The Persistence of Chaos - $1M for malware infected laptop
thepersistenceofchaos.com
thepersistenceofchaos.com
Get Banksy to light it on fire and the molten slag should sell for at least $100 million. :)
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/software/
"Even if you don’t put that little © on your work, you automatically get copyright protection the instant your work of expression becomes fixed in a tangible medium. Theoretically, this means that you own the copyright, and no one may copy, distribute, display or make adaptations of the work without your permission."
The difference is it must be registered for the creator to sue for monetary damages.
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/registration-and-...
"You must register your copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office before you are legally permitted to bring a lawsuit to enforce it."
* Registration is also needed to get the longest available copyright term. * There's no need for the registration to happen anytime near when the work is created or published. If I needed to sue someone for copyright infringement for a piece of software I wrote and published in 1998 and stopped maintaining in 1999, I could file the registration on Tuesday and the lawsuit on Wednesday.
Whoever thinks of buying this: I'll get you one for half the price.
It won't be "a work of art" but it will functionally be the same. I even promise I wont neuter it's LAN port.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/705278696/epis...
Edit: Looking at it now, this appears to actually just be a somewhat clever way to get attention for “Deep Instinct” - a company that does some sort of malware threat detection.
In my early tech days riding the helpdesk in college, I'd heard about it and half thought it an urban legend. Then it hit campus, and I had to clean about a half dozen systems. Not a complex process, and more fun than most given that I could admonish the user, "You really should have wished Shankar a happy birthday."
I wish more people would be aware of the importance of dates.
We have been trained to see most works on canvas as art first, layers of pigments second. Through education, the skill used to create them has become evident to all of us - thereby sanctifying them from these criticisms. Yet all art was subject to such criticism at one time or another. Some even going so far to call Munch's paintings "An abortion, a failure like those Zola described so well D'Oeuvre. Here is no longer a question of nature, only a bizarre madness, delirious moods, feverish hallucinations" and "Are those meant to be hands or are they blobs of fish mousse smeared in lobster sauce?"
Sounds familiar?
Art goes beyond the technicalities of the creation of the work itself. Art is a form of communication. An attempt to have a conversation with a society. Or an expression of the artist’s uniqueness. It can be that and so much more. The point of art does not have to be linear technical accomplishment, it can be the exploration of the bizarre and the strangeness of our world. The fish in a blender were put there as an invitation to kill a being. The point of the piece was the question, will a human being push the button? In a world where cruelty exists at a push of a button that is a valid and fascinating social experiment.
This work is original and creative in the sense that it packs what wreaks our world into havoc into one device and puts it on the pedestal. Our world is increasingly governed by blips of code. Bad blips of code have caused billions of dollars in damage. In that laptop lies the power of immense destruction, contained in a cheap plastic container. What does it say about us when we look at it and the world we have wrought? Those are the questions that pop into my mind when I look at the work. That’s what I feel the artist is trying to communicate.
We will at some point recognize the audacity of this piece as art as well. But we haven’t matured to that point yet. We still look at it as “blobs of fish mousse smeared in lobster sauce”
Art is an ever-evolving conversation. All we have to do to appreciate it is… listen more closely and relax the preconceptions that cloud our mind. Let them all fall away to hear what the artist might have to say.
It is far more interesting to look at art this way than the common, reductive lens.
Audacity is overrated. Twitter is full of clever people straining to be as audacious, controversial, memorable, and viral as possible. Audacity is as common as dirt - an insight the shock troops of modern art have yet to absorb.
> Art goes beyond the technicalities of the creation of the work itself. Art is a form of communication.
Yes - but the skill involved in creation is just as important as the idea being communicated. Installing malware on a laptop is a relatively common skill; a task that could be completed by any millions or even billions of people.
