"Rather than thinking in terms of the Duchampian readymade, which is most often understood as operating iconically..."
I got a real kick out of this line. At first I thought it was pure nonsense. After a bit of searching I found out that Marcel Duchamp was an artist that made some art called "readymades." Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me.
> Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me.
I want to thank you for commenting on this. It's been said before, but: technologists have a tendency to attempt and derive every other field from their own first principles and, when they fail to do so, discount fields as "pure nonsense."
We all (non-technologists included) benefit from not falling into that mode of thought.
Feynman famously suffered from this so it's hardly just computer people.
I spent some time in drug design, surprised at how stupidly things were done in the life sciences. Of course once I was immersed in the field I discovered that many of those so-called "stupid" things were quite rational and even most of the ones that were the result of legitimate path dependence, and not really so stupid as to be worth changing.
I also learned that people in the field had already thought about this and the current state was a result of people trying to fix procedural/cultural bugs.
Of course the residual of subtracting all those "many" things that turned out to be legit still left a few stupidities and tweaking a couple of them was enough to make a big difference to our startup.
Also: our own field (I'm back in computing) is full of path-dependent oddities and wholesale cargo cutting as well. I think it's human nature.
> There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
That’s a slightly different principle, as it applies to intro-domain work as well (say refactoring code or redesigning a circuit board to reduce cost).
The issue at hand is mistaking one’s own competence in domain D as evidence of competence in domain R.
I'm horrified by the autocorrect typos and misplaced word due to high speed typing on the phone. Actually, I suppose, "due to my lazy proofreading when using the phone."
Wow, reading my comment: what a lot of autocorrect errors that I did not pick up (I was composing on my phone). I’m glad some people found it comprehensible.
What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? Anything anyone says is gonna be anecdotal.
Personally, probably a solid third of the guys I knew in a college CS program were insufferably close-minded and reductionist about non-"hard stem" fields of study.
To be fair, a lot of people I know who are outside of stem also don't view non-stem fields in a shiny light. It's not a phenomenal inside CS. We as a society value stem fields higher and pay them more on average.
>What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here?
I like how this is phrased. It's a more pithy question than the one I generally use with people who have loosely defined interrogatives or claims, which is:
"What proof would you need to make you believe otherwise"
Replication crisis is real. It's at least somewhat likely that large chunks of the research output in those non-stem fields is just the result of p-hacking. Go ahead and try to replicate studies in Psychology. Good luck.
>Personally, probably a solid third of the guys I knew in a college CS program were insufferably close-minded and reductionist about non-"hard stem" fields of study.
Did you read your own comment? There's a reason people dismiss those fields because they are largely anti-scientific and produce results that don't hold up under scrutiny.
Would is be close-minded or reductionist to dismiss Homeopathy? Because there are certain philosophical topics that have little more merit (beyond a study in philosophical thought/history).
Homeopathy promises tangible physical effects that should be able to be measured, so as a field of study it's "competing" with medicine, so in my opinion it's only fair to judge it on equal terms via empirical study.
Philosophy as a field of study is not at all making those claims, nor is anyone expecting it to.
Some Homeopathists promise tangible physical effects, not all. The point remains the same - how is value determined?
Why shouldn't I teach Q-Anon theory in the classroom, but as a humanity, not a science? or Reality distortion field theory? Witch studies?
Claiming different standards of value feels a lot like the distinction: "science for the world, religion for the soul"
If I had a criticism for the arrogant SW devs depicted earlier as representing a majority, it would be that they don't appreciate logic/science in STEM (or their ability to apply it), not that they apply it to everything.
It's a good question, I'm not sure I'd have an insightful answer there. Surely there's a difference between Q-Anon, the brain-child of one guy just a few years ago, and questions like "how to derive meaning in life?", "how to be a good person?", which have been discussed in virtually every culture over millennia. Q-Anon may be an interesting case study of some aspect of our current zeitgeist and on the nature of truth and could play a role in understanding some small part of the "meaning in life" question.
In my opinion, equating "Q-Anon theory" and pretty much any well-established field of academic study is like comparing one single rubber boot and the evolution of bipedal life. Sure, one can learn a few things from studying the boot, but the depth understanding of the world and our place in it from understanding the evolution of microbes, to animals to even have legs, let alone feet and toes, and an intelligence and culture to the point that we manufacture footwear far surpasses the surface we breach with any one modern example.
