The Obvious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close

Wils S. Hylton wrote a long read for the New York Times about the artist Chuck Close. Like most New York Times pieces, it's well-researched, engaging, and utterly pretentious ignorant garbage in equal measures.

The short version is: After years of perfecting his now-classic grid technique for portraiture, the wheelchair-bound 76 year old Close divorced his wife of 43 years and now spends his time in Miami Beach and Long Island, areas seemingly held in low esteem to the art scene in New York City. His portrait style has transformed from photo-realism, to his grid technique, and has now entered a new realm of flat, garish colors, which seems to send the writer into fits of confusion and rage at the very thought of his favorite artist changing his style.

However, we should begin with Hylton's complete misunderstanding of what happens when people get old:

Then he paused again, and a look of confusion came over him.

“Why am I talking about this?” he asked.

“You were talking about the therapeutic role of process,” I said.

“Right,” he said, and resumed the story. But a minute later, he lost his train of thought once more. Then another few minutes passed, and it happened again.

After half a dozen of these, I suggested we take a break.

The writer sees these lapses in thought as bizarre and out of character, however anyone with aging parents knows that this is, sadly, completely normal, especially someone with as many life-long medical issues as Chuck Close. Trying to find some insight into this forgetfulness in regards to his art is, at best, ignorant, and at worst like a chin-stroking college freshman trying to divine some insight into humanity from a midnight view of Titicutt Follies.

I am not saying there is no room for discriminating taste and judgment, just that there is also, I think, this other portal through which to experience creative work and to access a different kind of beauty, which might be called communion.

Personally I hate it when writers start throwing out terms like "communion" and "sacrament" in regards to art. Religion and art are in turns forever overlapping and separate realms, and using terms from one to describe the other has always struck me as a lazy shortcut to sounding insightful.

The writer takes issue with Close's changing art style, which seems odd because he defends Close's earlier transformation from photo-realism to grid painting.

...an incomplete portrait of the artist Cindy Sherman — eight feet high and wrought in a palette that dissolved from creamy greens and grays into a riot of hot pink at the bottom. At the time, I thought little of this shift on the canvas, or what it might portend. The intrusion of pink at the lower edge was unlike anything I’d seen him paint before. It seemed lurid and garish, not at all to my taste, but it was, after all, an incomplete work, and he was Chuck Close.

The above quote closes with the admission that Close's artistic evolution is a continuing process, yet it doesn't seem to be a good thing when the evolution is into a place the writer's tastes don't overlap.

So when I entered his studio on a sweltering afternoon last summer and discovered, mounted upon the easel, a looming self-­portrait in glaring neon, utterly devoid of depth or detail, as if he had taken the pink bottom of that Cindy Sherman portrait from a few years earlier and, rather than complete the painting, embraced its crude quality as a new technique, I couldn’t help wondering what Close, after 50 years of struggling to capture the human face and human identity, was trying now, at the end of his life, to reveal about his own.

From a simple technical perspective, Close has simply been changing what he fills in each square on the grid with. His earliest grid paintings had an abstract, liquid, organic quality to the paint work when you were close to the work, but as you backed up they coalesced into a portrait that used your brain to fill in the gaps that the abstract technique left behind. Now that he is filling each square with a simple flat color, the writer is aghast. Suddenly the efforts at defending his grid paintings fall away when the style isn't suited to the writer's interests, and he retreats to psychobabble in an attempt to discover why his favorite artist no longer makes pieces he likes.

Later the author goes into cringe-inducing detail of Close's love life, a bizarre tangent that reveals nothing other than some titillating details of an older man's love of younger women. Anyone who's spent time with the type of aging established heterosexual male artist knows they are rarely without a courtier of indistinguishable young women.

The article runs out the word count with gossipy facts viewed through the supposedly legitimizing lens of using meta-commentary to ruminate over the same gossip. Should the writer say these things (oh look he said them), what would the artist think (oh look he told him). There's an entire paragraph that simply cut-and-pastes details of Close's childhood that were described earlier, trying to divine some new insight through boring repetition.

The author has the provincial nearsighted insight to his fellow people as anyone who spends the majority of their time in and writing about New York City. The article reads like the physical manifestation of everyone who ever saw the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg and failed to see the criticism leveled at them. The novelist flourishes, the references to dog-eared copies of ancient philosophy books read at sidewalk cafes, all of it points to a view of humanity spent picking it apart in a laboratory instead of experiencing it.

