Sun 31 May 2009
Art for Money’s (oops) Art’s Sake
Posted by anaglyph under Idiots, In The News, Technology, Web Politics
[17] Comments
Along with the prestigious Cow Medals I hand out very sparingly here on The Cow, I think I’m going to have to invent some kind of trophy for the opposite end of the spectrum; an award for those who say the stupidest things on teh webs.
I’d kick off the ceremony with the CEO of Sony, Michael Lynton, who last week opined “I haven’t seen any good come out of the internet”. Translating that into something that makes sense to people who aren’t the buck-stops-here-guy for multinational companies: “I don’t get why this thing is bigger than television and getting bigger by the attosecond and we can’t figure out a way to make as much money out of it as we used to make out of all that old technology we have”.[tippy title=”*”]Or: “God in Heaven – just look at all that MONEY that we’re NOT making!”[/tippy]
Mr Lynton got a good old walloping immediately on the nets of course, and tried to backpedal in an article on the Huffington Post, managing only to dig himself an even deeper hole by revealing the real extent of his failure to grok the magnitude of the thing he’s trying to get his brain around.
I cannot subscribe to the views of those online critics who insist that I “just don’t get it,”
…he protests, and then goes on to comprehensively demonstrate his inability to get it.
His Huffington Post whinge is so clubfooted, and so embarrassingly naive, that it is staggering to believe that this guy has managed to get to be the guy in charge of one of the largest corporations in the world.
He laughingly attempts to equate the ‘Information Superhighway'[tippy title=”†”]Surely one of the daftest most empty-headed and inappropriate expressions ever uttered…[/tippy] with an actual ‘highway’…
In the 1950’s, the Eisenhower Administration undertook one of the most massive infrastructure projects in our nation’s history — the creation of the Interstate Highway System… Guard rails went along dangerous sections of the road. Speed and weight limits saved lives and maintenance costs. And officers of the law made sure that these rules were obeyed.
…and then suggests that unless we do something, our kids are going to grow up inside some kind of artistic vacuum, without anything at all decent to ‘enliven their culture’.
As I go into my sixth decade, I listen to people like Mr Lynton and realise that… I actually feel young again. While he stamps his foot and pouts and sulkingly packs up his marbles into his little string bag, folks all around the planet who do understand what’s going on in the 21st Century are just getting on with their business and doing very well thanks all the same.
Mr Lynton wants the world to be the way it was when his company was making packets of money and everything was nicely settled into a paradigm he could understand. By drawing stupid analogies and playing the Fear card he wants people to think the world will be a whole lot worse off without companies like Sony providing the entertainment they think we should see. The implication being, of course, that without them the alternatives couldn’t possibly be anything but inferior, and we would all be engulfed by some kind of cultural Dark Ages.
I’m getting to be an old guy now (relatively speaking, you understand), but never have I been as optimistic as I am now about the future of art. Would I be disappointed if mega budget movies like The Da Vinci Code and Spiderman disappeared off the face of the earth? Not one whit. Would I care if Mariah Carey or Avril Lavigne or Kings of Leon were taken up in the Rapture tomorrow? Not even remotely.
My Lynton – for all your wailings about the End Times, let me put this to you: an artist doesn’t need much these days to make something worth watching or listening to. And an audience doesn’t need much to experience that effort. To translate: We. Don’t. Need.You.
If you didn’t exist, music and painting and poetry and literature and film wouldn’t cease to exist. As much as you desperately might like to think you have some important part to play in the great cultural sweep of the human species, you are just an accessory. You are unimportant.
Do you get it?
No, I didn’t think so.
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*Or: “God in Heaven – just look at all that MONEY that we’re NOT making!”
†Surely one of the daftest most empty-headed and inappropriate expressions ever uttered…
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As the great David Mamet once said “Everyone wants money. That’s why it’s called money.”
Well I’m all for art – just don’t ask Brian Eno what it is.
Ah Sony – their stuff is always the worst of the worst! Made more sense when the Japs were in charge, which they still are in a way, they just kept buying up all these western companies, and like Rome – all those regional governers and a loony at home are a bad combo.
I liked it when the head of Sony in France was kept locked in his office for three days. Those frog workers know how to negotiate with a boss!
Being french they probably just drank wine, ate cheese and shagged anyway – but it’s the thought that counts.
Now back to making my fortune
The King
Thoughts very much like these went through my head this evening, as I struggled to open a DVD case that some idiot had forgotten to take the fucking security plastic thing off when I bought it, and then halfway through the film the disc sputtered to a halt because it was damaged anyway.
I thought to myself, I am sick and tired of being treated like a fucking idiot and a criminal by these people in return for my hard earned money. I demand quality, and I demand to be treated like my custom is worth having and keeping.