If a homeopath isn't promising tangible physical effects (and isn't charging $19.99 per dose, haha) but just spiritual effects, well I don't know. I wouldn't try to judge the validity of his spiritual claims against modern medicine in a controlled trial, no. You can distinguish my previous response as relating to scientific claims posed by certain homeopaths. Beyond those physical claims, anything else doesn't sound too far from a religious claim.
> science for the world, religion for the soul
You say that like it's a bad thing :). I'm not religious, but it's obviously played a major role throughout history in people's search for meaning and for how to be a good person.
I'm not sure I understand your last point. Could you say more about what you mean? Their lack of appreciation for empirical rationalism in their own fields lead them to underestimate the value of other fields? How does one imply the other?
Having worked in technology in the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and SV as well as working regularly with (and at) teams on the East coast, in the south, Japan, Taiwan, China, India, Europe, the UK (it ain't Europe now!), I've found this tendency of those in technology, and especially software, to discount the complexity and systematization of other fields, disproportionately common.
I was well and truly familiar with the classic "why don't you just..." way of speaking before I'd ever even visited the bay. Similarly, I'd witnessed (and participated in) mocking of domain-specific jargon when I was younger, and I see it still today.
It's not data, but my experience in the space strongly supports the suggestion that a dismissive, reductive, and aloof posture is quite common in tech. It's one reason that I regularly tell team members that engineers should be professional pessimists, especially about themselves and their ignorance.
I don't have any hard evidence, sorry. I've also never spent any significant amount of time in SV or engaging with SV culture (besides this website).
What I have is anecdotes and idle thoughts: most of my STEM peers were laser focused on their majors and avoided the humanities (and even other STEM topics) like the plague. The university I went to enabled and even encouraged this, since it makes their alumni statistics look great and kept the four-year-graduation-to-tech-job machine well-oiled.
I have a difficult time assigning immediate blameworthiness when talking about this: it's frustrating to hear tech people disregard things just because they fail to adapt them, but it strikes me as a failure of education rather than a solely personal failure.
Well, what you describe here (avoiding humanities) isn't the same as what you describe in you original post (discount fields as "pure nonsense.").
That aside, OP talked about what seems to be jargon, and unfamiliarity with it.
"attempt and derive every other field from their own first principles" - sounds like an attempt to engage with a topic that goes further than merely learning the terminology.
So I'm not sure what you mean by "adapt" in this context; but why do you assist on assigning blame/failure? Is it possible some topics are nonsense?
Funny how I read the same comment sections and don't agree with this characterisation. Maybe selective memory is at play? People tend to remember the 1 arrogant dismissal and forget the 9 measured comments.
In any case; /are you referring to any field outside tech, e.g. history, geology, metallurgy?
I'm a physicist. Interestingly enough, a lot of physicists and other scientists actively participate in music, the arts, and so forth. I'm a musician. I read literature. I visit art galleries and attend the opera.
I think some people have a sort of tribal sense for what ideas they're receptive to. Others don't. I don't know if there's any kind of predictor or pattern.
There are engineers who think that physics is bunk -- that the precision implied by theory is not believable.
It's also important to understand the context of any artistic movement. Dadaism was a response to futurism and other pro-industrial artistic movements that were very popular during the lead up to WW1. Dadaists were part of an artistic recoiling from the horrors of WW1 and anything that even smacked of the sentiments that were felt to have lead up to such a catastrophe.
This far from WW1, the whole thing seems a bit silly because we're not part of the time and mental place that made such movements tick originally.
That's quite interesting as I would consider Duchamp as modern art history 101 and his readymades are the prototypical examples of subversive art / anti-art.
Duchamp's art also (arguably) marks the beginning of the transition from modernism to postmodernism - our current era. It's definitely modern, but it has little hints of postmodernism in it.
I've never taken an art history class, but I do know of Duchamp, and I do think his name is known by anyone with even a passing curiosity with the world of art.
The fact that he's relatively unknown here says a lot about the users of this site: highly knowledgeable folks, whose knowledge is probably much more specialized that they realize.
Given the state of arts funding at least in the US, and depending on how old you are, people tend to forget these things.
The last art history class I took was my sophmore year of high school. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget particulars if it's that long ago.
They kind of had to mention Duchamp since the artwork is slightly derivative of one of Duchamp's famous artwork which features glass panes broken during transport:
Sometimes I read expert-written blog posts or articles, targeted at a demographic the author is familiar in communicating with.
