What about visual artists?
Today, Cory Doctorow had an article published in Information Week about How Big Media’s Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression. Although he did mention galleries in the article, I couldn’t help but feel left out (as usual) as a visual artist.
The players in music and movie industries have been the main focus of most of the recent discussions regarding copyright, copyright reform, piracy and the internet. But what about visual artists?
Although I love the internet, I still struggle with how it can be used effectively for a visual artist to do away with galleries and agents–particularly if the artist is, like me, dealing with a traditional medium. Is it even desireable to remove the artist-gallery/agent relationship?
I have a website for my sculptures which I maintain regularly with updates on my sculpting progress and photos of new sculptures. I also have a profile with sculpture.org. And while I haven’t spent as much as I could on promotion of my website (or promotion of my sculptures through my website), all of my sales have been made to people who saw the sculptures in person (either firstly or only). My website and profile with sculpture.org has only resulted in emails targeting me for shipping/cheque scams.
I’ve seen discussions on good ideas for using technology for creating promotional materials for artwork, but many discussions on sales of artwork through websites have returned negative results (here, here and here). The group of patrons for visual artists is small (something which also needs to change), and the creative community for visual artists doesn’t work in exactly the same way as that of music or movies. Because the nature of visual art is much different from that of music or movies, many of the experiments being made by creators in those industries are not easily translated to visual artists. Writers have also received much less attention recently (except in relation to the movie industry), and have their own unique set of challenges and opportunities.
It’s entirely likely that my perspective is limited because of where I’m getting my information, and I would love to be proven wrong. It’s also likely that visual artists, like many our musical or preformative counterparts, are simply not stretching our creativity enough when it comes to marketing. Then again, most of our creative energies are strongest for creating art, not for creating marketing techniques. And isn’t that where those galleries and agents are supposed to come in?
Tags: art, copyright, internet, technologyRelated posts
By Julianna Yau
On November 5, 2007
At 9:17 pm
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I don’t think that the recent changes to technology impact a visual artist in the same way that it does other industries.
The music industry was originally just composers, with performers essentially treated as ‘trained monkeys’ who were not independently considered artists. Then the technology to record performances came around (player pianos, “talking machines”, etc) and there was a brief (well, almost a hundred years) time when distributing copies of recordings dominated the industry. With the hardware to record, edit and distribute being dirt cheap, the era of the recording industry is over (whether politicians and record industry executives recognize this or not). I believe/hope we quickly move to an era where both composers and performers rights are respected, and digital distribution benefits them. I really believe we will be moving to a system of collective licensing to deal with situations such as non-commercial sharing of multimedia (p2p, etc) as well as mash-ups and user generated content (obviously the current licensing models don’t work for teenagers dancing to pop songs on YouTube).
As a visual artist you may want to look at 3D printers as a technology that may impact you. http://www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2007/10/interview_with_adrian_bowyer_3.html
There is also technology to do 3D scanning, and together you effectively have a 3D “photocopier” that works for a subset of visual art. That brings you to the same place the music industry was a hundred years ago. But, wouldn’t it be great to figure out ways to bypass the dominance of any intermediaries and go directly to a situation where visual artists get the largest direct material rewards for this? Is more exclusive rights going to give you that, or less? (You know my beliefs - detailed well in Yochai Benklers’s recent book http://benkler.org )
Or maybe none of this new technology really has relevance to you. Why must all creativity be treated as if it is the same? The issues for composers, performers and labels are extremely different (which is why they fight each other more than they do outsiders to the industry), so why shouldn’t the interests of visual artists be understood as different?
My concern is that the music and movie industries are overshadowing the rest of us. Because their needs are different, it would be dangerous to revise the copyright act based on their concerns alone.
Unauthorized duplicates are a longstanding issue with artists, and simply hasn’t gotten the same amount of publicity as p2p sharing of music/movies. Costco was actually a recent offender of “pirated” art ( http://theartlawblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/costco-counterfeits.html), and websites have been reported as selling unauthorized duplicates ( http://www.painterskeys.com/clickbacks/arch-world/chinese-list.asp, http://christo.absolutearts.com/artsforum/messages/57508/72366.html?1141985378). Bronze art fraud ( http://www.bronzecopyright.com/) is an old and persistent problem. Things like rapid prototyping probably aren’t going to start anything new, but may make it easier to create copies.
