Framers

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 19 March 2014.

I like the Joe Lazarus Jr. campaign almost being echoed/ paralleled/ shadowed by the blog.

Like the two emerge simultaneously or the one shortly after the other, but the blog--the more nefarious entity--controls the outer frame while providing no content of its own.  Even when Joe is able to achieve some kind of victory with regard to Arthur or the project, the blog posts it and thereby claims a kind of ownership over it.

This to me seems a very insidious aspect of the whole embedding, linking, posting/ reposting, tweeting/ retweeting phenomenon: the author/ artist no longer has control of the final way their works will be framed (maybe never did).  And later "framers" can, in a sense, usurp authorship by re-presenting someone else's work in their own context.

History will not be kind to this generation: usurpers with a penchant for thinking they are all famous, all standing on their own proscenium stage before a captive audience of their own adoring followers/ fans/ friends (our project obviously takes that same penchant to a ridiculous extreme).

Maybe the actual creators, those whose art is at bottom of the frames-within-frames will get some kind of credit when these accretions are finally removed. Or maybe modern artists are actually making art with this sort of framing in mind, such that the art requires that kind of gratuitous framing to have its effect.

Maybe it's all smoke, no fire.  All buzz, no substance.  Okay, I'm digressing...