My brain will literally just turn off and I will go into a reading trance where I don't understand the text because my brain simply says 'yeah this is nonsense, don't get it.'
When I was working on my MFA thesis, I came to a realization that feels like it might overlap with what you're describing.
It's a little hard to put a bow on the idea (and why it isn't trite...) at this length, but basically: I felt a connection between the experience of trying to parse some intentionally difficult/impenetrable ~modernist texts, and the experience of trying to parse older texts where the phrasing is dated.
They're too unfamiliar to parse with fluent ease, and the experience of fluent reading is just fundamentally different. In one case, the text is like a Rubik's cube, and in the other it's hard to even realize it exists separately from your instantaneous understanding of it.
This was also the case while prepping for GRE. I realized that reading comprehension questions were hard because the passages were referring to completely alien concepts which I had no intuitive comprehension of. I used to totally screw up when passages were referring to art, finance, culture etc. Realized that I should develop comfort in understanding remote fields, not necessarily just the vocabulary. I spent a lot of time reading articles from very diverse areas which I thought ultimately helped handling them better.
I immediately realized that is the case even here when I read that quoted line. In my case, when I read such things, I just skim past them. It takes some effort to slow down and actually dig a bit more to form the understanding.
Every field has it's own jargon and natural/comfortable modes of expression. Pretty interesting things can happen at the boundaries between fields, when you are trying to translate.
That's how any field would be if you don't know the jargon, history and technicalities. Is it the fact that it's art that led your first thought to consider it "pure nonsense"?
I believe this is similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect.
> In essence, people recognise that the media gets virtually everything wrong in media reports they know something about but credulously accept media accounts about everything else where they actually themselves know nothing.
To be fair, it is pretentious writing. Who uses "Duchampian" instead of "Duchamp's"? That paragraph can be written much more simply without losing any nuance.
Duchamp's readymade and Duchampian readymade don't mean the same thing. A skilled imitator could create a Duchampian readymade, but it wouldn't be Duchamp's work.
It's like with coining a joke or a funny meme. It's not hard to string a few words together or slap a caption on a picture; everyone can do that. The skill is in the ability to string the right words together or slap the right caption on the right picture, and perhaps create an extra ambiance around it.
I would imagine there is considerable intersection between people who say Duchampian with people who say Orwellian, Freudian, or Kafkaesque. It seems to me a fairly normal English construction.
Of course you wouldn't, because being Orwell, it's Orwellian by definition. But you could call another author's book Orwellian. Just as the quote in question was probably referring to things that are Duchamp-like, as opposed to just Duchamp's.
One can imagine a context where the qualities referenced aren't specific or limited to 1984. In such a case it would be perfectly apt to reference Orwell's writing style or body of ideas more globally.
The thing I love about modern art is that initial instinctive reaction of "Anyone could do this!". I have absolutely zero training in art so this might be a infantile opinion, but I am delighted by the pieces that makes me realize "Anyone could do this, but no-one did until now."
All that to say, I really like this series of works.
Yeah, but for a lot of modern art, I think the claim many people are making is both that "anyone could do it" and "people already have and just didn't make a big deal of it". Ex. When people say "my kid could paint that" they mean "something very similar to that is already hanging on my refrigerator".
Some modern art does not stand on its own. It requires the expert explanation to transform it from garbage to art. For myself this is “clever art” and has little cultural value.
Damien Hirst once had a work on display and a janitor threw it out - because he truly thought it was garbage. My toddler daughter once “ruined” a Mathew Barney work on a wall - it was a smear of black jelly that she smeared some more. The guard quickly looked the other way while motioning us to leave.
Working in the gallery world I would read the epic descriptions of works for sale. A lot of ink went in to creating and describing the value of art works that had no apparent worth. It is fashion to be sold and adorn and tell your friends about.
Not all modern art is like this, some works can be appreciated for its intrinsic properties. But this requires more skill, and dedication, and is rather rare.
I value art similar to the rule about food - if your grandmother would recognize it as art then it probably is, if not then maybe not. And all things art - it boils down to opinion. This is mine.
> My toddler daughter once “ruined” a Mathew Barney work on a wall - it was a smear of black jelly that she smeared some more.
That's a great story and gave me a good laugh. But with a lot of these pieces, there is a strong sense that the object isn't really the artwork, in the same way that a program isn't really the exact bits on my machine.