Companies like Sony completely dropped the ball on basic concepts like these many years ago.
Yes it does seem like another case of the Peter Principal in action.
Spare us from these deranged oligarchs:)
The King
Can we wait until after Avril Lavigne does a spread in Playboy before she does that rapture “thang?”
Cissy Strutt: Ah yes – speaking through the lips of the scrumptious Rebecca Pidgeon, if I remember correctly
King Willy: Your Rome analogy is more than apposite. Sony is such a behemoth that it has totally lost touch with a whole part of the world that pretty much everyone has now integrated significantly into their lives. Michael Lynton quite obviously sees the internet as some kind of fancy conduit for the dissemination of his (old school) intellectual property, when anyone who spends any time with it understands that it is SO much more than that. He is being as naive as the Church when it commissioned Gutenberg to print bibles on his press.
Universal Head: Sony would simply argue that you are suffering from the effects of theft and piracy on their product, and that they’re protecting your best interests as their valued customer. This hoary old conclusion is predicated on a ridiculous conceit. It started with the recording industry side of the business when music was becoming popular on the net and went like this:
– Our music is becoming available on the internet.
– People are downloading it FOR FREE and not buying our CDs.
– Ergo, for every download someone makes FOR FREE, we lose a sale.
– We’re losing money to ‘piracy’.
Of course, even the most challenged of simpletons can see where the logic breaks down in that argument: a download does NOT equal a potential sale. You can draw no sensible argument at all to say that a person would have purchased the music had it not been available on the net. The best you can do is infer that they might have. Of course, this is not to say that people do not steal the music – we know that happens too – but the indications from mega-successful online music ventures like iTunes is that people will buy the music if the price is reasonable. And everybody still makes their money!
Sony was one of the biggest whingers in this respect too, but now they are quite happy to rake in the online bucks from music. Except they still think they’re ‘missing out’ on all those dollars that ‘pirates’ aren’t paying them. And they’re pissed because they can’t figure out a way to make this paradigm work for movies. Well, someone smarter will figure out a way and we will end up with art & music & film of a high calibre despite the lack of involvement of Sony.
Mike: If I understand the rules correctly, if she does a spread in Playboy, she fails to qualify for The Rapture anyway, so you should be safe there.
Is Celine Dion in line for the Rapture too? Can you put a word in upstairs, Rev?
The scrumptious Rebecca Pidgeon said “Yeah, I’m the go-getter. You tell me what it is you want me to go get.” It was the only slightly less scrumptious Danny de Vito who said the money line.
And wasn’t it Betty page (or some other screen diva) who said “It’s better to be looked over than to be overlooked.”
The King
Casey: Well I know you’re baiting me, but the Kings of Leon are certainly not the Beatles of their generation. Whatever you think of the standard of their pop music, they are hardly innovators in any way – a Kings of Leon CD is your bog standard studio-style recording. Those guys do nothing more than lounge comfortably on the shoulders of giants.
As far as the concept of ‘getting something for free’ is concerned, well, those big corporations will never understand how that works. Because we live in an era where everything is so heavily monetized, some people, like Michael Lynton, make the mistake of equating MONEY with VALUE in every kind of transaction. It’s so enmeshed in his way of thinking that he’s clueless as to why people think what he says is so idiotic. It’s like trying to explain geometry to a duck.
We all know that it’s now possible to spend hours – maybe even ALL your entertainment time – solely on the net. And that’s not downloading Mr Lynton’s precious intellectual property, it’s just doing things that you can do, perfectly legitimately, for free. Like blogging. Or reading blogs. Or sharing photographs. Or watching YouTube. Michael Lynton makes the colossal error of determining that all these kinds of activities are worthless when compared to the Wonders That Sony Can Bring You. And worse, for him, he can’t understand how you can have all that stuff and somehow not figure out a way to get people to pay for it. That’s why he draws the stupid freeway analogy: “If only they could put controls on this damn thing we could find a way to charge people!”
He’s really peeved that people are nicking his films, but it’s simply not borne out in any way that it’s hurting the studios. Just like it wasn’t with music. The big players are projecting that it will hurt them, and, in time it will. But not in the way they think – they’ll lose their market share alright, but not via thievery. They’ll lose it because they are dinosaurs. Their time is done.
In a way I feel sorry for Lynton. He’s looking out on a situation in which he is totally at sea. He thinks all the evil consumers are out to steal his livelihood and make his life a misery, but what he fails to realise is that he and his cronies were only ever enablers. People don’t care about movie studios or record companies. They only care about being entertained. And they got entertainment before there was ever a Sony, and they’ll get entertainment after Sony disappears down the plughole. And the quality of the entertainment won’t be affected one little bit.
