Sarah Sze, 'Strange Attractor,' 2000. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Marianne Boesky, Ed Cohen, and Adam Sender 2001.1. © Sarah Sze. Photograph by Frank Oudeman (Courtesy the Whitney Museum)

Artist Sarah Sze will speak at the Whitney's eighth annual Walter Annenberg Lecture. On Nov. 5, at the Whitney Musuem’s lower gallery, she will talk about her work with Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg and join the ranks of former speakers, including Claes Oldenburg, Susan Rothenberg and John Baldessari.

Ms. Sze, who has been selected to represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale, is best known for her delicate, immersive and gravity-defying sculptural installations made from the detritus of everyday life where anything from a matchstick to a 20-foot step ladder seems to work.

Since the early days of her career, the Biennale-bound artist has been in the good graces of the Whitney. She took part in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and in 2003 had a solo presentation at the museum, “The Triple Point of Water,” for which she took to the submerged sculpture garden of the museum with a scaffold of PVC pipes, fish tanks, Styrofoam and orange yarn all held together in surreal equilibrium.

The lecture is held in honor of the late Walter H. Annenberg, a philanthropist, patron of the arts, and former ambassador. While it’s free, take a second to register at whitney.org.

Gregory Crewdson and Richard Prince (Courtesy The Observer)

Richard Prince wasn’t alone last night when he walked into the Yale School of Art to give a lecture. The “Visiting Artist in Sculpture” was accompanied by photographer Gregory Crewdson, who teaches at Yale, and who invited the artist to speak to his students, according to art dealer and TV personality Bill Powers who was also in the audience.

Mr. Crewdson opened by saying we were going to hear all about Mr. Prince’s early life as an artist and see some rarely seen work, such as his early postcard photographs and some of what he’s working on now. But with Mr. Prince’s first words, the elephant was brought squarely into the room.

“I was born in the Panama Canal Zone,” said Mr. Prince.

This factoid reminded us of Mr. Prince’s controversial Canal Zone series, a group of paintings he made by reworking images of Rastafarians by the photographer Patrick Cariou, which a court ordered him to destroy roughly a year ago. Mr. Prince appealed the decision, a move which is still working its way through Federal court in New York.

Mr. Crewdson asked Mr. Prince questions about the latter’s life and work, which Mr. Prince responded to with quirky colorful stories interjected with awkward reflections on artistic ownership, all while presenting a slideshow.

He discussed his “tear sheets” job at LIFE magazine, which required him to tear up magazines and collate hard copies of articles to send to authors. It was that post which first sparked his interest in re-photography, the practice of photographing other photographs. At the end of each day, he was left with the advertisements, which he would take down to his studio and photograph.

“Those images weren’t associated with an author,” Mr. Prince said. “At least not in my mind.”

He remembers hanging up his first work of “re-photography,” a term he claims to have coined though many other artists would practice it, and the initial response. “The reactions I would get—it was kind of embarrassing.” He said his guests would be confused. “They didn’t quite know what it was—was it my photograph?”

And while he was soon being introduced to other artists like Laurie Simmons, Sherry Levine and Cindy Sherman some of whom worked in re-photography, and who “had similar thoughts in their heads,” he didn’t feel like he belonged to that group. “I had a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “I wanted things to be factual.”

He spoke of his series of photographs of cowboys, that would be known as his Marlborough Men, because they were re-photographs of advertisements for Marlborough cigarettes. He put up a picture of a cowboy riding a horse through a prairie against a blue sky. It was transfixing.

“The first time I titled an image,” he said, “I called it Cowboy.” At his first showing of the images, at an Upper East Side gallery Baskerville and Watson, not one image sold. The implied joke seemed odd in light of the fact that his works sell for large sums, particularly the Canal Zone works at question in his pending litigation, one of which sold for $2.3 million.

Mr. Prince stopped making photographs in 1986 and took up writing out jokes on paper. In 1999, he returned to photography, and cowboys.

“I was never interested in the cowboys,” he said. “I was interested in what they were in.” He looked up at the image on the screen of a generic-looking mountain range without any humans.

Then, he returned to the subject of cowboys, this time painting them. He likened the his practice to beach-combing. “It came in with the tide. You can claim it. You can take it home with you that day.”

He showed us slides of his early and rarely seen “post-card” photographs, beautiful images of monuments and urban European cityscapes that he took while he was a student in Europe. But he didn’t show us any images of sculpture, which he claimed to be working on.

“What kind of sculpture are you doing now?” we asked Mr. Prince after the lecture.

He said he was now making sculptures of cowboys. “A young cowboy,” he said. “The cowboy as a young boy. And humorous sculpture. Like oxymorons. A ten foot pole. A pole that is ten feet long.”