Recently SFMOMA put up a Sol LeWitt, one of his "Wall Drawing" pieces, which involved some employee of the museum carefully painting it on the wall. At the end of the exhibit, the whole wall got painted back over. In my opinion (and that of the curators of SFMOMA), they weren't actually destroying a Sol LeWitt; the actual piece is something more abstract, including but not limited to the instructions used to paint it onto the wall.
>For myself this is “clever art” and has little cultural value.
We'd all be alot better if in circumstances like this, we would say "I don't personally value this" instead of "there is not value in this for anyone."
If there weren't people that valued it, it wouldn't exist. The fact that it exists demonstrates a certain level of cultural value.
I think they couldn't really. If you look into modern artists they are extremelly talented and their unique style that seems like _anyone could do it_ comes in later stages in their life.
It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)
> I think they couldn't really. If you look into modern artists they are extremelly talented and their unique style that seems like _anyone could do it_ comes in later stages in their life.
This is incorrect (although I don't know anything about the artist in question). Contemporary art degrees are heavily moving away from teaching craft or even consider it a valid aesthetic or criterion for judgement (along the lines of rejecting the notion of good/bad/better/worse). Was there any identifiable craft involved in this piece? Did the artists remove from circulation the boxes that weren't broken in just the right way? Is the art more interesting to look about than to talk about? Marginally... I find the pile of boxes sorta aesthetically pleasing, but its not clear to me that was even done by the artist (and not the gallery).
What part of this piece are you proposing that a total outsider/complete amateur couldn't create on a first pass? The form of the glass looks to be haphazard, (ie, unimportant the artist). The boxes are off the shelf. What else is left?
> Is the art more interesting to look about than to talk about?
That is an interesting perspective. I have always judged art by its aesthetics and its ability to elicit thought / conversation equally.
In my view art becomes shallow when it is purely visually appealing with no conceptual backing or purely conceptual with uninteresting visual components.
I'll put it the other way though, if you attribute it to any other artist, would the appeal be greatly reduced? Can the art stand alone and be great on its own merit rather than the borrowed fame of its creator?
Coding seems like a bad example, at least for me. I’m a professional coder with several years of experience, but I routinely encounter code or software architectures that very much impress me and make me think “not just any coder could have come up with this, at least without a great deal of thought and effort.”
Art is also about communicating ideas, concepts. Most abstract expressionists could paint photorealistic scenes in detail, but they just found it boring and went on with soak staining or squeezing tubes.
One thing to keep in mind is the context you're observing this in.
Imagine instead, someone makes a post on https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/ about how they connected some glass panels together and shipped them in fedex boxes. Then put them in their living room on top of the boxes they shipped in as an art piece.
The next place that post would end up is DIWHY. The reason anyone thinks its a truly inspired meaningful commentary on modern times is simply that it's being presented as such. It's on a clean floor, with professional photography, with a news article about it. The context, the author, and the opinions of the people around you, all work to subconsciously influence your opinion.
If you did it as DIY, yes, but not all modern - really, contemporary - art is done by Important People who get magazine interviews. A colleague of mine at a web design shop had done his degree in fine art. He was into minimalism and Arte Povera, and his main work was a large ball of grey paint which he had kept with him for years. He would grind down stuff from his daily life and mix his own paint (which he named after himself) to add to this ball. It just kept growing and growing.... Weird, but fun.
It also sometimes matters who it is: (apart from the straightforward joke)
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
A problem I have never really found a satisfactory answer to. On some computers in some places, I have found that occasionally one has to disconnect them from mains to get them to power up occasionally. Some people have said I needed to discharge some capacitors but that never felt satisfactory. Very heisenbuggy.
Like Tom Knight, I was able to fix a broken machine by slowly power-cycling it :)
I'm not sure how the discussion went from art to power supplies, but... Turning off a computer doesn't completely turn it off. Specifically, ATX power supplies have a standby +5V output, even when the computer is off. (This is how Wake-on-LAN works, for instance.) So it's quite possible that you needed to disconnect the computer to get it to fully restart.
As far as discharging capacitors, that's an issue if you turn the computer off and on rapidly; the power supply can continue supplying power for a few seconds due to its capacitors, so the system might continue uninterrupted.
This reminds me of power-glitching my Atari 2600 (or "frying", in the 2600-enthusiast vernacular) to get odd "effects" in some games. It randomized the state of the system and, given the relative simplicity of the platform and the "one big loop" nature of most games you could actually get some interesting and useful results.
