Name Dropping - What's In A Name? Who Is Bangsy?

Is Name Dropping really necessary? How do we put value on fashion, art, literature and design? By their inherent quality of craftsmanship, beauty and meaning, or do we rather evaluate art by name dropping a famous person as its creator? Should content be freely contributed to a rapidly emerging global consciousness or should we, the creators of Internet content, cling on to private ownership with copyright? There is a lot of debate on the Internet about common domain, open source free software, collective creativity, and above all about people ripping each other off when they are not supposed to. This true story about my mother, the now famous photographer Ata Kando, questions such issues from two opposing views.

What's in a Name?

Ever since we were children my mother had a stamp for the back of every photograph she printed in the dark room that said: Copyright Ata Kando, with her address and telephone number, and then she had a second stamp, a red one, larger than the first one that said in capital letters: “MENTION NAME”. It so often happened that newspapers would use her pictures and failed to give due credit. I understand that, as a single mother with three kids to raise, Ata needed to promote herself to get more work, obviously. But despite the big red letters on the stamp we were still as poor as rats, always on the bread line.

An exhibition showing the pictures from Ata Kando's new photo book opened on the 5^th June 2008 at the Hub Gallery in Amsterdam. Ata gave a ten-minute talk to 300 people. At the same event, she signed vintage prints which were auctioned to the tune of ten thousand euros a piece for animal welfare. Ata was exhausted but very happy. Until she had a closer look at the new book and started finding faults. One of which was that they had failed to mention my name as the translator of the text from Dutch into English. She was so upset and angry about this that she told me she would tell the publisher that from now on she insists on signing a contract giving her the right to verify corrections prior to future reprints. “And if they don’t agree?” I asked. “Well then I shall not permit them to do any further print runs of my books!” I very much doubted if she was in a position to do so, but my determined mother who now sees herself as the diva of Dutch photography, seemed adamant.

I don’t like the element of pride, ego, self-centeredness and false superiority that comes with fame. And the endless game of name dropping, the desperate urge for people, like ants around the honey, to be connected to fame. Even some of our family members who previously never gave her the time of day now rush to openings of her exhibitions because she is now a celebrity. I don’t like Ata’s own pride in having lunch with the prince of Holland or her even greater pride in being a personal friend of the former Hungarian president.

One morning at the breakfast table I asked her: “Who is more important to your daily existence, the milkman who delivers your milk in the freezing rain at six o’clock every morning or the Hungarian president?”

Now I personally don’t mind if my name is not mentioned for doing this translation. Achilles’ Cools' original text is strong and informative. It was interesting to get into another author’s head and try to convey his style and meaning in a different language. I enjoyed doing the work and I learned from it. The publishers were happy with the result and thanked me profusely for doing such a good job for no fee. I donated my fee to the cause of the animals, to the success of my mother's new book.

A well-known graffiti artist pseudo-named Banksy has created politically relevant pictures on walls and bridges all over the world, from London and New York to Paris and Israel. He has clandestinely hung his own paintings in the Louvres next to the Mona Lisa, then recorded the time it took for his pictures to be removed, between a few days to a few weeks!

There are well illustrated books about Banksy. But nobody knows who he is. He has to hide from the law because graffiti art is illegal. Why is Banksy so popular? Because he is anonymous. He could be any of us, the voice of an unknown majority. As Banksy shows in some of his work, cavemen did not sign their pictures, yet we can still admire some beautiful thousands of years old cave paintings today.

The insanity that goes on about names, labels, trademarks, in short, the ownership and commercialisation of creativity is not art worthy.

An unknown composer wrote my very favourite guitar tune. Here we meet the borderline between folk art and high art. I personally think that high art stinks of money.

Pure art is the product of free, creative expression. Ok, professional artists need to make a living like everyone else, but collectors' speculation in art is an antithesis. Art and greed don't match. People, at the folk level, sing and dance (perform art) to forget their monetary problems.

What’s in a name? Surely it is the product that matters, not who created it. Van Gogh’s sunflowers? Yes, not a bad painting but would it fetch millions had it not been signed?