0-Day at Eyebeam (Courtesy The Observer)

Last night at Eyebeam in Chelsea, Jeremiah Johnson and Don Miller met up to give a lecture on the ethics of stealing art. The two co-founded 0-Day Art, an online gallery that deals in net art, or artwork that uses the Internet as its medium. But unlike other galleries, they don't sell the work. These self-styled Robin Hoods of Internet trade in net art in an effort to keep it free and available to the public, even if that means taking it by illicit means from the artist. Their lecture was the first in a series organized in conjunction with an online-only exhibition called "C.R.E.A.M.," which is accessible during the month of April. As the purpose of "C.R.E.A.M." (an acronym for “cash rules everything around me") is to present work by artists who are engaged in open-source art while exploring the issue of establishing value for Internet-based artwork, 0-Day Art was a perfect fit.

“Is it okay to take digital art 'offline' to give it value,” asked Mr. Johnson rhetorically. “No. It’s not okay. That’s a ridiculous way to monetize net art.”

Mr. Johnson and Mr. Miller were referring to a video that first piqued their interest in exploring the valuation of net-based work. They saw the video “How Do You Sell an Animated GIF,” which showed Rhizome executive director Lauren Cornell talking about selling the quirky computer animations that could be taken “offline” and enjoyed “locally” by collectors. While the conversation about limiting access to digital artwork or imposing restrictions on their display and transfer was not new, it forced people to have an opinion about the issue one way or another, including Mr. Johnson and Mr. Miller.

“We’re resistant to attempts to create value or applying a paradigm that exists for physical objects,” said Mr. Johnson who was seated next to Mr. Miller behind a table and partially hidden by an open laptop. Behind them was a large screen which displayed bright green vintage-like computer graphics. “In treating digital works as a physical work, you’re neutering the power of those works.”

There were about eight people in the audience. A young woman in heels was recording the whole thing with a large VHS camera. Another camera was set up on a tripod as the talk was being streamed online.

“0-Day Art ('zero day' art), is a 'warez' group,'” said Mr. Johnson, explaining that that is a group of people who distribute copyrighted work, mostly software, without fees.

As an introduction, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Miller did a run-through of all the vocabulary we would need to know for this discussion. "'Warez'," he said, "are copyrighted works, mostly software, that is distributed without fees."

A “warez scene” is the competition between warez groups, which bred a lot of creativity and changes in digital artwork; “0-day” is a version of “cracked” software that has been modified to remove unwanted features like copy protection and released on the same day as the original. Then they gave us a “cracktro” an introduction to “cracking.”

The digital art gurus distinguished between the "demoscene" (computer art scene of individuals who produce real-time non-interactive audio-visual computer graphics) and the "net art" scene, which is less technical but more conceptual and artistic than the Demoscene.

Then they showed a video of a young man listening to a hip-hop song and gesticulating a whole series of “gang signs” to the rhythm of the song. This was a video that was part of one of their exhibitions that you could access online. They also passed around a flash drive and encouraged anyone with a computer to download all of the work that 0-Day has ever released.

“This might seem disrespectful,” said Mr. Johnson. "We have ultimate respect for the artists' intentions."

“I can’t reconcile your saying you’re trying to be respectful,” said a young man in the audience later, “when what you’re doing is not respectful.”

“If you’re anyone and you’re putting anything online," said Mr. Johnson in response, "and you expect to control it, you’re delusional. I don’t see how holding a mirror up to someone’s delusions is disrespectful.”

An online audience member asked about their piracy of S[edition], a site which offers limited-edition digital artworks for sale.

“We ripped a high-resolution version of a Damien Hirst video,” said Mr. Johnson.

“But we just sat on it,” added Mr. Miller. They never ended up distributing it. Perhaps they were worried about litigation.

“Are you afraid of being prosecuted by S[edition]?” someone asked.

“That didn’t play into our decision,” Mr. Johnson said. “It didn’t fit with our trajectory of what we had so far. And it just wasn’t very good.”

After the talk, Gallerist brought up Cory Arcangel. Mr. Johnson said while they had not shown Mr. Arcangel's work, it does fit within their aesthetic and was similar enough to what they do. He didn't elaborate on why they didn't show Mr. Arcangel's work but perhaps it wasn't challenging enough for them and anyway, he already operates in a similar fashion to 0-Day Art. “You can get his work on his website. He even gives away the code for Super Mario Clouds.”

We asked if they had been approached by collectors.

“No,” Mr. Johnson said. “That would be funny. I guess if we were approached by one, we’d have to figure out how to troll them really hard.”