From Real Life Magazine:
In a 2000 piece for Wired, John Perry Barlow celebrated the rise of Napster and peer-to-peer file sharing while ridiculing the entertainment industry’s effort to suppress those developments. “The conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in earnest,” he claimed, and the free proliferation of information was winning. Computers had made information infinitely reproducible by disconnecting it from physical media; he took this to mean that owning information had become obsolete. That had become a core principle of the internet: Information wants to be free, as another early internet visionary, Stewart Brand, famously proclaimed at a conference in 1984.
Barlow used a derogative term, set off in scare quotes, for whatever information remained vestigially proprietary: “content.” He declared that “art is a service, not a product,” and that “created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to ‘content’ is like praying in swear words.” Soon enough, he assured readers, the internet would allow us to supersede the concept of “content” altogether.
Twenty years later, the opposite has happened: Everything is content. We all “pray in swear words,” to borrow Barlow’s phrase, and emerging forms of art are conspicuously products, characterized by their sale prices and ownership status as much as aesthetic merit. Free or not, content is still a commodity, inherently shaped by the platforms that circulate it and responsive to their incentives, monetary or otherwise. Rather than overthrowing the corporate entertainment industry, the internet has led us to internalize that industry’s logic, precipitating what is often called the “creator economy.” A host of intermediaries providing payment management systems, distribution infrastructure, marketing support, and systematized artificial scarcity are emerging to help individuals commodify and monetize more of their online presence. Intellectual property hasn’t faded away; instead it has become even more embedded in the fabric of the internet....
....MUCH MORE
Probably related:Commercialism As The Last 'ism' in Art:..."
I stole the 'ism' line from dealer Michael Finley's 2012 book The Value of Art.
Just as Duveen hit one of his dealing career high points with Gainsborough's 'Blue Boy' Finley can lay claim to putting together the deal that transferred van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet....