The article ends with the writer seeing an unfinished Close painting as an accusation at himself, because what would any highbrow writing in 2016 be without ending on complete solipsism?

The sprawling white emptiness suddenly felt overwhelming, the horizontal streaks of pink and blue insufficient, and I stood there for a moment, wondering where he would take it, whether he would ever complete the painting, or if, as in his deepest fears, he had already finished his final work.

It seems toxic to write as if you're concerned with an elderly man's twilight years when you're really just writing about your own failures and doubts as a writer, like some low-rent Charlie Kaufman, forever naval gazing. Not once does the writer see the correlation between the new Close style and the pixellation of digital images, especially since most of his life is probably spent staring at screens. That seems like more fertile pasture for the writer to till, what with his own earlier (admittedly well thought out) insight into Close's photo-realistic portraits in the '60s and how they were not well regarded in an art work more interested in concepts than finished pieces.

My favorite part is Close's adherence to craft as its own reward, lambasting the high rents in NYC that force artists to draw up plans for their art without having  the room to build it. The man likes to paint, and now he's painting in a slightly different way. Is that enough to give a tweed jacket New York writer a sudden crisis of self-identity? It's just paint on canvas, and as any artist gets older they tend to break down their creations to their elemental parts. Chuck Close puts colors on rectangular canvas. Musicians write instructions for creating sound waves. Perhaps it's better to let the art wash over you than tie your very identity to it. That never ends well.

Thoughts on Car Seat Headrest

Recently, Matador Records as forced to destroy about 10,000 copies of their artist Car Seat Headrest's new album Teens of Denial due to a clearance issue with Rock Ocasek of the Cars in the track “Just What I Needed / Not Just What I Needed”. The Cars song was not sampled, but prominent parts of its composition were used, thus making this an issue of mechanical royalties, not performance.

Warning: Discussing legal issues involves a lot of repetition in order to make sure the concepts are being explained enough.

My experience with copyright law is limited to the written word, but a sad byproduct of US Copyright Law is that it's intentionally vague enough that I can provide some insight into the issue at hand. Everything comes down to a case-by-case basis, and while there are criteria for a judge to consider, in the end it comes down to the opinion of the courts and any precedent the parties can present in court. The last time US Copyright Law was overhauled was the late 1970s, and any amendments since then to include the effect of the internet have been intentionally vague to reflect lawmaker's understanding that the use of materials on digital media is constantly changing. 

I would split the blame 60-40 in this case, with Ocasek's publisher Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) holding the majority of the blame here. UMPG's system should have kicked back that Ocasek reserves the right to personally approve or deny any requests to use his music. The fact that Ocasek has veto power from his publisher is the result of his signing with UMPG in 2007, decades after the Car's hits and long enough to cement his place in popular culture and give him the leverage to request this kind of power. Generally, the publishing company holds nearly all the power, since publishing deals are worked out early in an artist's career when an advance from the publisher can mean the difference between starving or not. Considering the Car's songs ubiquitous placement in TV shows, movies, and regular rotation on classic rock radio, UMPG was confident that they would make enough money from licensing to justify giving Ocasek personal control over where his music would be used.

As a similar example, in 2011 Louis CK wanted to use the Who's classic "Who Are You" in an episode of his show Louie. According to Pete Townsend's publishing deal, regardless of whether Townsend or the publisher was contact for approval to use his music, the other side would automatically agree to however much was being charged. Louis CK was told to ask Townsend personally, because he was known to charge less for the use of his music than what the publisher would charge if they were approached first. After sending Townsend copies of previous episodes, CK was granted the use for a much lower sum than he would have been charged had he gone through the publisher.

The episode, "Country Drive", aired in 2011, around the time Who primary songwriter Pete Townsend was in the midst of selling his publishing rights to Spirit Music Group for up to $100 million, but it is realistic that his previous publisher would have granted him this same power. However, unlike Ocasek, Townsend's deal with Spirit does not grant him personal veto power. 

The 40% blame on Matador is tied to the fact that Car Seat Headrest's use of "Just What I Needed" skirts the line between homage and cover, with no clear dividing line. Several of the very memorable parts of the Cars song are used in his composition “Just What I Needed / Not Just What I Needed”, woven in with original elements. A very similar example is "John Allyn Smith Sails" by Okkervil River, which interpolates the old folk song "Sloop John B." to describe the suicide of poet John Berryman. The big difference here is that "Sloop John B.," as a traditional folk song with no one author, does not have a copyright. 

