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Save Those Compact Discs!

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-Add in the degraded audio quality of most streaming, MP3 compression, or home-based Bluetooth equipment, and you are suddenly in the cheap seats behind the restrooms–some distance away from what can be heard from a studio master released as a CD

A few years back I wrote a piece about whether we were done collecting books and music.  Many people are, but it can be a mistake to abandon those once-loved CDs. What is interesting now is how streaming has come to dominate the music industry. Streaming means you pay a fee to access a vast library service with the music you want to hear.  In most cases its incredibly small royalties are a thumb in the eye to musicians, but it is ever so convenient for people who want wall to wall music without having to lift a finger. No collecting required. In 2019 Spotify had become the dominant form of music delivery, with other services like Pandora, radio and YouTube not far behind.

What a different world the music industry was in 1999, when 900 million compact discs were sold.  But in the years that followed, the CD lost favor and went into a near total collapse of sales.  Suddenly perfect digital copies could be made without additional purchases. By 2007, most of the huge brick and mortar stores like Tower Records and HMV were shuttered, and favorite form of retail therapy died with them. CDs now sell at the modest rate of 31 million copies a year, with Japan the only remaining major consumer. In fact some who study music industry trends in the United States barely notice this superior older format.

As for streaming, what benefits consumers is often a nightmare for performers. Fee-based streaming services put performers at the end of a meager financial food chain that was mostly tapped-out before they were paid. In 2019 the Canadian cellist Zoe Keating reported that her royalty for each stream of her music played by Spotify was $0.0054.

This short essay came to mind after reading a recent article from the Guardian’s Matt Charlton, who wondered if there was any point in holding on to the silver discs that solved many of the problems inherent in vinyl records. Some audiophiles will disagree, but modern CDs can offer stunning sound.  They also eliminated the problems created by physically trying to race a stylus through a narrow trough of vinyl. Clicks, pops, inner groove distortion, warping, and washed-out sound from worn down grooves are problems listeners no longer have to contend with. But as Charlton still sees it, CDs “are inherently unlovable, with none of the richness or tactile nature of vinyl, or the kooky, Urban Outfitters irony of tapes.”

His reasons don’t add up to much of an argument. Is he serious about the sonically handicapped cassette tapes that were originally designed for dictation? And what about “tactile vinyl” with grooves everywhere that you are not supposed to touch?  I also must have missed the concerts at Urban Outfitters.  Overall, I’m not feeling the vibe.

 

A CD has the capacity for sound accuracy higher than what Apple, Amazon and other music services are routinely streaming.

In fact, CDs are amazing as carriers of music and its supporting images and texts. The standard sampling rate of 44,000 Hz a second is a phenomenal rate for accurately rendering what microphones have heard (assuming your playback device has a decent digital-to-analogue converter.)  This is the big remaining asset of the CD; it has emerged as an easy way to hold on to what avid music listeners call “lossless” sound. That is, a CD has the capacity for sound accuracy far above what Apple, Amazon and other music services are routinely streaming. Add in more degrading streamed audio files like MP3 compression or Bluetooth equipment, and you suddenly only qualify for the cheap seats near the restrooms.

Of course there are some caveats. Many listeners seem to have trained their ears to not care about less-than-optimal sound.  And even a well-made CD won’t help what started out as a bad recording. In addition, if smaller cards and memory chips can now hold the same accurate audio content, the CD remains the most accessible medium we have for holding the complete package of music, notes and images that a carefully thought-out album represents. For me, new music starts from a physical CD, a personal “master,” before it is stored somewhere else as a high-quality audio file. What’s not to love about these small silver marvels?

 

 

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Valuing the Source More than the Thing

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                           A Fake Rothko

Eight million dollars is a lot to pay for a fake. But it is still the same canvas that was once loved when it was purchased years ago.

Sometimes our apparent devotion to a specific thing gets betrayed by our deeper and occasionally unmasked love for its ostensible caché.  We may like the idea of owning something more than the object itself.  For example, many of us have hundreds of books that we may never read again. But they stay nearby, proudly displayed as representations of an identity we are willing to share. These books are doing most of their work as unopened artifacts, their spines neatly lined up and visible for the world to see.

Our misplaced love for assumed attributions of good taste suggests values that have perhaps become inverted. To use the language of the art world, can the provenance of an object mean more than the object?  Sometimes– a fact well represented in Director Barry Avrich’s documentary, Made You Look now available on Netflix. It’s drama means that it will surely be a feature film in the near future. In it, Avrich takes us back to the early 2000s and to New York’s Knoedler Gallery and its Director, Ann Freedman.  Over a full decade, 80 million dollars changed hands at the gallery as what were supposedly “unknown” paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko were sold to Manhattan’s money-to-burn elites.  Even the President of the Board at Sotheby’s and his wife couldn’t resist.

You know where this is heading.  All of the newly discovered works of abstract impressionism were fakes. They were sold to Freeman, who found it convenient to accept the story of a Queens New York woman who claimed that she was simply helping a friend, a South American art collector who wished to sell off works that he no longer wanted. The mysterious woman sold them to the gallery for modest sums, and then the gallery sold them to their well-healed clients.

In fact, there was no collector. Instead, a very good Chinese artist then living on Long Island had mastered the common cultural practice of making nearly perfect paintings in the styles of the artists. It was an effective con involving scores of “new” canvasses that had supposedly been purchased directly from leading painters of mid-Twentieth Century American art.

The problem is what to make of copies of a famous work at a time when we have almost perfect tools of reproduction.

Interestingly, if we buy a copy of a musical performance—perhaps a CD, DVD or download—we know we are getting a copy, and that is exactly what we want.  We want the performance that is brought back to life in bytes or pixels. With music, everyone can be a collector of music.  But the modern art world has a distorted set of values.  The assumption is that each painting is unique and monetizes the celebrity of a famous artist.  All of this presumably increases the size of the numbers on price tags. A long-running BBC series, Fake or Fortune, made the same point for years. Sleuthing the origins of someone’s inheritance of a possible Constable or Gainsborough became the most popular arts program in Britain.

Avrich talks to some of the people who were duped, including Dominico and Eleanore De Soles. They thought they were buying the rather striking painting at the top of this piece, supposedly by Mark  Rothko.  Even though Mr. De Soles was an auction house executive, he was fooled like almost everyone else who viewed it. When the con was revealed, suddenly the picture that had hung on the wall of their home was, in his word, “worthless.”

The problem of what to make of copies in an age of instant reproduction is actually not a new quandary.  Philosopher Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), raises the question of what to make of convincing copies of the real thing. After making a pitch for cherishing “authenticity,” he reaches the mostly unsatisfying conclusion that an original as an “aura” that is missing in a copy.  But there is at least some logic here. In simpler terms, perhaps the De Soles and others were buying a vaunted reputation that comes with an established artist, something both less and more than the material object itself.

One indicator of this inverted state of affairs is the recent observation of writer and critic Fran Lebowitz, who has noted how strange it is that auctions of stunningly high-priced works follow a pattern where the painting is shown to a packed but silent room, followed by a burst of applause only when a final high bid is finally accepted. Similarly, for many news organizations the story of a famous painting is not about the art, but the astronomical price paid for it.

     The Alleged fake Renoir owned by Donald Trump

Donald Trump apparently owns an attractive but fake Renoir. It may be easier to sell a fake to someone who so eagerly trades in appearances. Even so, it probably still hangs on a wall in one of his homes. And it should. Ditto for the Chinese copy that the De Soles bought. Eight million dollars is a lot to pay for a fake. But it’s worth remembering that it is the same canvas they bought and loved years ago.