Puck

review by Brian Charles Clark

Freedom of Expression
by Kembrew McLeod
Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

No Trespassing
by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
Publisher: U. Toronto Press, 2005

In recent decades intellectual property (IP) law has become the handmaiden of transnational capitalism. “Fair use”, at least in the United States, has become a hollow shell: tap it and it shatters into a thousand sharp-edged lawsuits. Two recent books delve into the history of and effects on creativity resulting from globalized IP law. The overall picture for scientists and artists in all media is gloomy. As novelist Michael Chabon concluded, in a recent review-essay on the sources of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Influence is bliss indeed, at least until it falls under the boot heel of regressive capitalism. Now royalties, licensing fees and corporate secrecy make creative ‘gene swapping’ too expensive for most artists and scientists.

“Follow the money” is the credo of investigative journalists. As Eva Hemmungs Wirtén argues in No Trespassing, it’s also the logic of empire when scoping out the landscape of IP law in general, and copyright law in particular. No Trespassing is tightly focused on book culture: the rise of copyright law in Western Europe and the U.S., the role of translation in commodifying authorship, and the blood-drawing lawsuits that result from the bliss of influence and the influence of technology (the photocopier in particular). Wirtén’s book, with its tight focus, deep historical view, and thorough-going scholarship make it a well-written complement to McLeod’s more free-wheeling Freedom of Expression. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Plato Unmasked: The Dialogues Made New
by Keith Quincy
Publisher: Eastern Washington University Press, 2004

For many centuries now, people have been making big piles of hay out of the dialogues of Plato. Each pile created has the remarkable property of closely resembling its maker. Totalizing philosophers are absolutely positive that Plato’s hodge-podge of dialogues all piece together to make a nice neat system. Nietzsche said that Plato was boring because the Greek was a philosopher first and a citizen second. I.F. Stone, the late great investigative journalist, accused Socrates, Plato’s beloved teacher and mentor, of fascism. Enter Keith Quincy, who, while never using the “F” word (neither did Stone), is quite adamant that Plato was anti-democratic. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

De Kooning: An American Master
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan
Knopf, 2004

Willem de Kooning painted big canvases that reflected the way he lived: large. He juggled up to five love affairs at one time (and kept them all secret from each other and his wife, Elaine, with a variety of code door knocks), out-painted his rivals, such as Jackson Pollock, and was perhaps only happy drunk and asleep in a gutter. It was there, to riff on Wilde, that he saw the stars. De Kooning was the bohemian: part artist, part intellectual, part alcoholic playboy and pure adventuresome genius.

He was born in Rotterdam in 1904, and stowed away to the U.S. in the mid-twenties. He was already a master draughtsman, and went to work in New York as a commercial artist and window dresser. He made a pretty good living that way. In the 1930s, though, he abandoned commercial art in favor of the more dangerous path: “pure” art. De Kooning quit his jobs at the height of the Depression and just in time to help formulate a major wave in American (and world) painting: Abstract Expressionism. Read the rest of this entry »