The difference between this form of art and the various iterations of The Sick Child is stark - anyone who has experienced loss can relate to the themes of Munch's painting. True, a critic may not like Munch's technique and compare it to bad food. But the skill and technique actually exist and are encoded in the piece alongside powerful ideas of loss and yearning. And that's what art means to me - it's not a bare, cheap, hacky communication of an idea - art is a synthesis of true talent and transcendent themes.
Munch's work could be sent backwards or forwards in time 500 years and the people viewing the piece could still comprehend the themes and appreciate the skill involved. (Or not - I'm sure there'll still be art critics 500 years from now). An infected laptop on a live stream can only exist in a very narrow and parochial context. That doesn't mean it's not art. It's just bad art.
> "Here is no longer a question of nature, only a bizarre madness, delirious moods, feverish hallucinations"
As an aside, that's actually a spot-on description of Munch's most famous work, The Scream - some critics may simply have not realized the shambolic madness of the piece is a feature and not bug.
"Pay attention to me" seems to be a recurring theme.
There has to be more to it than that. Otherwise, this very message would be classified as "art". If everything is art, then the term becomes meaningless.
> This work is original and creative in the sense that it packs what wreaks our world into havoc into one device and puts it on the pedestal
Works of art have historically required some effort. This is very low effort. I could take a potato battery from a kid's science fair, give it some fashionable title (something something society something technology mumble energy from nature) and it would become a piece of modern art.
There has to be some standard, and these pieces should be amenable to criticism. Otherwise, how would one distinguish someone's garbage dumb from a piece of art? You can't.
From your link (Jeff Koon's ball):
> However, this state of perfection is fragile and impermanent. Temperature fluctuations and vibrations blend the solutions of water, causing the ball to move off-center and eventually to sink. The improbability of this sculpture underscores its metaphorical associations with life, death, and ambition that Koons carefully considered when he made a series of works for Equilibrium
That sounds to me like an excuse. "I'm unable to perfect this and account for the required variables, so I'll concoct some story on how this is done by design".
As for the goldfish in a blender...that is also low effort and provides no real insight on human nature.
> The fish in a blender were put there as an invitation to kill a being.
Yes, and we know people will do that, by observation. A single fish and a single blender would have been enough to prove the point. But then, it would look like a 5 minute job.
In fact, it would take just as much to drop a pair of glasses against the wall. This would be art by the above definition, and people actually though so:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/arts/sfmoma-glasses-prank...
It could be argued that it was a piece of art challenging art itself.
> In that laptop lies the power of immense destruction, contained in a cheap plastic container.
As a modern day's pandora's box, it's not too bad. Still. there must be a way to convey this in a more profound way. Which way is that? I don't know, but I only dedicated 5 minutes trying to come up with an answer. Maybe we could come up with something better in a month.
Or we could place a MicroSD card in a pedestal with a couple of viruses, in 5 minutes and be done with it.
Why? What is it?
> Works of art have historically required some effort.
Effort is not a reliable or particularly good metric at all. Conceptual art as a genre is not based on effort, sometimes intentionally eschews effort, and there are many famous conceptual artists in the last century that have been accused of low effort yet still changed the world.
> There has to be some standard, and these pieces should be amenable to criticism. Otherwise, how would one distinguish someone’s garbage dumb [sic] from a piece of art? You can’t.
Correct. You can’t, and you never could. There is no such standard, and there does not have to be a standard. This is art, not logic. The questions “what is art?” and “is this piece art or garbage?” has always existed and always will.
> As for the goldfish in a blender...that is also low effort and provides no real insight on human nature.
Goldfish in a blender as a piece of art tautologically says something about human nature. To do something like that is human. To think it’s silly is human. To write it off as low effort is human. To be concerned for the fish while we’re blind to the animal and environmental destruction our economy brings is human. The only way to deny that it’s making any statement on human nature is to not put any effort into it and not think about it.
The reason an auctioneer matters is they typically are paid a (sometimes decreasing) percentage of the final bid, or a (sometimes lower) percentage of the reserve, if there are no bids. But details vary.
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For the hell of it I will bid with a throwaway and see what are the next steps.