Consequence of Sound has a very good article about "John Allyn Smith Sails" that you should check out.

Fair Use, which you probably see slapped on the description of numerous YouTube videos in an attempt to skirt takedown notices, is not a state of being in copyright law, but a defense. If you are sent a letter from a copyright owner saying you violated the terms of their copyright, you can say it was Fair Use, but not before. Fair Use came about because of the number of cases involving copyright violations due to the ease of copying and distributing materials on the internet. Did I mention the US Copyright Law hasn't had an overhaul since the late 1970s? As with most aspects of US law, it doesn't matter what you do until you get caught. 

In the end it doesn't matter whether it's Fair Use or not, because Matador has acquiesced to the demands of UMPG and are removing the offending song without getting the courts involved. This is how nearly all copyright disputes are resolved: the owner of the work contacts whoever they think is using it in an illegal manner, and it gets taken down. This is due to several high-profile precedents in the 1990s involving companies photocopying peer-reviewed articles for employee use & email forwarding stock tip newsletters which resulted in six-figure settlements with copyright holders. 

Let's just say Matador dug in their heels and took this to court. The four criteria to determine whether something has been use in accordance to the Fair Use defense are:

• the purpose and character of your use.
• Courts have generally cited this first criteria as one of the most important (though from a legal standpoint, all four criteria must be weighed equally). Did Car Seat Headrest transformed the material in any meaningful way, adding new insights and aesthetics to the original work? I would say that while the new composition is somewhat trans formative, it is not trans formative enough to qualify as fair use; rather, it hews closer to a cover song than an original song. The new song starts out sounding like a cover song, pulling a bait-and-switch on the audience's expectation of what they are about to hear, thus employing a copyrighted work that, temporally, covers the song before transforming it. 
• the nature of the copyrighted work.
• "Just What I Needed" is a published composition that has enjoyed wide popularity from its initial release in 1978 to the present day.  
• the amount and substantiality of the portion taken
• Car Seat Headrest uses the palm-muted 8th note E chord from the intro of "Just What I Needed," setting the stage for the listener to expect a straightforward cover, when instead the song goes into an original direction. Later, the lyrics are very similar, but slightly different, from the first verse of the Cars song. 
• the effect of the use upon the potential market
• Car Seat Headrest is a band who, despite many self-released albums and critical adulation, is relatively unknown to the US listening audience. Their new label, Matador, is one of the larger "indie" labels, though its distribution has, in the past, been bankrolled by a major label, i.e. a company whose stock is traded on the US stock market. The cultural impact of The Cars dwarfs even hyperbolic estimates of Car Seat Headrest's popularity, and this new composition is unlikely to cause UMPG to lose any money. 

In terms of a utopian ideal of copyright law, I would say Car Seat Headrest could not claim Fair Use. The new composition is too close to the most prominent parts of "Just What I Needed", and for the purpose of conforming to the law, it should be considered a cover song, despite Will Toldeo's additions to the song. There is no legal number associated with the percentage of another composition can be used in a new one before Fair Use is no longer a valid argument. When a late night talk show utilizes a popular song or a clip of another song, and the host says they can only use 30 seconds of it, that is not due to a law on the books, but its the limit that most entertainment lawyers agree is the most you can show and still successfully argue Fair Use.

Matador could claim that they acted in good faith in requesting a license to use the song on the Car Seat Headrest album, and the blame for Ocasek not having the opportunity to veto the licencing before the records are pressed should fall on UMPG.

BUT WAIT!

Matador should have waited until it had the full approval from the publisher before pressing the records. The thing is, pressing records and setting up promotion for a new album takes time, but getting approval for a music license takes even longer. This is a matter of UMPG saying "okay we will approve this eventually" and Matador taking that as a good sign that they could go forward with manufacturing with the understanding that they would get official notice before the album's release date. Matador had started the ball rolling, and had enough faith in UMPG to fill their paperwork requirements to start manufacturing before official approval was given. Matador probably also has enough clout at their pressing plant that the plant will manufacture their records before official approval.

This example toes the line between homage, cover song, and transformative work, thus making it difficult to come to a verdict beyond a reasonable doubt. Matador were smart to destroy their stock, despite being unable to write it down as an expense, because UMPG can afford much better lawyers than Matador ever could. Eventually that's what it comes down to: how good of a lawyer can you afford?