Art and the Artist

Miguel Guhlin quotes a person asking, " Is it even necessary for an art classroom to have all of the technological advancements of the modern age?" and replies, in part, "Imagine what would have happened if The Impressionists--did I mention I hate art?--hadn't been able to share their ideas with others."

I do not address his point that "The fact is, it's changing how people interact at the most fundamental levels OUTSIDE the classroom...you either use it, or you don't. " - with which I am in fundamental agreement. This is about the rest of it.

The question also demonstrates a surprising lack of knowledge about art as a discipline. Art is often the first of all the disciplines to embrace a new technology. Usually, entire new disciplines evolve out of this.

Examples? Artists began using imaging technologies very early on, inventing photography, which evolved (through confluence with another art, drama) into motion pictures and television.

Artists experimented with electronic sound very early on, developing instruments like the Moog synthesizer, eventually changing the entire world of music.

Artists began using the printing process as soon as it was invented - arguably influencing the development of the Gutenberg press. Continued use of printing technologies led to the discipline of graphic design. Design software was one of the first killer applications for computers (remember Quark?) which led to things like SGML, the direct forerunner of HTML and the web.

Performance artists were among the first to catch on to the communicative capacities of the web, crating such exhibits as 'flash mobs' and other guerrilla theater pieces. These were a direct forerunner not only of social networking but also of political organization from Seattle to Howard Dean to Ron Paul and Barak Obama.

Finally - regarding your comment that you "hate art" - it sounds to me like somebody has spoiled 'art' for you some time in the past. That's too bad.

'Art' isn't a matter of walking around in galleries looking at static paintings going, 'ah, the impressionists' and nodding appreciatively at paintings you don't like.

Art - properly so-called - is totally about communication, which means that appreciation (*genuine* appreciation) is an important part of the work. It the work doesn't speak to you, if you don't like it then the work has in a certain sense failed (not in the evaluative sense (our culture is so infused with judging it's almost impossible to get away from that sort of language) but in the sense in which a person speaking French has failed to communicate with you if you speak only English.

Where 'art' becomes something that people 'hate' is when artists (and their admirers) become dishonest and pretentious. I once wrote an article, in my pre-internet days (I'll post it one day), 'On Artistic Criticism', the point of which was to respond to an artist who, after spilling some paint on his sculpture, tried to explain it as 'the randomness of the cosmos'. It was totally dishonest and simply made the work unintelligible to viewers.

Artistic criticism - like literary criticism - is full of this sort of pseudo-interpretation. They are like that character on MAD TV who, when called on to translate languages, interprets everything as "OK hot dog!" Understanding art doesn't require seeing the world through an art critic's eyes (good thing, too).

Instead of seeing art as something that is done to you, forcing you to respond to it appropriately (like a stuffy waiter at a French restaurant that sneers at your misunderstanding of 'escargot' on the menu), art becomes relevant when you take control of it and make it something you own and that belongs to you.

A work of art - *any* work of art, whether displayed in a museum, in your home, or on your web page - becomes, on this account, part of *your* vocabulary. It means what you want it to mean. It says what you want it to say.

You can use any of the arts - painting, photography, video, music, design - in any way you want to add colour, texture and depth of meaning to what you are writing. It doesn't even matter if you can't say what that element of meaning is - meaning is often ineffable, no matter what the critics say. If the artistic work 'goes with' whatever you are saying, that's fine.

In my view, it is important that communicators do this because there are ways in which words alone do not express what they mean. It's like Barak Obama's speech - you can read the words, and nod along, or listen to the words - the stress, the inflection, the pauses - and 'get it'. Art - properly so-called - is the stress, the inflection, the pauses of our lives.

Most probably, 'art' class probably never taught you that. It was probably about being able to identify impressionists on command (I remember studying paintings for a game show called 'Reach for the Top' - what a way to wreck a good painting).

Museums often do a lot of injustice to art (not always, though - it really depends on the curator) by taking one piece of a complex message and displaying it as a single artifact. It's as though you were presented with the word 'eglise' and expected to reflect on its sense and relevance, in isolation from any context in which it might be used.

To me (and you can see this in my photographs) understanding art is like walking through the streets of another culture, my use of art being my way of saying back to them, *this* is what I saw, and *this* is how I felt. It is a conversation - but not in words, not evn of something that could be expressed in words.

Look at my photos of Medellin. Can you see the conversation there? Can you see the Colombians and I engaging in this dialogue, the people of the city trying to convey their spirit through their art, and me responding in kind, expressing my appreciation, my understanding, my thoughts.

So long as 'art' remains something that hangs on a wall, this conversation can never happen. But the minute you make a piece of art your own, though its use in your own vocabulary of life, art becomes meaningful, not obscure and stuffy, but personal and alive.

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Economics in a DRM-Free World

After my previous post, Doug Johnson asked me to explain the economic model of a DRM-free world. This has been done by others on numerous occasions, so what follows should only be thought of as a summary.

