From: Anna Biller (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Dec 03 2005 - 09:39:55 PST
My comment was based on the text below, in which Tony says we should
resist market-based institutionalization altogether. Of course we can't
do that, I agree. But he is talking about the work as if it has been
DETERMINED by market capitalism. I guess you could argue that anything
produced in a capitalist society is determined by capitalism. But I
still maintain that people are/ were making personal films, and not
making work in order to be part of a power machine. Maybe he means an
intellectual power machine. But that's not really market capitalism, as
ideas aren't worth much. And the institutions and the filmmakers are
not making substantial money.
Anthology was formed within, albeit to a substantial
degree against the grain of, the American heartland of market
capitalism. Hence the elements that found their way into Jonas Mekas’s
design... are artifacts of his efforts and successes within
a larger cultural and economic framework that reflects these same values
to a far greater degree.
I would prefer to resist market-based
institutionalization altogether, as each of us is able, and to defend
the relatively “quality-free” environment that experimental media
inhabits so comfortably because of its relative isolation from the
marketplace.
However, where some of us may have swallowed the idea that hierarchies
of “quality” or “greatness” are needed, they must also acknowledge the
concomitant conditions of the market system we inhabit. As Fred again
implicitly recognizes, this is a system that entails the ideology of
individualism and the work ethic, and within which nagging voices in the
end serve to reproduce the inequities they criticize---by alienating and
homogenizing the critical establishment.
On Dec 2, 2005, at 11:56 PM, Brian Frye wrote:
> Anna writes:
> "I also don't see how you can talk about people making their personal
> artwork and films as MARKET CAPITALISM."
>
> Well, I buy my camera on eBay. And get my projector from the thrift
> store. And film from the Kodak store. And process it at the film lab
> that charges me $12 a roll. Prints for $.30 a foot. And then I give
> it to the FMC (or Peripheral Produce), which rents or sells it and
> gives me a cut. Sure looks like "market capitalism" to me. I've got
> money, and I can spend it how I like, and maybe even turn a profit.
> Including on making personal artworks and films. Or on video games.
> My pick. Not that I'm exactly clear as to why that's supposed to be a
> criticism.
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