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Art as Commerce

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Written by: Rod Boyle

Category: Ideas & Questions

Published: 14 October 2015

Hits: 2564

• Art,
• Copyright,

Refer to the original: From Art to Artifact.

Art, when it becomes currency, has a variety of possible evolutions ahead of it.

There is, of course, the endless replication of it, which generally raise money, or more currency, in the instance of music, for the artist while alive, for those in the visual arts more often when they are dead. Music, we've come to accept that the primary revenues for a successful musical artist will come from the reproduction of their works, whereas with the visual arts the primary revenue comes from the sale of the original; there are entire conversations to be had on that topic, but that's not where I'm going with this.

This will be about Copyright. This is the inherent right of an artist to maintain control over their work and realize a profit, the original point of which was to allow the artist to make money in their lifetime without fear of plagiarism or being undermined with cheap imitations. At the end of their life the copyright would expire (most people, artists or otherwise, have no need of an income in death). A good and a noble idea, but let's see how it's played out...

Copyright laws evolved such that they became currency as well, the artist could sell the rights to his/her work for an initial lump sum, and the purchaser would be free to exploit the work as they saw fit. For some artists this would be good, lacking the means to reproduce their work, the new copyright holder could make prints or records, commercialize the art and bring it to the largest possible audience. This freed up the artist to create, no longer do they need to worry about the manufacture of product, but it very often paid them a fraction of what their art would prove to be worth. With this new paradigm Art becomes a commodity. 

Those "brokers", who purchased the rights to the work, then lobby to extend copyright to allow them to increase revenues from the purchased work - in Canada, Copyright duration is the creator of the works lifetime, plus 50 years from the end of the calendar year that the creator died. We begin to see the perversion of what was once a great idea. The arguments made that posthumous profits could be used to support the artists heirs are largely spurious - why, a) should the artists work be expected to support his/her heirs, and b) in application it's largely used to benefit the people who've commoditized the work and seek to maximize returns.

Abuses of this are now legion, think of Time Warner's Claim to Copyright on Happy Birthday, now largely invalidated, but still having denied for decades fair public use and collecting tens of millions in fraudulent royalties. Think of every format change in media - you bought the Beatles Record, 8 Track, Cassette, CD, and finally you want to throw it on your iTunes, you should expect to pay YET AGAIN for "copyright", when in fact you should have bought personal rights the first time, subsequent purchases applying only to have your "right" as purchaser rewritten onto the new media.

The system, as it stands, is rarely enforced by artists and frequently enforced by corporations and brokers who have no legitimate claim upon the work. "50 years from death", in the age of the internet, given the population of the planet and abundance of media being created, is easily equivalent to the previous 10,000 years of human history. While I have no simple solutions, it might be time for some intelligence and reason to fairly visit again the notion of Copyright.