John Berger—The Success and Failure of Picasso

John Berger
The Success and Failure of Picasso
(1965)

My note says:
p. 6—"the man, the personality, has put his art in the shade"
p. 9—"For Picasso, what he is is far more important than what he does."
p. 13—"Picasso's historical ambiguity...his fame rests upon his modernity... And yet in his attitude to art...there is a bias which is not in the least modern..."
It could not have been obvious in 1965 just how post-modern this outlook is, though in drawing a connection between the "what he is" outlook and Picasso's great fame JB clearly grasps the underlying mechanism. It is but a short step from the focus on self and the hostility to learning and reason and experimentation to the phenomenon of Famous for being Famous. The Picasso herein described would have made a near ideal instagram user...and instagram (the company and the user community) would have loved having him. The nineteenth- and twenty-first-century provenance of this ethos suggests a cyclical rather than linear history.

The First Angelinos

Song was an integral element of Gabrielino rituals, and although songs could be performed independently of dance or ceremony, the latter activities could not be performed without song. Some songs were associated with specific ceremonies, while others could be adapted to virtually any performance. In addition, songs were commonly linked together to create a "song series."

Songs were inherited along family lines and were rarely disclosed to outsiders. Lineages owned songs, as did individuals, and these could not be sung by others without permission. The tomyaar was responsible for the songs owned by the lineage, just as the head of each family was responsible for family-owned songs. (179)

William McCawley
The First Angelinos: The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles (1996)

Given my lack of depth on this topic and the reductive nature of the source, all speculation is tenuous. With that disclaimer, here's what sticks out to me.

Songs COULD be performed independently of their necessary function? You would not think this had ever been the case in any tribal culture if you listened to the pre-packaged narratives of undergraduate education; or perhaps I am guilty of absolutizing on this question without realizing it. In any case, it never made sense to me that any culture could have (and value) music without inevitably coming to have (and value) it for its own sake. Whether this impulse rises to the level of post-industrial Decadence or is closely regulated and/or circumscribed (e.g. like casual sex, which WMC finds was strictly discouraged yet allowed during a certain festival) really is rather irrelevant. The degree to which a human need is regulated by a society can probably be explained by the constellation of other social, technological, environmental forces, etc. True needs, if that's what they are, cannot productively be bottled up completely; and of course sex is again the ultimate illustration, pointing to an age-old debate vis-a-vis the relative merits of Judaism/Christianity/Islam and the incessant violence which has followed them everywhere vs. "primitive" tribal societies which, it must be said, we have been too quick to idealize in this way, and yet DO seem to have had surprisingly nuanced, well-developed, time-tested ways of managing conflicts between individual and collective needs. And so it's a mistake to view what seems to us like excessively strict rationing of recreational/leisure/pleasurable activities as evidence that these people conceived of these things vastly differently than we do. Is it possible that the full constellation of socially/historically contingent factors simply yielded a somewhat different recipe for survival which nonetheless reflects very clearly the understanding that you cannot survive under conditions of total deprivation?

That this was, in addition, a Permission Culture vis-a-vis family-owned songs certainly is interesting. WMC remarks several times elsewhere that the individual profit motive and the law of supply and demand were the Gabrielinos' operative economic principles. Yet here he never says that songs were proprietary in the economic sense, just that they were "owned." It is hard to say more without greater depth of study, but certainly that distinction could be important, i.e. it seems that respect for ownership was based on intrinsic and not economic value.

Conversely, Shamans owned their own "power songs" (179) and did profit from their activities.

[from a notebook, 2017]

Close Encounters With Permission Culture

I've just finished reading Lawrence Lessig's 2004 book "Free Culture," which is chock full of mostly demoralizing stories, observations and ancedotes culled from recent and occasionally not so recent legal and cultural history. Lessig pulls together this history in order to make a point, and he makes it convincingly, but the history is worth knowing in and of itself. The nugget that I just can't get over is ASCAP's threat to sue the Girl Scouts, among others, for singing licensed music at camp. You can read all about it here (via Lessig's helpful list of the book's online references here).

Once upon a time, as a freshly minted music school graduate eager to gain a foothold in the more business-oriented side of my chosen profession, I began looking into joining a performance rights organization, and, for reasons I've since forgotten, ultimately settled on ASCAP. Even then, I had misgivings about joining such a club, for years earlier, ASCAP had supposedly threatened action against a local venue where I and many of my colleagues frequently performed. Rather than pay the fee, the owner began enforcing a zero-tolerance policy regarding "other people's licensed cover songs" and requiring each performing group to fill out and sign a form. This made for some eclectic, original programming, and gave me a great excuse to impose even more of my tunes on my bandmates, but those trivial facts aside, there were no winners here: not ASCAP, who hasn't received a cent; not the owner, who evidently was scared shitless by the whole thing; and least of all those of us who perform there, of whom even the most radical like to play other people's licensed music from time to time, or at least know that we can if we want to.

To have one's music performed by others is not only one of the most basic artistic aspirations which many composers share, but also, the state of music publishing being what it is, increasingly the only meaningful financial aspiration as well, or so I've been reading over the last several years. I'm normally too pessimistic to plan on things like that ever happening, but have occasionally been prone to making such plans simply to put my mind at rest, and as there was no application fee, it seemed harmless enough to just send the damn thing in and forget about it until that first royalty check showed up. Nonetheless, I was never totally comfortable doing so knowing that I was also criminalizing the performance of my music in the very types of venues it was most likely to be performed in, venues where the management and the musicians alike are lucky to break even on any given night. This ultimately weighed on my mind more heavily than not being a member had before, until finally an envelope arrived from ASCAP. Rather than a welcome packet, it was my application, which was being returned to me because I had forgotten to sign one of the forms. I've never been so relieved, and to this day, the incomplete application sits buried in a file cabinet, where I anticipate it will stay for a very long time.