blaring from boom box speakers.

Seeing this going on has made me think about how relatively rarely it is these days that a single song, dance or other cultural phenomenon carries such mass appeal. It used to be that everyone knew the words to the same songs that were sung everywhere. That’s certainly not the case any more.

It’s a funny paradox really: A few decades ago when there were only a few television stations and no Internet, there’s a case to be made that many more people experienced and talked about the same stuff. The Beatles, Star Trek etc. These days, we are deluged with so many possibilities of things to watch, read and otherwise engage with, that it can be argued that there’s much less opportunity for common points of cultural connection between masses of people.

On the other hand, the so-called “long tail” of today’s fragmented and diversified cultural landscape may have the potential to create a stronger bond between people than was possible in the past. When you find someone who shares the same point of cultural connection that you do (“It’s so great that you watch Portlandia! I love that show!” etc) it’s possible that the sense of community you feel around whatever it is that you collectively appreciate will be deeper and more passionate.

Discuss.

Weekend Warriorings

UnknownSome quick thoughts about a few cultural activities I got up to this weekend…

1)Liz Caruana is a fabulous art and commercial photographer in the Bay Area. Friday night saw the launch of Caruana’s new collection of photographs in book and gallery exhibition form at Carte Blanche Gallery in The Mission. The series, The Bay: Creators of Style, lis at the intersection of Caruana’s work as an art and commercial photographer in its depiction of portraits of  Bay Area fashion designers. The images are glossy, vivid and unabashedly pose-y. It’s hard to tell whether they’re advertising or art in some ways. I think they kind of succeed as both.

2) Eddie Izzard was in town for a few days working on some new material at Z Space. His management asked critics to refrain from reviewing the British comedian’s work-in-progress which I think is fair enough and I am simply happy to have had a chance to experience Izzard’s meandering-sharp sense of humor in such an intimate setting. What I will say, though, is that I wish I had known that Izzard was doing a set in French while in town. As a French speaker, I would have loved to have been there on Thursday night with the Francophone audience of 150 people. But I didn’t find out about it until the day I was already scheduled to see Izzard perform, the Friday, so sadly missed out. I gather that the comedian only took up French fairly recently, perhaps two or three years ago. To be able to pull off 90 minutes of standup comedy in a language which is new to you and to even begin to know what people in another culture would find funny is a remarkable feat. It’s almost beyond belief really. Then again, doing exceptionally challenging things is becoming a bit of a habit for Izzard. In 2009, he ran 43 marathons in 51 days for charity in spite of having no prior history of long-distance running. I would love to interview Izzard about his polyglotal adventures in comedy and I gather he’s about to start a big world tour with lots of French dates in it in the coming months. Perhaps I’ll have to catch him in a few places. Finally, I heard a rumor that Izzard might also be hatching a plan to perform standup in Japanese and German. Crikey.

3) With its new production of Waiting for Godot, The Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley is taking a slightly different approach to the standard post-show “talk back” formula that so many theatres practice across the land. According to the program notes, these new-format “Points of View Q&A” sessions are supposed to begin by inviting “two guests with different points of view to discuss what they thought of the play.” I was invited to attend the matinee performance yesterday and serve as one of these guests. I sat up on stage with director Jasson Minadakis, dramaturg, Margot Melcon, and assistant director, Logan Ellis. So rather than there being two guests, there were three company insiders and me. We had a nice enough conversation about the play, but there were no opposing points of view to be had really. When I answered the first question, I was met by an “I completely agree!” from the assistant director. I’d be curious to see if the effect is different when there actually are two guests with different viewpoints involved. I should say, however, that the Marin Theatre’s production is quite well done. Minadakis doesn’t play it for laughs, really, though the physical comedy between Mark Anderson Phillips’ sulky Estragon and Mark Bedard’s thoughtful, optimistic Vladimir blossoms in act two. What I loved about this production is the way in which Didi and Gogo seem to be so close to each other. Their connection is deeply human and borne not simply out of need but quite a lot of love and respect. I found the whole thing to be quite life-affirming. And I don’t get to say that too often about productions of Beckett plays.

Princess Ivona at the PAI

photoThere’s nothing quite like exploring a nascent theatre company’s work and a space that I’ve never been in before both in one fell swoop.

The Collected Works, a new company helmed by director Michael Hunter and actor Barry Kendall, has just launched into its inaugural show, Princess Ivona, by the 20th century Polish playwright Witold Gombrowicz.

