Category Archives: History

History, Poetry, Security

The Daily Show on the Irony of Art, but no Banksy

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I was a little disappointed with John Stewart’s piece on art authentication. While humorous, he attacked the notion of art and consumerism but skirted the more controversial subjects of graffitti and censorship.

It seems to me that Banksy would have been a better example than Van Gough or Pollock. He is apparently about to have an auction and many of his works are said to be worth hundreds of thousands, while at the same time others still brand his work as too controversial or just an eye-sore. His themes remind me of the sharp jabs of Tom Toles yet in a more public forum and without the consent of the people who own the canvas. On the flip side he does not charge for admission.

I would like to think it is a particular work or theme that is found objectionable, rather than the nature of the art form, but that is not the message from those involved:

A spokeswoman for Tower Hamlets Council said it had not thought of selling the potentially valuable artwork to help raise money for council services, but did not rule out such action being considered in the future.

[…]

Tower Hamlets councillor Abdal Ullah said: “We need to be clear here, graffiti is a crime.

“It spoils the environment, makes our neighbourhoods feel less safe, and costs thousands of pounds each year to clean – money that could instead be paying for valuable local services.”

It is not yet known how many of the artist’s works would be affected.

The future of a Banksy piece painted on a wall in Bristol recently went to public vote, with 97% of people saying it should be kept.

Perhaps, then, Banksy’s crime is not in the manner chosen to create art but in the message. My guess is that an authority has to be exceptionally confident and secure in its position to allow freedom of expression and creative works. The Tower Hamlets insecurity and subsequent reaction (on the premise of exerting control) could actually increase the value of Banksy works and raise support for graffitti.

BANKSY

The cost of preventing an immitator of Banksy is higher than most tagging artists since the originals come from stencil. Can you tell a real Banksy?

The Tower Hamlet could use this point to their advantage and host talent competitions to supplant Banksy’s stencils with local ones with more general appeal. On the other hand, his work is nothing if not controversial and sarcastic and so a mainstream competition might not have the appeal for rebellious “artists” — like most competitions in art, even Banksy could lose if the criteria includes making people comfortable. He certainly has critics:

Here’s a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.

Clever to idiots? That about sums up the definition of something with broad appeal, no? How long did it take for Pollack and Van Gough to be seen as genius? Mainstream? How much longer would it have taken if they used graffitti as their medium rather than private canvas?

BANKSY

I love the “anti-climb paint” sign, almost as much as I like the rat characters themselves.

Here is an excellent commentary on the surveillance society in Britain, which has been unable to crack the identity of Banksy.

History, Security

Amazon Loses One-Click Patent Lawsuit

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Interesting David v. Goliath story in the New Zealand news. I have not seen it anywhere else yet:

An Auckland man who defeated internet giant Amazon in a copyright battle, hopes his example will inspire others to challenge big corporations.

The United States Patents Office has ruled that Amazon does not have the exclusive rights to what is called one-click shopping – the technology that allows shoppers to buy goods with just a single click of a mouse.

Peter Calveley used internet archive sites to prove the one-click shopping idea was pionnered by a now defunct internet company called Digi Cash.

Calveley has said that he pursued the suit as a game, or in other words to make a point, but he financed it with donations. Suing Amazon for profit? His blog has more details:

Many thanks to everyone who helped out with the funding and promoting the blog.

Please don’t send any more money

(unless you want to contribute to my personal consumption ;-) ).

Should lawyers, or even laymen, solicit funds from the Internet to attack corporate interests? This is an interesting model I had not thought about. I wonder if it might someday alter the definition of “public defender”. Calveley reported some sources of support, but most are anonymous.

Food, History, Security

Totalitarian Lawns and Johnny Appleseed

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“A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule.”

