B74
Collective Memory
Excerpt from Frē Speech speaker’s conference.

Frē Speech: The Public Record’s impact on artistic creation.

[…] Before the advent of the Public Record, research was difficult work. Research required physical exertion: if I wanted to learn about The Wheaty Hotsprings, for example; say I just want to find out the answer to the question, “How hot are The Wheaty Hotsprings?” I would have to transport myself to a physical address, walk through a building, memorize an entire decimal system, manually search for an author and book name, flip through the pages until I find the relevant information… I could go on. Needless to say, people must have been so tired back then [laughter].

For example: Artist A—or, let’s call him “Al the Artist”—thinks of making a performance piece. Al has the idea to have a stagehand pass out rotten vegetables to audience members prior to his show, and then he will play guitar and sing badly for fifteen minutes or so. His guess is that, based on the simple fact that people are given gross vegetables, they will decide throw them if presented with a distasteful performance. If nobody has thrown anything by ten minutes in, Al decides, then a paid actor will throw one old tomato, in hopes that the rest of the audience will feel that they’ve been given permission to throw garbage at a stranger and destroying a theater; something they probably wouldn’t normally do. Al likes this piece, because it explores social themes about the [airquotes] “safe” anonymity of a crowd, and how anonymity breeds cesspools of violence and vitriol.

Al the Artist is excited about this idea; it feels new and exciting. He searches the books of his local library for topics related to “performance,” scanning for any pictures of works like his, thumbing through pages, skimming each one quickly. He flips to the indexes, following his finger down the columns, searching for words like “audience experimentation,” “mass-irritability,” and “tomatoes,” and doesn’t find any works even similar to the one he is imagining. Fortunately, Al’s friend is the professor of Performance Art History at Coumbila University. Artist Al calls her, and she loves the idea. Better yet, it turns out that she can’t think of any performances similar to Al’s purported opus. She suggests that Al check his library for books ancient harvest festivals, as that is where the idea of throwing tomatoes at a performer was born. She says that during these festivals they would gather all of their most over-ripened vegetation, make a large stew with it, and then cast a vote to find their least favorite townsperson, who would then be cooked in the stew. She tells him this event marked as the birth of democracy, and some other things Al didn’t care to know. He searched the library as suggested, but found nothing. He asked the librarians if they knew of anything similar, and they didn’t. Artist Al would never find out that a man named Bil the Artist had done basically the same thing throughout the Neaderlins, or that Artist Cal had gone so far as to publish the results of his shows in peer-reviewed sociological studies on crowd behavior. Instead, Artist Al decides that his [airquotes] “extensive” search is complete, and he goes on to waste his time in trodden paths.

Now, however, with the ability to find out instantly whether somebody has already created work that is similar to your idea, the notion of “stealing” art seems to be much more dire than it was in the past. With the ability to search the Public Record for any description of nearly any piece of art, past or present, it is easy to claim that an artist stole the concept for her work if a similar work is preexisting. Deniability is difficult, as each member of the Record has access to the same information. […] The burden of proof lies within the artist whose work is published latest; they must exhibit evidence that their work is not stolen from a preexisting work. […]

Bermice Jacklewash