home
from my introduction
to the Gas Station:
an interactive
web-project conceived for the Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art,
Oxford,
1996 (no longer on-line)
...on my mixed feelings about copyright
In the area of art that is specifically designed for reproduction, or may in some part be reproduced, copyright is uncontentious. There is a certain rightness in the story of Richard Berry, tracked down to a fly-blown Los Angeles apartment by a royalty collection society, who was presented with a cheque for millions of dollars gathered from hundreds of musicians who had covered his song 'Louie, Louie' since the 1960s.
However, I find no reason
to get hot under the collar about any of the art that has been
made under the broad heading of appropriation. You cannot persuade
me that the interests of art were in any way served by the clumsy
intervention of The Dali Foundation against Glenn Brown's
knowing and open usage of Soft Construction with Boiled-Beans
and other surrealist favourites. The exercise of copyright protection,
in this instance, is a very blunt instrument.
One must ask whose intellectual rights are being protected by
the strengthening grip of copyright and what it is that is being
protected. Leaving aside the more temptingly humorous examples,
such as the copyrighting of 'Gazza' by Paul
Gascoigne, we might
usefully look at what has happened in the past when an artist
makes something that is popular and ripe for interpretation.
More than any other artist
of the 1980s, Keith Haring's work lent itself to incorporation in fashion, graphics
and advertising. Already commercially successful at the time of
his Japanese retrospective, Haring was flanked by posses of lawyers
who swooped on imitation Haring-inspired watches, tee-shirts and
key rings at every turn. Haring's business interests were well-protected,
but I think his art was never in any danger. Why? Because (i)
the imitations were transparently bad (ii) they were good enough
to pass for the originals (iii) they were better than the originals
so that the cause of art in general was advanced or (iv) both
the originals and their surrogates will be found in retrospect
to be uninteresting. Art has always proliferated on the back on
its predecessors. One of art's primary reference points is other
art and it would be a shame if the enthusiastic pursuit of copyright
stemmed this flow.
Which is the more likely scenario: that artists, through the Design
and Artists Copyright Society and related organisations, will be able to extract
an honest penny from unscrupulous designers and advertising agencies
who expropriate their work without acknowledgement or that large
commercial organisations will come down hard on any unlicensed
appearance of their product which meets with their displeasure?
Perhaps if an artist makes something so popular that it becomes
part of general culture he or she must let go of it and trust
that the more it proliferates the more buyers will pay for the
original. This sounds a little optimistic. Maybe DACS will come
to the rescue and we will hear more Richard Berry stories in the
field of visual art. Frighteningly, though, music provides other
examples of what can happen. The writer of every commercially
successful piece of music is chased by a pack of indignant litigants
who emerge from behind their dusty keyboards to claim that it
was they who wrote that particularly compelling three-chord riff
in the middle bit back in 1991. And then before we know what's
happening every magnificent structure starts to collapse into
tiny angry splinters!
© Jeffrey Dennis 1996