It reminds me of logo design. Anyone could draw the Apple, Pepsi, or Microsoft logo in a minute. However, if any of these brands approached you, would you have been able to deliver a logo that's as iconic? It's unlikely. You might get lucky once, but you wouldn't be able to do it day after day as a career unless you're incredibly talented.
When people say “anyone could do that” in reference to art, they’re usually not just saying that anyone could copy that after having seen it. Of course most people could take a famous novel and type out all the same words. They’re saying (regardless of whether they’re correct) that the actual conception of the new work doesn’t seem like it required significant creative effort.
I don't think I entirely agree. If you're correct, why doesn't anyone point at a famous portrait painting by a renowned artist, or a photorealistic pencil sketch of a fruit bowl and say, "anyone could do that"? These works might have very little creative effort, but people recognize they wouldn't be able to reproduce such a piece, so they don't make that statement. Instead, they look over at that painting with the square patches of color (https://cdn.kastatic.org/ka-perseus-images/f832e28211a5c9793...) and say their child could do that.
So, when someone says, "anyone could do that", it's likely a statement about being able to produce a similar piece of art. Could they paint a painting similar to the squares above that people could mistake as another painting from the same artist? Yes, so they make that statement. Could they write a novel that could be mistaken as a follow-up book from a famous writer? Not likely, so they don't say it. So, it's not a statement about being able to directly copy the work (like I might have referred to in my previous comment), or a reference to the creative effort involved, but a statement about being able to produce a similar piece. However, I think people mostly take into consideration the technical ability of the artist, they overlook the creative process to reach that point, and they're focused on a single piece when a large part of the talent is in being able to consistently produce such work.
> If you're correct, why doesn't anyone point at a famous portrait painting by a renowned artist, or a photorealistic pencil sketch of a fruit bowl and say, "anyone could do that"? These works might have very little creative effort, but people recognize they wouldn't be able to reproduce such a piece, so they don't make that statement.
The reason that people won't say "anyone could do that" about something that is indeed incredibly difficult is simply because it would be a clearly false claim. I didn't try to list all cases where people would not say that. I only explained what I think people generally mean when they do say that. Of course most people cannot do these supposedly "uncreative" yet difficult tasks like running really fast or lifting very heavy weights [0].
People say "anyone could do that" about things which they think are fairly simple to physically reproduce and which they think required very little creative effort. Physically reproducing a famous novel on a typewriter is relatively simple, but the creative effort required is clearly immense. Thus people do not say "anyone could do that." Physically reproducing hundreds of pages of seemingly random text like "asdfasdfasdf" is roughly as easy as reproducing the famous novel, but certainly appears to require much less creative effort. If someone was shown a book with hundreds of pages of that seemingly random text, they very well might say "anyone can do that."
[0] I actually reject this part entirely, because I suspect world-class excellence in all of these things actually do require a great deal of creativity and original problem-solving in honing one's mental and physical states. Photorealistic pencil sketches, for example, presumably require no less creativity than photography, and photography is widely recognized as a creative art form.
> They’re saying (regardless of whether they’re correct) that the actual conception of the new work doesn’t seem like it required significant creative effort.
It's amusing how well this correlates with having little experience or background (this doesn't apply only to art). Not perfectly, but extremely highly correlated.
It's also often the case that people make these sorts of comments not after seeing the art itself, but after seeing a decription or low fidelity reproduction of it.
Okay, but then none of the actual artists are making iconic logos day after day either, and when they make any at all, it's not from some artistic genius that us philistines could never understand, it's because they make a ton of variants and then a whole crew of marketers refines and A/B tests it before settling on "the" icon.
Logos are often quite highly-tuned with a lot of iterations to get just the right proportion, colour, etc. It's actually quite difficult to make a good quality logo.
Sure, anyone could do this, just come up with a meaningful idea, learn how to make large glass objects, procure glass panes of exactly the right size, attach them together, test the rigidity of the structure, probably some test shipments, make arrangements with museums to receive and display them, place them in the boxes, ship them, receive them, unpack them, take some photos, publish a website, done!
You do realize that often artist don’t physically make a large portion of larger art pieces. Nor do they set them up in galleries it is often done by teams but the artist gets the sole credit.
This might be your whole point, but what your comment inspired in me was the excitement that art is accessible to anyone. That we're not out of "easy ideas" with only "hard ideas" left.
Which touches on one of the disenchanting things about technology (that is probably not actually true, but how I feel): it feels like we've only got "hard ideas" left, most accessible to the experts, those with resources, those with a lot of time.
