Don’t steal? No, don’t devalue art
Passing through Union Station, you’ll sometimes come across stores offering samples of their goods. The commuters understand that this is something the stores are offering as part of a marketing strategy, giving you a literal or figurative taste of what they have to sell before you commit to a purchase.
This practice has parallels in art, with galleries where you can view work prior to purchase (and some even have loan programs where you can borrow a work for a period of time to ensure that you want to make the full investment) and the dying music store and its listening booths/stations.
In these instances, most reasonable people understand the purpose of the sampling strategy being used, and what is considered an acceptable use of the system. Someone who takes enough bagel segments in one visit to make up a whole bagel is obviously abusing the system. Likewise, someone who serially borrows work from a gallery without any intention of a purchase is abusing the loan program.
When I compare the brick-and-mortar practice of samples with the myriad of ways people are using the internet for marketing and exposure, I notice two things. The first is that when physical samples are provided, the party offering the sample is not reprimanded for trying to protect against the offerings being abused. The second is that with physical samples, both the giver and receiver have a consistent and, typically, matching understanding of what constitutes abuse.
So why do neither of these things happen where the internet is concerned? Somehow, in internet land, artists are framed as either greedy or clueless for trying to prevent their work abusive uses of the work they put online. And now that the idea that “everyone is an artist” is not merely more widespread than the emergence of contemporary art, but it is also being met with mixed reactions.
I think it’s great that so many people are creating work. But the use of “artist” as a label for anyone who has every made anything is diluting the value of the creative, administrative and physical effort required to “make for a living”. Art and artist appreciation is already a problem, with art education continuing to be cut from public education in favour of the three Rs. But the devaluation of the artist is a serious issue which is showing itself in the way people are talking about their entitlements to the use and access to art.
What is more appalling to me is that I’m told that creators create because of reasons other than financial gain, as if that were a justification for creators not being paid for the work they do. Why is this logic not applied to chefs, lawyers, educators, social workers, or anyone else who has chosen a career for reasons other than income generation?
Tags: art, copyright, gapingvoid, internet, ryan taylor, visualcyRelated posts
By Julianna Yau
On June 18, 2008
At 11:19 pm
Comments : 3
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