In 1983, Brooke Shields didn’t use the language of personal security to talk about revenge porn, she used the language of national security. Against the sixteen-year-old, the photographer Gary Gross defended the recirculation of the spank bank that should never have existed:
>These photographs are not sexually suggestive, provocative or pornographic; they do not suggest promiscuity. They are photos of a prepubescent girl in innocent poses at her bath. In contrast…is her widely televised sexually suggestive advertisement for blue jeans.
Just because an army of the sick will never be defeated doesn’t mean that it will win. Forty years later,
> gordongoner.com, a website named after one of the co-founders of BAYC, indexes the “dehumanizing” elements of BAYC NFTs with an exact replica of the cryptocurrency franchise
For almost a year now, the monkey people have been going bananas in their legal saga against Ryder Ripps. The Bored Ape Yacht Collective say that re-tokenizing their intellectual property in the context of Hitler is not a conceptual art action, but is in fact dehumanizing to their system of currency. Is this the work of art or another vulgar interpretation of the work of art essay? Who cares if the complacencies of the industry are rendered even more embarrassing when
>a spokesperson for Yuga Labs, the company behind the Apes, responded by calling the allegations “deeply painful,” and “harmful”
A mental health episode? I may be an unreliable narrator. I can't tell the difference between rape and trademark infringement and no one who lost their virginity on the internet can. But I know enough to know that when Brooke Shields loses a brand identity case against a freelance photographer in 1983, it's because no amount of money was capable of winning it. Gross was enabled by the Copyright Act of 1976 which granted monopoly rights to creators at the peak of the post-fordist restructuring of capital. But it was the consent of Shield's mother, Teri, that the defense relied upon to quell the word on the street, which was that Brooke Shields' ass had more security than the state department. Meaning: the teenager had to be taken down a few notches at the expense of public decency. Given the public outrage responding to the trial's outcome, only a threat to the national security would legitimate protecting the rights of an artifact so exclusive to the purpose of making a woman out of a woman in the news.
The 1976 Act did to intellectual property what Bretton-Woods did to gold– “fixing” a work of art to an author, rather than a notice of copyright. For Ripps to win the case against Yuga Labs, he only has to defend a joke on the “security primitive”, and a practical one: to underminine the aestheticization of politics by pointing out an externally enforced semantic rule is his only job. This is highly subject-oriented. Whatever this gesture amounts to, the millions of dollars in legal fees Yuga Labs is losing on the Frankfurt School amounts to more. But historically this should weigh out to exactly what the staff assistant at Time Life magazine who ended up with the tearsheets of Brooke Shield's nudes made it mean, prior Availability; nothing more and nothing less.
The photographic trace treats all its subjects equally unfair, though its slightly more unfair to youth, which pays the highest price in permanence; second, to politicians, who pay for what remains. The fact remains: Nixon got caught with his pants down at Watergate, and Prince Andrew, Donald Trump and anyone who was anyone paid not to notice minors rising from the steam of Mar-a-Lago, got caught with their pants down in the same media format. In sex tape vs politician the sex tape always wins--until very recently. When R. Kelly pulled a Shaggy in 2008, the White man got to believe maybe its he who was mistaken for someone else, perhaps a criminal; or maybe a victim, a girl, as innocent as R. Kelly. And Amber Heard rises from the depths with another appeal...
Did the landed aristocracy have more power in the 1980s than they do today? What about teenagers? Apes? In my digital utopia animals will have human rights, but girls will remain an intractable problem. The US joined the Berne Treaty at the very moment contemporary art became an international policy. What the monkey's "mean" is an intractable problem. Intractable problems have never been a popular product category. Now that Urbit has proved a liability to my personal security, what can I sanity test against?
Ripps will be up against the Berne Convention, which the U.S. joined in 1989, and that reads like the life sentence of international treaties: for photography, the statute of limitations is 25 years from the year the photograph was created before it is legally considered public domain. The U.S. Copyright public catalogue holds records from 1978-present. If Gary Gross still holds purchase over a photograph of Brooke Shields, we will never know, which goes to show so much for monopoly rights. A 1984 record for a photograph with similar metadata secures the titleholder as "Donald Duane Dowdy": subsequent google searches alight the high unlikelihood of this person being real.
If Ryder wins against the monkey people all revenge porn potentially recompiles to an act of authorship. But if the monkey people win, the creative commons loses. The political contexts? Maybe the 9/11 section when you walk into Barnes and Nobles. The use and abuse of insecurity as a security tactic; the reliability of the troll -- “Tell the world, Johnny. Tell them, ‘Johnny Depp, I, a man, I’m a victim, too, of domestic violence, it’s a fair fight…”