Art is showbusiness, and success is largely the result of flukes and many of the great names of history would easily have been unremarkable if it hadn't been for several fluke events.
It's entirely possible that many did such things before, but never became famous with it, and one did, and largely became so as a fluke simply because, say, an influential critic came across it by chance, and decided to write a positive piece, after which the ball was set in motion.
Yeah, that's the problem. Surely people did this for kicks from time to time. When I was younger, I used to fill old wine bottles with water, freeze them, then turn the cracked remains into candle holders. I had a few of them, and thought they looked cool.
There's some disconnect between what I did as a bit of crafts, and calling it an objet d'art that's a commentary on .. well, anything, that I don't fully grok.
Some of it is meta commentary on the whole game of convincing wealthy patrons to fork over money for these things.
I once saw an piece in a Boise gallery that consisted of a cardboard box filled with opened tubes of squeezed paint. Many people would walk by dismissively but upon closer inspection the entire thing was a ceramic sculpture.
I don't think this expresses the problem accurately. Something like facebook is "obvious on retrospect" in the sense that lots of people could theoretically have built a similar site if they just had the idea and the right timing, but didn't so so.
A lot of modern art I've seen maintains the "lots of people could do that relatively easily" aspect, but it doesn't have the "if someone else had built the same thing, I can see how it would have succeeded." Ie it's easy in retrospect, but it's not obvious.
My personal take on it is just that a lot of it is basically nonsense / garbage, but perhaps I'm just cynical and closeminded.
Interesting! It's not really about the glass cube, but about the shipping process and what that shipping process does to the things it ships. It highlights the brutality and scale well. It's almost like a QA relic put on display. I wonder if there would be other good examples.
It's also -- importantly IMHO -- about the fact that the dimensions of Fedex shipping boxes are proprietary. (Assuming that's actually true. I'm a little skeptical. But that's what the article claims.)
I’m not sure what you mean by space or tools. I think someone could see this work as a dig at fedex package handling, but personally think this is a pretty shallow take.
For me it is a window into the world of package transportation that few are aware of. this is probably biased by my background, having worked for a megacorp with an entire department dedicated to packaging design and validation. it even included glass fracture experts that could write 100 pages on one of those boxes!
This seems unlikely - you can register an exact dimension?
> As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions. In other words, the size of an official FedEx box, not just its design, is proprietary; it is a volume of space which is a property exclusive to FedEx.
Hmm... I’m not sure the article is correct. It seems like the Standard Serialized Container Code (emphasis mine) is meant to track an individual box or palette, not a “type” of box. [1]
It seems to be useful for processes that require an item to be FedEx’d from place to place in the same box.
(Edit: I’m not sure about my statement of reusing the container. The specifications are at https://www.gs1.org/standards/id-keys/sscc if you want to take a crack at answering that one.)
SSCC does stand for Serial Shipping Container Code, not “Standard Serialized”, per your GS1 link.
The rest of your comment is correct, though; they’re for tracking an individual box (the same idea as a postal tracking number), not “a box with the same dimensions” and I have no idea where the artist could have gotten that idea from. They do have a prefix that only the company generating them can use, but that’s just to keep the numbers from each company in a separate namespace to anyone else’s.
I also can’t find (with an admittedly cursory search) any evidence that FedEx’s standard boxes even have SSCCs, and it seems like the purpose would be served just as well by a proprietary tracking number on the address label.
Regarding your edit, this is covered under §4.4.1.1 of the GS1 spec:
> An individual Serial Shipping Container Code (SSCC) is a unique number, which remains the same for the life of the logistic unit to which it is assigned. When assigning an SSCC, the rule is that an individual SSCC number must not be reallocated within one year of the shipment date from the SSCC assignor to a trading partner. However, prevailing regulatory or industry organisation specific requirements may extend this period.
The definition of “logistic unit” is slightly impenetrable, but AFAIK it’s intended to mean a container with specific item(s) in it, so reusing a box for something else would make it a different logistics unit. If you wanted to track the container itself you’d assign it a Global Individual Asset Identifier.
Of course, you can do whatever you like in your own system, and trading partners can make arrangements with each other; but in my experience companies will get pretty annoyed if you send them the same SSCC multiple times since it confuses their system.