From the standpoint of a visual artist, I’m much more concerned with the the fact that the clause “worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s)” is becoming more and more standard in websites which are supposedly in existence to help artists make a living by providing a promotional playground.
The requests of the major labels and major studios isn’t just overshadowing the rest of us, but is often incompatible. The anti-circumvention legislation is an example: this is a digital lock not only on content such that it is only accessible to specific brands of access devices, but also locks on hardware to disallow the owner from making their own software choices. Both of these locks are an anti-competitive attack against the majority of the software industry (FLOSS and non-FLOSS), and is far more harmful to software creators than even the technologically invalid theory is helpful to the entertainment industry.
As to licensing on the Internet, I don’t see how that is a problem. The Internet is not geographically based, and trying to carve up geographic markets will never work well. That means any license needs to be worldwide. Non-exclusive is a feature, not a problem, meaning that you as creator are free to make other licensing arrangements with other entities. Exclusive licenses are the ones that you should be extremely concerned about.
Revoking licenses, or having expiry time limits/etc, is also an interesting concept for organizations who have floors of lawyers retained, but not practical for the rest of us. We need to realize as creators that it isn’t the 1960’s any more and the ‘users’ of our works are not massively large institutional users (Galleries, libraries, studios, etc) but average-joe citizens where complex license agreements are simply not workable.
Something being royalty-free needs to be a choice for both creators and their audiences, as there are many creators (I’m one of them) that uses peer production techniques which only work when the source and output of my creativity is royalty-free. While I wouldn’t ever force royalty-free on you, I also would hope that you wouldn’t want to impose royalties on other creators which can be just as harmful to their chosen method of production, distribution and funding.
Why do you say “supposedly in existence to help artists make a living by providing a promotional playground”? These websites likely have their own business models, and you want to look into that before you assume what their motivations are.
If they were customers, then they would be offering you royalties. They would then likely charge you money for any promotion that they did on your behalf. Talk to musicians about how well this works for them with labels before presuming that this is a great idea.
If they were offering you free promotion, then it is a simple (IE: no need to hire a lawyer/etc) reciprocal arrangement where each is offering their services without charging. Free promotion isn’t always worth it for a creator, but it needs to be a choice available for those creators (I’m often told a majority) that are more interested in exposure than royalties in specific cases.
It’s not the requests which I’m worried about doing the overshadowing, but the industries. For the very fact that their needs are often incompatible, there is the risk that the revisions to the copyright act will reflect many more of their needs than other industries involving copyright.
I agree that with the internet, the “worldwide” portion of the clause is a necessity. Likewise, the “non-exclusive” portion is not a bad thing. It’s the “royalty-free” portion which concerns me (and is almost always seen bookended by the other two words). Again, I agree that everyone should have a choice of whether royalties should apply, but these choices seem to be getting more and more narrow for some of us.
While I am “tech savvy” enough to setup my own website, not all artists are equally so, or have the financial means to hire someone to do that for them. For most artists, this leaves promotional websites which work on similar business models to YouTube (prior to their introduction of director accounts and revenue-sharing). Both online and offline, artists (particularly emerging artists) are being asked to forfeit many of their rights so that they have the chance of “exposure” or “promotion”.
I would argue that free promotion is almost never worth it for a creator, at least in the visual art world. Often times, restaurants and other establishments will offer free “gallery space” to artists without either paying an exhibition fee or doing much more than allowing the artist to provide business cards. This means the establishments get decor for their businesses without ever having to purchase anything. There are, of course, responsible businesses which have their staff work a bit to bring attention to the art and offer information about the artists, but these are rare. After all, those establishments have their own line of business and are not galleries or agencies.
