The 1990's Geocities style animated background image found by following the "LOG" link should be a 404, but it's no art.
Pirated software hard drive on display as art
A New York gallery is displaying a piece of “art” that consists of a one-terabyte portable hard drive chock-full of pirated code. Manuel Palou’s “5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte”, currently on display at the Art 404 gallery in New York, consists of a single drive placed on a plinth, containing stolen code from Adobe, Nintendo, …
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Monday 28th November 2011 21:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Very much Art
Art of rubbing up the RIAAA , MPAA et al. Wow, I like the audacity and your middle para about "interconnected superhighway ........ percieved value.... some such."
I think you can add some more value (millions) to it by multiplying and 130 Gig odd size of music files which have deprived thousands of artists of their livelihood, their dependants and countless generations of their royalties. ( 1 song = 2 million dollars- per the last court judgement). Also add the millions of dollars in "lost" value to the RIAA and MPAA mafia execs of their cocaine lifestyles monies. Multiply all of it by a factor of four for the negative trickle down effect it has had in the USA economy.
Art indeed.
My offer for the used HDD ! $50. Worth every penny.
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 01:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Uh.. did you read the article? It never said that he distributed the music. If the "artist" didn't distribute the media, then there's no copyright infringment and the value can only be the standard sale price for the media.
If you'd really been paying attention to all the RIAA/MPAA copyright articles over the last several years, you'd notice they don't go after people downloading copyrighted material; it's not worth the lawyer fees. They only go after people uploading the material. The thing is, using torrents (or other P2P clients) to download something also makes you an uploader and thus why they go after people using them.
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 11:21 GMT Fred Flintstone
Aha - but here is the rub..
.. it means this art can never be sold or the RIAA (et al) *will* be able to claim infringement. However, this has an extra twist: in every case we are talking about ONE (1) copy of the protected works, so the usual gazillions that their creative calculations tend to contain do not apply here. In addition, all they have at the moment is the manifest. It doesn't need to be true, so they would have to prove the content first, and my intention to *use* the drive rather than use it as art (a bit like buying a product box because you like it).
Heck, if I had the money I'd buy the thing just to see them try (and yes, you need money because they'd try the usual dragging-it-out-for-years blackmail), It would be fun to make them look ridiculous (um, *more* ridiculous) in court. All in the name of art, of course, nothing to do with the fact that abusers of IP laws deserve every bit of crap you can throw at them. Because that's the real abuse - their interpretation all but destroyed the original intention (which was IMHO in need of updating but generally sound).
Art, definitely.
I have no problem with the concept of protecting IP if applied properly - but that original aim was waylaid many years ago by milkers of the system.
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Monday 28th November 2011 22:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
If I were a Betting Man.
I would bet the gallery are counting on hordes of visitors, mostly consisting of under cover MPA and RIAA operatives (patiently waiting for someone to buy it so they can pounce), to boost their own profits.
At $5 Million per Terabyte, I am worth about $15 Million.
Of course, I am here in CHINA, so HA HA RIAA, come and get me!!!!!!!!!!
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 03:14 GMT damian0815
I'm disappointed El Reg is using scare quotes around 'art', and braindead commentors are playing along. Shame.
This is a great piece, and the article's 4th paragraph mostly gets it... A significant chunk of contemporary art, including stuff that deals with 'new media' (internet/technology), is interested in why and how value gets assigned to objects (and data).
And by pricing it at the value of the hard drive alone, the artist is addressing this again: cf Annihilator's post above, clearly to him at least the drive is worth more than the hardware.
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 07:43 GMT Neil Barnes
Or to put it another way
It's art because an 'artist' and an 'art gallery' say it is.
Full marks to the man; he's taken a commodity item and labelled it. Gee whiz. I think Duchamp was doing that a hundred years ago or so...
Art (n): that which an artist can persuade the credulous to pay money for on the grounds of allegedly perceived but actually imperceptible worth, bestowed upon it by the artist.
(proof: if the drive were stolen and replaced with an identical unit containing the same cloned content, it would be considered a fake.)
The flameproof one, thanks...
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 12:38 GMT Toastan Buttar
It's art because an 'artist' and an 'art gallery' say it is.