I took an experimental art course during my undergrad and this exact issue drove me insane. We went though dozens and dozens of examples of experimental/digital/interactive art, and each time the piece would really engaged me up until the point where I read the artists rambling justifications for their work. They just couldn't shut up and let the works stand on their own.
In fact SSCC is simply and unique identifier for particular logistics unit (ie. the one indivisible thing that you send from point A to point B) and does not in any way describe some kind of class of things sharing the same geometry. In the global logistics context GS1 managed SSCC namespace tends to be used only for "large" items (ie. pallets and LTL outsize boxes) while typical package services use either completely proprietary labeling or something that vaguely follows UPU rules for labeling of registered mail. IIRC the Code-128 barcode on FedEx packages contains GS1-128 datastructure that purpotedly encodes SSCC, but I'm not exactly sure that it in fact is correctly formatted SSCC and not just some kind of fedex-proprietary number.
Yeah, I'm confused as to what is meant by that. I bought a 20x20x12 box from a FedEx store last Wednesday, but I could just have easily bought a bunch from ULINE?
The USPS gives out flat-rate boxes for free. The assumption is of course that they'll recuperate the cost when you buy postage. But I have wondered if FedEx would accept a USPS box, and this "proprietary box size" thing makes me think no.
A guy actually used a bunch of FedEx boxes to furnish his house. FedEx was not amused. I kinda remember even the Simpsons had and episode with something similar (they built a fort from UPS boxes).
This packaging is the property of the U.S. Postal Service® and is provided solely for use in sending Priority Mail® shipments. Misuse may be a violation of federal law. This packaging is not for resale.
I understand it to mean: "out of likely misuses, some are actual violations of US federal law - so think twice before you decide to do something clever with this box".
While that might cause the USPS dismay, the question was whether FedEx would accept/ship the package. Would FedEx reject the package for fear of frustrating USPS?
Canadian perspective, I have used those boxes within the Canadian system with Canada Post. This law is not applicable in Canada so once those USPS box make it all the way here, there's nothing they can do to prevent it from being used.
I've had an eBay order arrive via Fedex in a flat rate box. I doubt anyone at Fedex cares as long as the label scans. I've also seen USPS labels printed on the free "UPS USE ONLY" thermal labels.
I'm going to be that guy. I can't help myself. This is fine for making art, and this is a really fun project that I enjoyed a lot.
But... I've seen enough unboxings of damaged goods, and ropey packaging over the years that has similarly led to damage here in real life, that it seems worth saying even amongst an intelligent crowd: the thickness of a cardboard box is not in any way sufficient to protect any goods more valuable than a book/DVD/video game/CD jewel case[0] during shipping, let alone fragile goods.
You need to make sure that you buy a box that's big enough to hold whatever you're sending, plus all the padding you're going to pack all around it to prevent it from being damaged by knocks or being dropped.
This will add to the weight and size of your package, and therefore the cost of shipping, but it's worth it to ensure your goods arrive undamaged at their destination.
</thatguymode>
[0] Even this one is debatable given how easy these are to crack and prone they are to the hinge tabs snapping off. The CD jewel case is a wildly successful design but not, I would argue, a great design - certainly not a great design for the particularly brittle plastic they're made out of. Ironic considering the discs themselves are made out of polycarbonate, and are therefore fairly durable.
As an artist, and one of the many who studied Duchamp in school, I love these. But I wonder if they aren’t potentially endangering the FedEx workers who transport them. Is there not some danger of getting a shard of glass sticking through the box?
The obvious Duchamp reference here by the way is not to his readymades but to his Large Glass:
"As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions"
Surely that's not right? What value is brought by only allowing one entity to register a 10"x2"x8" box, for example?
> Most of the artworks in Sometimes the river is the bridge were shipped by surface transport from Berlin to Tokyo to reduce the exhibition’s carbon footprint. Drawings were produced by a chance process that unfolded while the artworks were travelling by truck, train, and boat along their route. In each set-up, a ballpoint pen was held by a mechanical arm so that it moved over the surface of the paper in response to the movements of the crate, producing a visual record of the terrain over which the artworks passed.
Delightfully recursive in that the exhibition of the artwork creates the art being exhibited.. neither would exist without the other.
FedEx owns the box design and dimensions that these glass pieces explicitly imitate. FedEx also significantly contributes to the value of these pieces by applying unique and creative forms of rough handling during shipment.
Does FedEx own this art, and should the credited individual be paying them a share of the money earned from its display?
