After finishing The Originality of the Avant-Garde by Rosalind Krauss I was struck by most by how second nature all her arguments seemed to me already. Meaning, mostly well I read the article I thought to myself on any number of points she was making, of course! Of course! Take for example all the problems with authenticity and originality she finds in Rodin’s work. (Small tangent: when I first saw The Thinker in an art book as a child I recognized it because my grandmother had a pair of The Thinker shaped book ends on her shelf. Naturally I assumed she was rich.) Locating the original of a cast sculpture is maddening, like locating an original photograph. Anything that tries to claim originality or authenticity already strikes us me phony because it has to make that claim in the first place. In other words nothing that has ever struck me as really original ever had to have someone tell me it was. That claim is always tied to market value of the work. Why is a vintage Dorthea Lange worth so much more than a library of congress print? Scarcity, of course. That Krauss chose not to pursue the idea of the original and the importance of the original as being inescapably linked to the art market struck me as a little odd. Labeling something as original is an important way of increasing its desirability and thus capital. I’m sort of fond actually of how goofy the whole enterprise of editioning photographs is. I mean the idea that someone will only print seven or ten of an image as a way to increase value is so deeply antithetical to the very nature of photography that it strikes me as so nakedly capitalistic that it’s a bit funny. The value becomes so imaginary and arbitrary that you sort of want to pinch someone and say “you realize this emperor is completely naked right?” That’s the thing is that everyone does realize this too and I’m not saying it’s a bad this, its just a little silly. In a capitalist society artists must increase their capital, I mean I made a video of appropriated digital footage that exists online ad infinitum into an edition of three DVDs…