A Conversation with Peter Fend

Abstract

painting.” But he didn’t know about abstract painting. In other words, it was clear to me—and I think that we would all agree—that you’re going to need to have the generation of kids who have learned about modern art or twentieth-century art to be in power in government or the news media before you can really get them to be able to deal with what we were discovering. Harrison: I wonder how you would extend this aesthetic take on data to other political and critical questions. Fend: I believe that property should be the main tax base and that we can use satellites for this purpose. This would be an ecological tax system where every “pixel” of the globe is represented and assigned a certain value. If the value of a pixel-parcel becomes more ecologically responsible or “green,” there would be less tax to pay. If it becomes more polluted, there would be a higher tax. And that means that the owners of the land, whoever they might be—it could be a teachers’ union, it could be an airport, it could be a city government—are being taxed according to the deteriorat ion or the improvement of the site. So I am actually looking quite seriously into ways of having a political system whereby the landowners are the payers of taxes. Joselit : There’s been a lot of skepticism among artists and intellectuals of the kind of society of surveillance or the panopticism— Fend: I think this: the laws called for civilian satellite data to be available to the people. The situation is that it’s not really the case. That is to say, Google Earth will not show you what’s happening in Iraq or what’s happening in hot spots. Harrison: Or Washington, D.C., right? Fend: I’m not too happy about the whole Google Earth phenomenon because it’s not about, for example, change detection or motion detection or dynamics. The curiosity we should have about what’s going on around us is not satisfied, in my sense, by just mapping. Okay, so I see a house. Big deal. I’m not talking about looking at ourselves for the narcissistic satisfaction of it, I’m talking about looking at ourselves and saying, “Hey, we find this city with this pollution runoff,” or more general problems. And we find your property is having this amount of emission. And we find that this street is not doing so well. It’s quite dramatic to show, for example, that in downtown Munich, if you just move one block, the air pollution can go way down. Joselit: You’ve said in other interviews that you think that the art world can be used as a platform for advertising politico-aesthetic programs such as this. What do you think the utility of the art world is for the kind of project that you’re outlining now? Harrison: To follow up on that, I think there are other artists interested in what you’re doing, and who might actually want to redirect the conversation around art back toward the kind of real-world objectives that interest you. I would really like to see people talk about art ideas again, not commerce. It seems lately that there is more reporting on auction sale prices, art fairs, and private jets, than there is art criticism. OCTOBER 132