Art + Its Sources cont’d

Art

Internet Culture

&

Intellectual Property

Creativity

Versus

Property

Kinds of Property

Tangible goods

apples

houses

Intellectual Property

expression

ideas

Not protected by copyright:

Ideas, facts

Protected by copyright:

Expression

Legal Limits on Copyright

Fair Use

[Shepard] Fairey's multi-colored Obama gave visual definition to the intangible excitement stirred by the candidate, and soon that face was everywhere. […] the Obama icon propagated itself. Fairey's free distributive model fit well with Obama's bottom-up, technologically-oriented, self-starting organization and base, and Fairey's web traffic spiked as thousands of people downloaded the image, applying it to their own sites and printed materials. A collaboration with a San Francisco street-wear brand called Upper Playground put the image on t-shirts. The Obama campaign commissioned 50,000 copies of an official poster, raising $350,000 for the campaign. Other artists followed suit, creating limited editions under the banner of Artists for Obama.

-- Joshuah Bearman, Modern Painters. http://laweekly.blogs.com/joshuah_bearman/2008/11/about-that-hope-poster.html

February 2009

The Associated Press accuses Shepard Fairey of Copyright Infringement

In response, Fairey and his attorneys bring suit against the Associated Press, asserting that Fairey’s work does not constitute copyright infringement, and that Fairey as well as any other parties in possession of this work, are

protected by the Fair Use Doctrine.

Precedents

Fairey expropriates and recontextualizes artworks of others, primarily propaganda

imagery, from 1920s (Russian Constructivism and Bolshevist posters) to the 1960s (Chinese Socialist Realism and

counter-culture rock posters).

Shepard Fairey’s Method

Traditions of Agitprop Poster Design & Street Art

- Dada in the 1920s- Psychedelia in the 1960s

- The Situationists in the 1970s- Postmodern strategies of the 1980s

including- Appropriation

- Culture Jamming- Adbusting

The legacy of the Che imagery includes

”American Investments in Cuba,” by Patrick Thomas

Collage

The Readymade

Marcel Duchamp established the concept of the readymade with his ceramic urinal “Fountain” (1917);

Earlier in the 1900s, Picasso produced extraordinary collages that incorporated "found" newspaper images.

John Heartfield (1891-1968) was a master of photomontage. A Communist German, he produced montages of appropriated Nazi symbols in order to subvert and undermine their power as propaganda.

“Adolph, the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk.” 1932Photomontage

Raoul Hausmann, ABCD, 1923-1924

Dada presents a challenge to art and the Visual. 'Anti-art' movement of the early 20th Century, rebelling against traditional art and consumerist society.

Utilizing new techniques in myriad mediums, jarring juxtapositions, collages, text.

Be young and be quiet (a variation on the more common "Sois belle et tais toi", the classically sexist French version of "Just sit there and look pretty")

Paris ca. 1968

Painting + OPEN SOURCE

an ongoing collaborative

creative cultural

experiment.

Visual Convergences

Pictorial conventions

painting >>> photography

Che Guevera’s corpse (ca. 1967)

Freddy Alborta, Che Guevera’s Death, 1967

Rembrandt : The Anatomy Lesson of Dr NicholaesTulp (1632)

Giovanni Antonio Bazzi “il Sodoma”: Lamentation Over the Dead Christ (1503)

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna (c.1490)

Painting from Photographs

Painters have been using photographs

and cameras ever since modern photography

came to into existence, and earlier…

"Officer & a Laughing Girl"Vermeer(1657-1659)Frick Collection, NY

Vermeer and other Dutch and Flemish painters of the period used the camera obscura...

"Bathers, Dieppe" 1902Walter Richard Sickert (1860 - 1942) Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK

The English Impressionist painter Walter Sickert developed a method of painting scenes of modern life from photographs.

This off-center composition, which features no horizon line, is an immediate, "snap-shot" moment, much like a photograph..

Andy Warhol:

Red Race Riot (1963)

Interview, Greater Boston Arts TV series and website: Artists & Violence (2002)

“I’m nuts on images. I cut them out of books and newspapers, mostly books and magazines. And this is absolutely crucial to me, because this is one of the ways I tap into the world.

“I see the world because it comes to me through media. Through film, through newspapers. Through TV.”

L: Confrontation 1 (Gegenüberstellung 1) (1988) R: Gudrun Ensslin from “October 18, 1977,” based on “ubiquitous photographs” of the Baader-Meinhof.

Gerhard Richter

The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.

— Susan Sontag:

Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)

The new work that is based on, comments on, responds to, and engages its sources, may recontextualize the original, discarding and changing some of its information. It neither supersedes, replaces, or denigrates the original.

Unlike street art or agitprop, painting does not supply a simple message, or even a complete recontextualization; instead, it invites the viewer to finish the artwork…

“A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.”

--- Sherrie Levine, 1981

“Culture is made of objects, expressions, stories, gestures, etc. that MUST be repeatable (and repeated) in various situations - precisely to create an identity to be held in common. …it is through this process of repetition that a group's consensus of history and identity is created.…

“….Culture is composed of copies that we as a society share and subsequently hold in common - and that fundamentally bind us together. (We ALL copy without authorization all the time - that is called memory. Technology extends its perception and there is no 'self' without it.)”

-- David Clarkson, artist, NYC (2009), on Facebook.

To be continued…