Online “artist directories” and “free gallery space” websites are little more than online extensions of those establishments. While I appreciate that they have a business model, my argument is that their business model, in the end, does not normally benefit the artists…despite the fact that their promotional material boasts the benefits of artists having their work showcased on their websites. These sites basically provide custom but bulk website hosting, but also ask for a royalty-free licence to the work submitted by the artist. I understand that this is primarily so that they can display the artist’s work on the website, but there is almost never a stipulation which restricts the license to that use.
Most artists make their meagre livings from exhibition fees or sales (and often hold down a job on top of that). The illusion of free promotion doesn’t help the situation, because many struggling artists are being told that they’re getting free promotion, but these promoters rarely do as much on their end as the artist does on theirs. This relationship is not as balanced as an artist-gallery or artist-agent relationship where the gallery or agent is actively promoting the artist’s work.
Should we have the option to enter into an unbalanced relationship? Sure. But if the opportunities of entering into these relationships becomes the majority, it can very easily become the only option.
I think both of you are getting at an important point. The visual and media arts sector is handcuffed by its uniqueness. Other artforms are much more reproduceable without losing their artistic integrity while at the same time still being affordable to the mass market. The world wide web is designed for this form dissemiation
Lets stop lumping all creators into the same internet bundle and continue looking at it as the fine art that it is.
Thanks
The Internet is what we make it. If a creator wants to be charging people to view their art via this medium, then they need to hire someone to set up their website. Doing the lower-level technical stuff for websites is how I make my living, and I would never volunteer my time to set up a site when someone else charges (in fact, material being royalty-free is one of the conditions for a community group getting free hosted on http://www.flora.org ).
I don’t see how it is reasonable to expect technical people to apply their craft for free and then have them not expect you to do the same. You will always have to spend money to make money, and that isn’t unique to any type of creativity or creativity in general.
Kristian,
The whole “same copyright” concept is one of the things Julianna and I started talking about when we first met online months ago. (We haven’t met in person yet)
The rhetoric of “same copyright” is being abused by people claiming to represent certain creator groups, such as photographers, as if copyright could be identical for all creative works. The fact is that photography and book authorship (the base case for copyright, and often the only one policy makers understand) are entirely different, as are these types of creativity and other type of creativity.
Take copyright term as an example. Copyright is a balance between the interests of the individual creator, and the interests of society that should eventually be able to build on this creativity, so the cultural recycling date being clear and reasonably short is important.
Most photographs are taken by amateurs, not professionals. An even greater number of photographs do not indicate who took the photograph (some mention the studio, but not the photographer). This means that while the vast majority (clearly more than 99%) of photographs have no indication of who the photographer was, the standard copyright is the life of this unknowable person plus 50 years.
The only reasonable copyright for photography is to start the countdown to cultural recycling from the time the photograph is taken given the subject of the photograph is most often the only indicator that can be determined after-the-fact.
For books it is an integrated part of the publishing industry to include metadata about the book — ISBN, Author, publishers, etc, etc, etc. When the material includes all of this metadata, life+50 is more reasonable. If an author obfuscated their identity then it is reasonable to strip the life+ part of their copyright, but the vast majority of books contain authorship information.
For computer software, also considered a “literary work” with books under current copyright, any copyright term above 20 years is indistinguishable from infinity. Software is only commercially useful when it is updated constantly. There is no market for software older than 10 years currently, and expected release cycles are getting shorter, so there is no validity to claiming that having a copyright term above 20 years can financially benefit any creator. It does harm archiving of this creativity given we need to create emulators of old hardware in order to run old software, and if the copyright on this software expired it would inspire hobbiests to try to archive this important era in our human development.
Knowing the authors of the hundreds of thousands of different components to an average software application is even more rare than it is for photography, so the “life+” part is entirely unreasonable.
life+50 (or worse in other more out of touch countries like the USA and many European countries) just means we loose our Heritage, with absolutely no balancing gain for any creator.
Visual art? My guess (not being well versed in this area) is that the artist is known more often as the value of the art is often tied to the respect offered to its creator. Many (most?) artists sign their art as proof of authenticity. For this form of creativity life+ seems fairly reasonable, as long as the creator isn’t deliberately anonymous.
