FeWaysOfWorkingOutWhereTheMoneyIs
From UoWiki
On the 5th March 2005, the University of Westminster hosted an event organised by the Centre for Arts Research, Technology and Education titled "Ways of Working 2 - Appropriation and Collaboration in Contemporay Arts Practice" which I attended as myself - although I was invited as a delegate of the Uo1. I was really surprised by how interesting it was. I got the impression that it had somehow managed to be interesting by mistake.
The physical organisation of the conference was great - the food was top notch, the venue was central and prestigious in a way that focused the mind without letting the whole thing become too grand. I'm still sure it would have been more fun in a crappy old factory somewhere in the east end, but i'm not sure there would have been the mix of audience there, and people would have probably been more unhappy about sitting in a lecture theatre being talked at.
Having said 'talked at', I should clarify that I don't mean that in a pejorative way. The question sessions were really good and the 'marketplace' session was also a lot of fun from where I was sitting at the UoJournal distribution table.
The phrase 'interesting by mistake' also needs clarification. The premise of the meeting was that artists and lawyers would get together and talk about IP issues. As it turns out the artists and the lawyers were talking about completely different things.
Discussions amongst the lawyers about 'copying' artworks was largely irrelavent to most art practices because the value of an artwork isn't always diminished through direct copying. In many cases, copying increases the value of an artwork because the copied piece then seems more 'seminal'. But this is dependent on a complex and changable series of transactions and statuses.
For example, if a well-known artist is copied by a nobody or another well-known artist, it increases the value of their work for the above reasons. If a nobody is copied by a well-known artist (which happens often), the nobody then seems to be copying the well-known artist, and the value of their work and their ability to gain remuneration for it is diminished. So the economic model of scarcity and 'copyright' doesn't apply evenly.
This misunderstanding dislocated the discussion, but the methodology that the lawyers were using was still amazingly rigorous and interesting.
By actually attempting to ascertain whether something can be considered art in a pseudo-objective, legal framework, and making a serious attempt to pull apart the basic value transactions that take place when artists make art, the lawyers were attempting something really quite radical - and methodologically useful.
Often, the art world/game ignores these questions because it's too difficult and has been obscured by a weight of theoretical rhetoric and post-modernist doubt.
When QC Michael Silverleaf (chair of the day) talked about the legal approach, he rubbished the ability of a judge to ascertain the 'artness', and therefore the legal status of its reproductions or re-workings. A fellow conference attendee - from the 'artist' camp (I can't remember who) later asked me what was wrong with a judge's opinion.
Artists often ignore these difficult questions because they're difficult, and because once you learn how the art game works, it can be advantageous to swallow the early iniquities and just play until you're in a position to exploit the nobodies and accrete undue amounts of reputation from the distributedly authored transfer of ideas and conversations into an artwork.
It sounded to me like the lawyers had the right weapons and methodologies, but were just pointing them in the wrong direction - aiming at the appearance of the artwork as a copyrightable visual/conceptual/spatial arrangement, rather than seeing it as a complex flow of ideas and energies out of which, however crudely, it is possible make a sketch of the rights of each 'participant', and then to valorise their participation.
Whether or not this is desirable is another question, which I'm trying to write about more thoughtfully on the Uo wiki: http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/FeCvsForTheCultureIndustry
- - SaulAlbert 1/04/2005
1 I had intended to work out some ingenious and funny way to split the �150 contributor between myself and anyone else who wanted to come from the Uo list, but somehow, I couldn't be bothered and I needed the cash :), and they charged people �20 to get in which kind of made that difficult. In the end, I prepared another issue of the UoJournal - Communications of the Uo #2 and was kindly allowed to use the photocopying facilities at the venue to run off 100 copies, which I then distributed. Ron Briefel turned up with coloured papers, string, bits of magazine, glue and other goodies and proceeded to turn the the uo journal distribution table into a kind of carnival. It was great - people really enjoyed themselves, joined the TextSewingCircle, chatted, and donated little gifts of information; gossip, photos, ideas etc. in return for their hand-stitched copies of the journal. So Ron and I will split the dosh. Ha.