And yes, U2 and the tiresome Bono will go up to the nice cosy little Catholic Heaven. I’m sure they’ll all have a nice time.
Pil: Her too.
Cissy Strutt: Ah, that’s right. I’m getting confused with:
“Everybody makes their own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it isn’t fun. It’s entertainment.”
King Willy: Indubitably.
Maybe someone at Sony should explain to Lynton that it’s the Internet that connects all the folks who shelled out for the Sony PlayStation 3 to connect and play games online for free, and quite possibly drives sales of PS3 games because of their multiplayer capability.
Ya know, draw him a picture with pen and paper or something.
A whiner is a whiner. He wants his cake, to be able to eat it, and to get a packet of donuts and a latte as well. And a second serving of cake. With ice-cream… “W-a-a-a-a-a-a-ah! That boy took my cake! W-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-h!”
Well when I was growing up, I do recall Mom and Dad always telling us to go find something to do and “entertain ourselves” if we moaned and groaned that we were bored.
Well here we are with that whole “internets” thing entertaining ourselves with endless possibilities. Posting our art work, stories, poetry, videos of every fashion; just an endless list of things to entertain & express ourselves.
Now our modern Mom and Dad (Sony) and all of those other big wigs in the entertainment industry are at a complete loss as what to do with the little creative monsters they have created.
It has been interesting over the years watching how they would handle all of this new found freedom we have. I give them a D- at best.
If Mr Lynton really likes his silly Eisenhower Superhighway = Internet Highway analogy we can all go over to his house and start singing Springsteen’s “Wreck on the Highway” to him.
Either that or Loudon Wainwright’s “Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road”…
MI: I think you give them far too much credit – they didn’t ‘create’ anything, and that’s really the whole problem. Lynton (and others like him) want to paint the picture that Sony is responsible for bringing you, the lucky audience, all the wonderful music that you have. He probably really thinks that. But he’s making the mistake of conflating the conduit with the content. Humans create content with whatever they have. If a Sony comes along then that’s good fortune for everyone because they bring money to the table. But like most people who are preoccupied with money, Michael Lynton fails to see that it’s not the important part of the equation. He wants people to believe that without the mega companies we’d have some kind of barren artistic landscape. That’s plainly ridiculous – Sony didn’t exist a hundred years ago and we still had music and art and literature (arguably better music and art and literature at that). Like I said – he wants his cake and the pleasure of scoffing it down in front of us.
Colonel: How about AC/DC’s Highway to Hell?
Or perhaps Chris de Burgh’s ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman”.
People forget that the phenomenon of being able to ‘own’ music is very recent. Even in my grandparent’s generation it wasn’t something that was available to many. Music was something you experienced by either doing it yourself or going out to listen to someone else do it. The idea that you can have it anytime you like has both given and taken value from it. Undoubtedly people listen to way more music now than they ever did, but music is also commoditized as a result.
Lynton thinks that making music into a commodity is a great thing, but I am ambivalent about it. I think it makes music a lot less ‘special’. Lynton sees Sony as some kind of great boon to mankind, but I see it simply as a piece of plumbing. If we didn’t have Sony and all the big facilitators of IP, then we’d just have different plumbing. Which is where the internet comes in – it’s a different kind of plumbing. It doesn’t suit Michael Lynton because he’s not in control of the taps anymore.
Recently we saw the same kind of argument come from Rupert Murdoch: “The current days of the internet will soon be over”, he said, bemoaning the failing ‘business model’ of free newspaper websites and outlining his plans to charge for newspaper access. If he does that, he will fail, rapidly and spectacularly. Like the record companies he is equating the numbers of people who go to free newspaper sites with lost revenue. He is incapable of seeing that you can’t do the math like that.
So, how will it pan out when he starts to charge to read his newspapers online? Here is my prediction: people will stop reading them. In HUGE numbers. And they will go where the news is free, because someone will make sure that there are sites where it is. The only way he can make people read his newspapers is to attempt to change the net in some fundamental way that stops people from generating free content of any quality. These are the ‘guardrails’ and ‘speed’ and ‘weight’ limits that Michael Lynton is dribbling over.
I don’t know if there’s really any way that these powerful companies could do this (their political influence and their motivation is huge) but my hunch is that it’s too late for that. I really hope so. If we let them change the internet in the way they want, we are all great fools.
These are desperate wealthy men and we need to make sure that people understand that the gewgaws they are dangling in front of us, and the threats they are making are all cheap and pathetic. If they fail we will not lose anything except a 20th century business paradigm that is well past its use-by date.