An artist once said to me at an exhibition: “I do not boast about my work, I prefer it when other people talk about it in praise.” Unfortunately such artists are few and far between. Most successful artists lack humility and have got to where they are by being primarily bullshit artists. Name dropping attracts snobbism. “Who’s that?” the famous people say disdainfully when someone less famous is among them. If that person is less famous, then that person is surely a worthless nobody.

When you are famous and you do something wrong you live to regret it, you become infamous. As an author I wrote, at a certain time in my life, something I then believed to be the truth. But ten or fifteen years later I no longer believe that what I wrote then is true now, I changed my mind, moved on. But the books are still on the shelves, signed with my name saying things that I now no longer agree with. Now that is inconveniently embarrassing. Had I not had my name on the book it would not have mattered. Pseudonyms may be a form of copyleft.

There is something on the Internet called “copyleft” as opposed to “copyright” whereby the creators of music, art, animation and literature donate their work to the world without claiming any credit or copyright. Now that sort of thing is more in line with Carl Gustav Jung’s ideas of a collective consciousness and, to me, a much more appealing approach.

Back to Ata’s stamp on the back of her photographs, one could wonder whether copyleft prevents making a decent living. I don’t think so. Most people get by; especially if they are allowed to occupy themselves with things they enjoy doing and things that they are good at. The very essence of art is against all the nonsense flustering around celebrities, big names like v.i.p.’s, stars, royalty, false exclusivity, and superiority, fashion fads, and above all, speculation and greed. Good art suggests new ways towards some form of positive advancement of the human condition. Copyleft undresses art to its naked truth, to its own worth for what it is without the hype. In the context of this article, the auctioning of vintage prints took advantage of the greed factor for a good cause, but ask yourself: what does the public want to buy? A beautiful picture or the value the picture can gain if signed by a famous photographer? The latter product, the one with the signature is still the same picture but it has ceased to be pure art. It has now become a gambling commodity.

The product is the contribution. The product is what matters. The product adds to culture. Not the name of the individual character who made or invented it. A name is a reference only to a person at a certain time. Names help write history but what do they do for the future? When I was in primary school in France I was told that Napoleon was a hero. A few years later in secondary school in Holland, I was told that Napoleon was a tyrant. At twelve years of age I became utterly confused and began to suspect that history is a simplified, manipulated, biased and corrupt description of the past. Jane d’Arc, Charlemagne, Einstein, Da Vinci, Picasso, Robert Capa, Ata Kando. What about Mother Teresa, the saints, and Jesus, for Christ’s sake. If Jesus had not had a name women might not have been burned alive in the name of Christianity.

I realise that my lament about name dropping cannot be a generalisation. There are different reasons for being famous and fame involves many different personalities. But I think I am mostly against the demand, the exigency for fame. Who needs glory, medals and applause? Are they to encourage others to become famous? Some famous people are true role models of virtue and skill. But could it perhaps be that only very insecure people demand fame? To make sure to themselves that they exist, and, understandably at Ata’s ripe old age of 96, she wants to be remembered beyond the approaching disappearance of her physical existence.

Times Are Changing

Any Internet content will only survive for the time it is being promoted on the Internet. When you stop promoting a website it will soon drop into the no-follow dungeons, dissappear off the face of the ether and become obsolete regardless of its artistic or scientific merit. All internet content is therefore ephemeral and the names of the creators no longer matters. All they can hope for is that their ideas have been read by enough people, that their ideas have somehow infiltrated the brains of their readers.

The everlasting effect of a piece of work therefore becomes a part of the world pool of shared knowledge (collective consciousness) rather than a precious piece of canvas hanging in the Louvres or a Dostoevsky novel reprinted over centuries to come. With the Internet, Classicism can no longer grow.

So listen mother Ata: Never mind about the size of the credit. What matters is the book, the cause (in this case the animals) and the future. You and your oeuvre will change the minds of your public. And this change will affect the next generation and so on and so forth. Your unique contribution counts forever. In the great scheme of things any ripple of positive change is immortal regardless of a name. What really matters is: how can we together make the present fiasco of our world change for the better.

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How do you feel about copyright ownership of your written material? Do you agree or disagree with the notion that what we contribute to the Internet should be freely available for all to share and enjoy without having to pay for it? Put your thoughts in a comment. :)