Exactly right. It's then up to the audience/critics to consider whether it is 'good art' or 'bad art'.
“The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively - because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a "box" around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?” - Frank Zappa.
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 07:43 GMT Andy 70
*sigh*
time was when "art" was a craft that took 100's of hours/days/months, maybe even a lifetime to produce, perfect, hone etc.
now any poncey wuckfit with box frame glasses and an 'ironic' flat cap can put a mass produced bit of plastic on a pedastool, tag it with a metaphysical idea, and the self adulating masses come crawling.
dat make hulk angry! hulk smash!
f'instance. that massive stack of mecharno outside the olympic stadium with the viewing platform. why didn't they build some massive statues of olypians running, jumping, climbing trees (to quote Mr Izzard). i dunno. something inspiring, something that relates to what that area is?
instead we get something that could on a lesser scale be stolen from the entrance of any commercial estate across the country. nice one.
But we dare not critisize, for it is art, and we dare not be seen as uncultured. twunts.
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 11:22 GMT Fred Flintstone
Seen in that context ..
.. iI'd call it "f"art..
Someone once told me that you could judge art by how many people talked about it.
My comment that art would thus also include mooning tourists at Trafalgar Square with a photographer present was met with a stony silence, even when I pointed out that I could make Tracy Emin's "My Bed" practically every day if I just gave up any standard of cleanliness and started dating girls midst menstrual cycle (if you've seen it you know what I mean).
But, I am not alone (in my opinion, not the mooning). Do a search for "Craig Brown My Turd" - and enjoy..
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 15:00 GMT damian0815
That time disappeared along with the advent of mechanical reproduction.
There's a city in China (Dafen, I believe) that is full of oil painters who will paint whatever you like. Email them a jpeg and they'll send you back an oil-on-canvas painting for less money than it would cost to have it printed in large format at a copy shop on decent paper. With this is mind, what does it matter if you have 'skill' or not?
Art has _never_ been purely about the craft. The great masters of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries were paid by the church or the state or the wealthy: people or organisations would pay artists to paint paintings and portraits because owning such things indicated that you were wealthy, powerful, and had good taste.
The Modernists in the late 19th/early 20th centuries tried their hardest to throw all that out, but their work was driven heavily by science and technological development. Impressionism happened because of a packaging invention: rather than having to sit around as an apprentice learning how to mix colour, you could just pop down to the local art supplies shop (chemist, probably) and buy pre-mixed paint in little metal tubes, that was always the same colour, no need to mix your own.
And then it continued into the 20th century.........
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 11:28 GMT Just Thinking
Sometimes you need to have something explained before you find it interesting.
Many people have unwittingly bought into "copyright infringement is theft" idea simply because they haven't thought it through. Show them a hard drive and explain that it is worth $5 million because it has loads and loads of compressed files of people singing songs, and they might start to realise how ludicrous the whole situation is.
So, not some piece of skilled craftsmanship, but it might cause some people to look at things in a different way.
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 10:06 GMT LuMan
But Is It Art??
Well, of course it's art. Because, if you want it to be, ANYTHING can be considered art. Even the written word. So, here's my artistic offering:
To put that drive on a plinth is the biggest fucking waste of time in the art world since an unmade bed and a goddam urinal. At least that huge pile of tyres LOOKED like something interesting - like a submarine! Anyone who stops to ponder the juxtaposition of the aesthetics of this device in the material world is an utter twat and needs fucking shooting!
There - feel free to criticise as you see fit. I can't be offended by your comments as it's art. So there. Now, I'm just gonna sit back and wait for my Turner Prize to turn up......
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Tuesday 29th November 2011 12:46 GMT mark 63
words fail me
what a fucking Dick , The idiocy of the art world is now stealing from the tech world, the only notable thing about this is the capacity of the hard drive , and therefore the value of the stolen code , both of which are entirely and completely in no way contributed to by him.
I hope they make this asshole pay for the software
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Wednesday 30th November 2011 00:27 GMT Matt Siddall
It is important to be precise
Technically speaking there is a cost for the replication, be it in clock cycles, bandwidth, power consumption, or whatever. By your argument, since human beings can be replicated infinitely, they too have no value.
It is also worth considering the cost of information, and the value of relaxation. Value is a very subjective thing.