The venue is the Performance Art Institute, a cavernous yet convivial warehouse-style space located down a back alley in the clubby SOMA district of San Francisco.

The company performs the first act of Gombrowicz’s sprawling allegorical piece about the power of an outsider to shake up the establishment through silence in the spacious lobby area of the PAI. Studded with lights and warmly shaped by a central water feature and scattered couches and chairs, the lobby proves to be a wonderful space in which to warm an audience up for what lies ahead. The bar also helps in this regard.

For the rest of the two and half hour play (the script of which could use some hefty editing) the audience is ushered into the main staging area. It’s cold and dark in there. The chairs are arranged in such a way that you have to turn your head to the left or to the right like watching a tennis match to follow the action.

Perhaps Hunter wishes with his blocking to suggest the coldness and alienation that exists between the courtly characters and between these people and Ivona, a peasant girl who’s brought to court as a kind of practical joke made out of boredom.

In the final scene, set at a banquet, the production team makes wonderful use of video projections. Our perspective on the event is fascinatingly altered, as the camera projects onto the wall images of the courtiers eating and drinking as viewed from above.

The Collected Works, a company which has more PhDs in it than I think I’ve ever seen in a single acting troupe, tries to make the most of the enticing staging possibilities of PAI. But there’s still some way to go in terms of creating a fully immersive experience for the audience. Many scenes are hard to watch because they happen too far to the right or left for sections of the audience to see without getting cricks in their necks. And the space is unforgiving in terms of lighting. Half of the time, action happens in the shadows, I think somewhat unintentionally, as the actors struggle to find their light.

Oh, and one more thing: Meredith Axelrod‘s musical interludes are a highlight of the production. The plum-voiced vocalist/guitarist wanders about playing and singing like a troubadour in between the acts of the play, reflecting through song on the action. I’d like to get her on my show to talk about old American ballads.  She’s obviously expert at this repertoire.

Marclay’s Marvelous Mashup

UnknownChristian Marclay’s 13-minute-long video montage, Video Quartet, (2001) is the sort of work that you can spend an entire day with.

This may not be true of the Swiss-American artist’s more recently created 24-hour, real-time synchronized video collage, The Clock, (2010) which the artist painstakingly built from thousands of film clips indicating the passage of time and is synchronized with local time so that minutes and hours depicted in The Clock also pass simultaneously in the viewer’s real time. When that work arrives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art later this April, I am guessing that the longest I will be able to watch it for is about five minutes.

Video Quartet was constructed in a similar way to The Clock. The artist sampled more than 700 Hollywood films, many of them iconic, to collect footage of people singing, playing instruments, tap dancing, knocking on doors and making other sounds. He then reassembled the film clips into a new narrative which makes you see and hear the clips as you have never experienced them before.

What’s fascinating and engrossing about Video Quartet (so called because it unfolds across four screens) is how beautifully the disparate clips fit together to create a modernist symphony of sight and sound. The artist cleverly juxtaposes film excerpts that naturally relate to each other not just visually but aurally. For example, at one point, two pianists on adjacent screens play music that’s loud and percussive but each has a different approach to playing in this way — one plays very close to the keys and the other lifts his hands way off the keyboard. The effect is extremely hypnotic.

Beyond the viscerality of the experience of sitting in a darkened room at The Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford enjoying Marclay’s work, I came away thinking about how much music penetrates our visual culture and visa versa. Sometimes, especially in the classical music world, people forget that music is in many ways a visual medium. The same can be said of visual art in the traditional western sense of the word. We should think more deeply about the music in every painting.

On a final note, I was lucky to attend the installation with Christopher Musgrave, a Bay Area sound artist and rock musician who served as the technical director ton Marclay on Video Quartet. I asked Chris about the use of all those famous clips in the work from a copyright perspective. I can’t imagine it’s easy or cheap to get the rights to use scenes from Hollywood movies like Back to the Future or Sweet and Lowdown. Chris didn’t seem to think that this was an issue. “Marclay’s work reconfigures the film clips into something new and original” was one explanation he gave. He also said “I think an artwork like this flies under the radar.” I certainly don’t buy his second explanation. The first, I am not so sure. Perhaps the use of the clips in this way is covered under the slippery “fair usage laws.”

I would be intrigued to find out how Marclay managed to get away with his mashup. And most importantly, I’m glad he did.

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