Young tells ANIMAL that he is “probably not” going to update any of the press materials or revise his upcoming talk at the Church’s gallery space. “I’m still not convinced it’s necessary,” he says, then takes to updating definitions of English adjectives. “Crediting them as anonymous is different than unknown, which is to say unknowable.” And so, he seems to believe that labeling “knowable” someone’s images as anonymous/courtesy of yourself — the equivalent of cropping out a photo credit a scrawling out a painting signature and toting it as your anonymous discovery — is legit curatorial practice, in fact, it’s even conceptual-like!
“I recognize a philosophical juncture that once they were in the trash, ownership ceased,” he muses to me. Soda mused on this as well, finding it curious that Young’s self-imposed ownership to her physical stuff mimics the part of internet culture where images sometimes lose authorship once unloaded onto the internet, quipping, “It’s interesting that this is happening IRL too.” Young jumped all over that, of course. “That includes attribution, and so by Molly’s own words… there is no imperative to cite ownership or attribution to her. This is not the same as if I had printed out images online and used them.” Only, it is. Because those images he used are online, in the Google image results for her name.
When asked if he was surprised that it took less than an hour for his faux-”anonymous” artist’s identity to become a public fact, Young said, “Not really, I knew she was pretty well-known on the internet.”
Read More | "Curator of Molly Soda's 'Found' Photos: 'I Don't Think of These as Molly Soda's Photos" | Marina Galperina | Animal NYC