Michael Pollan apparently wrote that in Second Nature. Someone I work with pointed me to another book of his that is a study of Johnny Appleseed. I found it very compelling, especially in the sense that he looked for root-cause (pun not intended) rather than settle with the pulp of commercial drivel also known as Disney. PBS did an interview with him where he summarizes:

GWEN IFILL: So as a gardener, which you admit to being, a backyard gardener of sorts in Connecticut, how did you make these connections between human impulse and the plant world?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, it all started with the bumblebee. I mean, the premise of the book is very, very simple. I… One day in the garden I was watching a bumblebee alongside me while I was sewing [sic] seeds and thought, “well, what do I have in common with a bee as a gardener?” and realized more than I realized. Like the bumblebee, I was disseminating the genes of one species, a potato instead of a leek, say, rather than another. And like the bumblebee, I thought these plants were here for my benefit, you know, all the plants in the garden I was growing. But in fact, I realized maybe they had induced me to help them, because, you know, the bumblebee breaks into the flower, finds the nectar, thinks he’s making off with the goods and thinks he’s getting the better of the deal with the flower. But, in fact, it’s the flower that has tricked the bumblebee into doing the work for him, to take his pollen from flower to flower to flower. And then I realized well, what if… So from the flower’s point of view, the bumblebee is this credulous gullible animal, and how would we look to our plants… from our plant’s point of view? And I realize we’re much the same; we’re more like the bumblebee than we think.

I love that analysis. We are gullible if we think that we are totally in control of how we choose the food we eat. People love to be led, and those that seem to want the least regulations also appear to be the ones easiest to lead. I think this is explored best in the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Anyway, back to the Appleseed story:

GWEN IFILL: Well, you tell… You talk about sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control. And sweetness you talk about the apple.

MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah.

GWEN IFILL: How does Johnny Appleseed figure into this?

MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, Johnny Appleseed, in a way, he’s kind of a pagan patron saint of the book. I didn’t even know when I started this that he was a real historical figure, by John Chapman. I thought he was one of those kindergarten folk heroes, you know, like Paul Bunyon, that’s made up. It turns out Johnny Appleseed, John Chapman, was a real historical figure who played a very important role in the frontier in the Northwest territory. And I also found out that the version of Johnny Appleseed I learned in kindergarten was completely wrong, had been Disney-fied, cleaned up and made very benign. He’s a much more interesting character. The way figured this out was I learned this one botanical fact about apples, which is, if you plant the seeds of an apple, like a red delicious or a golden delicious, the offspring will look nothing like the parent, will be a completely different variety and will be inedible. You cannot eat apples planted from seeds. They must be grafted, cloned.

GWEN IFILL: And they’re not American fruit.

MICHAEL POLLAN: They’re not, no. I learned it comes from Kazakhstan and has made its way here and changed a lot along the way. And so the fact that Johnny Appleseed was planting apples from seed, which he insisted on– he though grafting was wicked– meant they were not edible apples, and it meant they were for hard cider because you can use any kind of apple for making cider. Really, what Johnny Appleseed was doing and the reason he was welcome in every cabin in Ohio and Indiana was he was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier. He was our American Dionysus.

The fundamentalists who sought prohibition threated to destroy the story of Mr. Appleseed. Thus the story was somehow adapted to leave out the grain of alcohol. It also seems to leave out some of the more obvious motivation of “homesteading” land. He is portrayed as someone who was a friend of native inhabitants because he was not afraid to speak with them, while he actually was probably negotiating with them to let him “enhance” property (grow trees) in order to legally claim it as his own under nascent laws and profit from sale to a settler.

History, Security

Dr. Crippen Exonerated

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Reuters reports that the police convicted Crippen on false evidence:

A team led by John Trestrail, head of the regional poison centre in Grand Rapids, Michigan, took mitochondrial DNA — genetic material passed on through the mother — from a tissue sample from the corpse kept in a London museum.

They then compared it with samples from three of Cora Crippen’s female descendants, found after a 7-year search.

“That body was not Cora Crippen’s,” said David Foran, a forensic biologist at Michigan State University. “We don’t know who that body was or how it got there.”

As I read this I thought about an incident I had to investigate recently.

Business executives, as expected, quickly wanted a summary of events and then to move on in their work. They threw some opinions around and weighed in before the facts were fully known, as if making a decision about general operational risks.

The security team, on the other hand, wanted to study the data and come to a reliable understanding of the threat as well as vulnerabilities before letting the case be closed.

You can guess which one carries more weight in the average corporate environment. Let me try to put it a different way:

If the job is to keep the business processes firing (like pistons in an engine) then reactions will be necessarily oriented to moving things along without delay. If the job is to keep the business running (like avoiding a cliff) then delay might be warranted if danger is ahead.

Why did a team want to research the Crippen case? Curiosity and doubt about the accuracy of conviction, surely, which is also the sort of quality you should seek in security teams who will be faced with incident response and investigation.