If a work like this actually sold for a significant value, I would argue that the FedEx person who threw it about and broke it SHOULD be compensated for their contribution to the work, all the more since their unknowingness was absolutely part of the nature of the artwork (it wouldn't be the artwork if just the artist put the thing into a box and then dropped it).
Do the producers of brushes, paints, and canvases own any of the art that their products make possible? Does the owner of an art gallery own the photos I take during my paid visit?
You may well own the photo but not the subject of the photo. I believe this means that you can not sell the photo without also acquiring a license to the subject.
I imagine that this is the same as taking a photo of a stock image. That doesn't make any sense.
> As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions.
I wonder if this is true, because if so it would be a particularly ridiculous example of "intellectual property".
Anecdotally I have read a few of these art PR-pieces where such details were made up.
It would be so cool if they did not just shipping to art galleries, but also mass produced it so you could get your own fedex shipping box art at home.
That is a great idea. It has some appeal. Prepare it from some thin sheet of glass but on something which will hold it together, maybe add some fluids separated in a ways that are easy to destroy with acceleration. You receive something that nobody else saw before and completely unique. With interesting enough design people would be posting pictures of these so you have marketing covered.
And then there are returned products: "My item was not damaged at all"
Exactly, present randomness to people and they will find some patterns. Even if 1 in 100 is interesting, those are the one that end up on social media doing the marketing. Kind of evil that way. But I think some people want what others don't have.
IANAL, but I would think the artist would have copyright as normal for a couple of reasons —- the involvement FedEx did was for hire —- and FedEx’s actions were used as tool in creating the work that they didn’t even know was being created. The artist still caused it to be created.
> And each time the work is shipped — say from one gallery to another — it’s unwittingly altered further by a system created by a massive multinational corporation:
Methinks the writer of this article has a chip on their shoulder or someone hurt them.
Personally, I judge art purely on the final result by principle and refuse to consider the artist itself, his stated intent, or the process by which he made it, as well as the source material whereupon it might be based: — it must stand on it's own merit.
In this particular case I find the cracks to not be terribly unæsthetic but not spectacular either, and consider it largely an inferior form of Wabi-Sabi design.
I do not like how much the art world is about the artist rather than the art itself, and how a story must accommodate it such as the novel production technique of shipping it as such.
It is essentially a world of hero worship where one's name is more important than one's productions.
In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value. This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution. This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later.
Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more.
> In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value.
It removes the value for the unobjective man who cannot free himself of such biases and judge matters on their own merit.
> This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution.
No, it would be akin to reading animal farm without knowing anything about the auctor, or the conditions and process by which it was written.
Art providing a commentary on an external event, and being judged upon how well it does so is an entirely different matter.
Of course, the artist can also be considered if what the art attempt to do is to provide some kind of commentary on it's own artist.
The argument you raise here is tantamount to that refusing to consider the auctor of a physics paper as well as how the research came to be in judging it's merit, is tantamount to not considering how well the physical results in it model the physical realities they attempt to describe.
> This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later.
And this is exactly why I believe judging Shakespeare by modern readers is prætentious.
A modern reader can never truly have Sprachgefühl for 1500s English. He may be able to read it, but it's hard for him to truly be capable of assessing whether language truly sounds beautiful.
> Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more.
It is what gives art power to the unobjective, biased man who cannot compartimentalize and judge matters on their own merit.
This does not limit itself to art. You will find that the same same man who judges art by the artist, will also easily be convinced that the exact same dish tastes better, if he be told it was more expensive.
> This does not limit itself to art. You will find that the same same man who judges art by the artist, will also easily be convinced that the exact same dish tastes better, if he be told it was more expensive.
If someone perceives the exact same dish as tasting better because it was more expensive (and/or in a fancier setting, with fancy table linens and silverware, a live quartet playing classical music, etc) then to that person it IS better. Perceiving something as being better is literally all that matters.
To look at it another way, removing one's sense of smell will make the same dish taste worse. Smell is a factor in one's perception of taste, as are other environmental factors.
> If someone perceives the exact same dish as tasting better because it was more expensive (and/or in a fancier setting, with fancy table linens and silverware, a live quartet playing classical music, etc) then to that person it IS better. Perceiving something as being better is literally all that matters.
Perhaps it does, but it also makes him a poor food critic, which was the relevant issue here.
I got a real kick out of this line. At first I thought it was pure nonsense. After a bit of searching I found out that Marcel Duchamp was an artist that made some art called "readymades." Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me.