lectures at columbia

On a more blog-friendly note (I just had to get that academic load off my desk yesterday), I was surprised to overhear Norwegian spoken behind me last night at a lecture by Guggenheim curator Jon Ippolito at the Art and Technology series. One of the women speaking Norwegian was from Oslo, the other was actually speaking Danish, and they were both art history students at Århus University doing internships at galleries in Chelsea. They were very enthusiastic about the art history program at Århus, which integrates other required courses into the overall study plan (like a "real" degree program). It's pretty much the opposite in Oslo, she explained, where art history classes must be picked up here and there as you go along.

Anyway, Ippolito is an artist and professor at Still Water, the New Media program of the University of Maine at Orono. He's a lively, quick talking, young guy who appears on programs of international conferences for new media art, like ISEA. Last night he spoke about his efforts to promote new solutions to intellectual property issues that were in the true Internet spirit of sharing (or what media giants call cheating). An example of a potentially effective and realistic copyright process for the future that he championed was one developed by Creative Commons. Judging from the discussion afterwards, the artist audience seemed most interested in 1) how to do "subversive" projects on the net and still avoid going to jail and 2) how to make money with their work without going to "the dark side" of commercial conniving.

The other talk I attended this week at Columbia was T.J. Clark's, the second in a new lecture series at the art history dept. dedicated to the heritage of Meyer Shapiro. Just as disorganized, overcrowded (200 people attend these talks in rooms built for maybe 100) and late to start as the first, I was disappointed by an uninspired reading of David's The Rape of the Sabine Women using structuralist anthropologist Levi-Strauss' taboo concept as interpretative framework. I know, its art history and all, but yawn.