Re: “I don’t see how it is reasonable to expect technical people to apply their craft for free and then have them not expect you to do the same.”
I don’t see how anyone is expecting technical people to apply their craft for free—in fact, I would argue that artists are more often asked to offer artwork for free. While you “would never volunteer [your] time to set up a site when someone else charges”, artists are often asked to lend or donate their work when other creators aren’t. Take the restaurant situation I mentioned above as an example: an artist would be asked to have their artwork on display at a restaurant in exchange for “free gallery space”, but that same restaurant would probably never consider asking a website designer to create a website for them in exchange for advertising the website designer’s services on the finished website.
As I understand it, there are three types of website scenarios which are most commonly available to artists:
1. Personal websites, setup by a web designer who is paid by the artist. With these websites, the artwork is clearly the artist’s.
2. Online Artist Directories/Online Gallery Space which is free to the artist and the revenue for the website owners comes from advertising. With these websites, the artwork is licensed to the website owner under a “royalty-free” basis.
3. Online Artist Directories/Online Gallery Space which require the artist to pay a subscription fee, and the revenue for the website owners comes from those fees. With these websites, the artwork is still licensed to the website owner under a “royalty-free” basis.
(And there are, of course, blends of 2 & 3).
With #2, artists do get free webspace and website building tools in exchange for the royalty-free license of their work. And while it’s not necessarily the “fault” of the website owner (who, understandably, does need to have financial incentive to provide this service), the clause has potential of being harmful to an artist who is not fully aware of what that license entails. As I’ve mentioned before in our conversations on Facebook, I’m a firm believer of more education on copyright because of how much misunderstanding and unawareness there is on it.
With #3, it’s even worse for the artist because not only are they paying for the services of the website owner, but they are still subject to the royalty-free license. I’m surprised that there aren’t more of these websites which restrict that license to use around the website only.
Re: your comments on copyright duration
I think we all agree that the different creators and the type of work they create need to be reviewed on their own (keeping in mind, of course, everyone else) to determine the most suitable copyright terms.
I suspect the education is more around contracts and business than copyright.
Copyright is currently excessively complex (and is in need of having “clarification and simplification” brought as the top priority for any revision), but can be simplified as a law that requires permission from the copyright holder to do certain things. Once that is understood the questions come down to what permission is granted to who, and under what conditions.
In the past creators were expected to sign over all their rights in an exclusive contract with some intermediary, who would then in theory sub-license with clients. Modern technology allows nearly all creators to reach their audiences directly, allowing them to bypass these intermediaries. This bypassing intermediaries means that we move from an “all or nothing” contract scenario to one where creators have to think more about a wider variety of uses their works will be put to, and use non-exclusive licenses to carve up that pie appropriately.
But what can we do if there are creators who simply want to create, and don’t want to get involved in the business aspect of their profession? How do we convince them to be more picky about what intermediaries they trust to actually help rather than harm their interests?
The education would actually be quite useful for copyright in addition to contracts and business. For the very reason that copyright is excessively complex, artists need to have some base knowledge of those complexities. We certainly would never expect to know everything there is to know, but I’ve attended copyright workshops and seen online discussions where many artists are unaware of even the basics (if we can call it that). Most artists I know have simply started creating work at some point in their life, and learning about copyright, contracts and other business-related things come afterwards. It may not be the ideal route, but it’s the most-travelled one!
It’s possible that the changes in technology will soon create the need for a new type of intermediary for artists (or at least a change in the type of intermediary), just like it’s doing for musicians. There are certainly creators who don’t want to get too involved with the business aspect of their profession—either entirely or in part. For example, I’m a member of CARCC, which handles the administration of my copyright, and I’m currently looking for the right dealer/gallery/agent to handle my sales. Although I have the option of selling direct to my patrons, I currently have time to maintain the relationships I have with current patrons, but don’t have the time or resources to seek new ones.
I’m not sure how to help artists be “be more picky about what intermediaries they trust to actually help rather than harm their interests”. Like aspiring actors and singers, many aspiring visual artists tend to fall victim to big [empty] promises.