Rudolf E. Kuenzli

Collection of pieces as described in the title; most felt pretty familiar—tragic irony or poetic justice? (Get the reference?) Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence is a nice reprint, but I liked Eva Hemmungs Wirtén’s “Visualizing Copyright, Seeing Hegemony: Toward a Meta-Critique of Intellectual Property” best, because she points out the persistent gendering of anti-enclosure, copyright restrictionist accounts of creativity, which routinely feature a male artist suppressed show more by corporate copyright—Larry Lessig uses multiple examples of creativity threatened by intellectual property rights, all of which feature men. This just reinstates the gendered vision of the individual genius, now as innovator/activist/hacker. She asks: “why is it that the exclusionary narrative of male individuality and originality are part of the problem when it comes to intellectual property and ‘authorship,’ and part of the solution when it comes to the public domain and ‘creativity’?” Of course, being in media fandom means that my experience of transformative creativity is very gendered in the opposite direction, and I try to do my part to put women’s experiences into the mix, so to speak. show less

What's most impressive to me is that this compendium covers expressions of Dada, such as in Eastern Europe and Japan, that I was not previously aware of. What most amuses me (as an aging, one-time punk rocker) is the thought of how the instigators of the movement might react to getting the full sober, academic analysis of what was basically a brick through a window; revolt into style indeed.

A fine appreciation of this most influential Surrealist.

Dada (Themes and Movements) by Rudolf Kuenzli (2006)