Not so long ago, I had a discussion with a dear friend who also happens to be an artist and works part time at one of our local art galleries.
Our talk centered around the whole idea of people taking pictures of original art at art galleries, typically without even asking the gallery owner or artist in residence for permission to do so.
She had gotten in a somewhat heated discussion with a gallery visitor over the - perhaps slightly delicate - subject of who art "belongs" to.
This person was asserting that the moment an artist turns an idea or concept or vision in their mind into a tangible piece of art and put it on display for others to see, it becomes "public property," and the whole idea of ownership ends at this point.
In essence, the visitor was arguing that there is no such thing as "ownership" of art, and that the whole idea of art as a commercial commodity was slightly appalling, and surely counter to any self respecting artist's desire to simply create and give form to their creative vision.
Of course this somewhat flies in the face of the general truism that "everybody's gotta eat!" Hence, be compensated for their efforts.
That everybody naturally includes artists, who also have to spend good money on canvases and paint and brushes and other supplies because those don't just drop out of the skies like magic unicorn dust. So even if the above argument was to hold any water at all, there would at least have to be some kind of voluntary donation system or the art wouldn't come into existence in the 1st place!
And that was the point at which the discussion in the gallery had gotten a little bit heated, because the person making the assertion that art is immediately public property also turned out to be somebody who was a professional couch surfer who largely mooched off the rest of the world.
Of course there is a greater issue hand here beyond just one person's sense of entitlement.
If, indeed, we are moving towards a technological future in which most things are incredibly cheap or free, how do we make the transition from a commercially based system to the system in which nobody really needs money for anything because everything's just available for the taking?
I guess this would be what could essentially be labeled as the "Star Trek future," in which meaning and identity is derived from something besides money and possessions.
Futures of a utopia nature are often depicted as being moneyless because there are no shortages, no scarcity and no outstanding needs... everybody's taken care of.
Typically these rather rosy interpretations of human evolution do not include an explanation of how we got from where we are now to how we reach the idealistic world two or three hundred years down the road.
All we're given is this is where we are now and then some miracle happens and suddenly we have a world in which we can replicate any food, instruments, rare objects or whatever in a replicator, and have any possible human experience by stepping on to a holodeck.
But what sort of upheaval and confusion came between point A and point B? How did people let go of their need to "own" things... such as art?
That remains a mystery.
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Created at 2024-08-12 02:38 PDT
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The concept of property seems to be poorly grasped by a lot of folks. I would argue that once an idea is released into the public, you no longer truly control it, and "intellectual property" laws are fundamentally flawed because they claim a property right in something intangible while claiming the right to control how others use their real scarce physical property. However, specific examples of art certainly do not become owned by some vague concept of "the public" either, even if they are displayed for public appreciation.
Nice pictures.
Maybe attribution is the word than ownership.