Today, the demand that someone (not necessarily the artist) be compensated for the creative act is driving the demand for digital rights management. Because it is today so easy to make copies of content, the idea is that any access to content must be compensated. Otherwise, we are told, the creator (or, more accurately, the rights holder) will not be rewarded.

But we have had free content since time immemorial. Not always in the form of television, obviously, but from the days the first stories were told around the campfire and the days the first paintings were drawn on the walls of caves, listeners and viewers could access that content for free.

It is important to recognize this. It is important to see that free access to content has, though history, been the rule, not the exception. That the commodification of content, that the charging of access fees, subscriptions, or some other form of tariff, is a recent invention for almost all forms of content.

Yet, somehow, through history, artists and authors and musicians managed to ply their trade. How was this possible? It was rarely through sale of recordings or reproductions. Here are some ways authors, artists and musicians can support bthemselves in a post-DRM world.

1. Sale of Original Works

The best examples of this practice are found in the visual arts - paining and sculpture, especially. Even though it is possible to create copies, the original cannot be recreated. This makes it rare, and hence, valuable. The same approach may be used in writing; witness J.K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, handwritten and bound, which sold for £1.95 million at a Sotheby’s auction.

Indeed, it is by selling original works that most craftsmen and artisans make their livings. We see at the Craft Fair at the local park very year everything from photographs to candle holders to wood shelves to maple syrup being sold by local merchants. And people who lay bricks, build houses, make hamburgers, and grow wheat also profit by the sale of original products. This, indeed, is the dominant form of commerce in society, one that artists would do well to consider.

2. The Sale of Services

While the musician does not frequently sell an original work, the musician is almost unique among the artists in his or her ability to offer a performance (though you can also watch painters performing). As we are frequently told, musicians typically make more money performing than through CD sales. That is why Canadian musicians have split from the recording industry.

Most people in the world make their livings from performing services. Photographs take photos by request, artists paint portraits, authors write news articles and obituaries and greeting card poems. Waiters bring us our food, receptionists greet people and ask them to sit in the waiting room, call centre staff answer questions and provide advice. The people who perform services rarely, if ever, retain rights to the work they have performed. Artists and other creative talents should consider that this might be good enough for them as well.

3. Selling Sponsorships

This is the reason we have free access to content on television and radio. Today we know this under the more generic name of 'advertising', but the sale of sponsorhips has a wide variety of models, everything from the restrained sponsorship messages on public broadcasting to the blazoning of company logos on sports jerseys and racing cars.

Advertising has always been (and remains) the major source of revenue for newspapers - so much so that even the venerable New York Times has abandoned its paid content model in order to lure more readers to view its advertisements.

Advertisers seek implied credibility by association with quality or entertaining content. So advertising is not suitable for all types of content, of course (though you would never know by the way it is relentlessly pursued). Advertising is probably inappropriate for educational content. But for many artists - especially those in video and entertainment - advertising can help pay the bills.

4. Obtaining Patronage

Mozart was employed as a court musician by the ruler of Salzburg Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo. Michelangelo worked under the patronage of Pope Julius II. Even Ranier Maria Rilke was supported for a time by the patronage of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The glory days of patronage may have passed us by, but it remains the primary means of income for many creative workers.

My own work, for example, is funded by the Government of Canada, as I am employed by the National Research Council, an appointment that may be seen as a sort of patronage. Foundations routinely support authors and artists and others. IBM has its fellows program. Japan has its living treasures program.

5. Work for Hire

If it's good enough for tens of thousands of university professors, it should be good enough for artists as well. Professors are not compensated for the articles they write, nor do they receive income for reviewing publications. Even if they write textbooks, their earnings are minor compared to the salaries they receive for teaching and research.

The vast majority of crative workers - authors, artists, even musicians - receive no royalties or other income from their creative works. These rights are retained by their employers - newspapers, magazines, advertising agencies, and myriad other businesses and agencies. This content is, in turn, used to make money by any of the other means described in this article.

6. Bundling

Vendors compensate artists for creating or contributing content to be distributed with their products.

Prince recently created a sensation when he released his latest album for free as an insert inside the Daily Mail. This is a distribution method writers of open source software will recognize instantly, as almost everything written under the GPL eventually winds up on a magazine CD as a giveaway. Starbucks, meanwhile, has been giving away free music to coffee patrons. Even McDonald's is giving songs away with meals.

It's a bit harder to give away writing and art - there's less demand - but nonetheless very practical and useful add-ons can be given away with food, hardware, indeed, any sort of product. This will be a significant source of income for learning materials, as vendors seek to stimulate a demand for their product by teaching people about it (the book on types of coffee the vendor in McEwan Hall once loaned me made me an affectionado for life).

7. Loss Leaders and Marketing

When Ben Goodger was hired by Google, his previous position had been unpaid: he was one of the lead developers for Firefox. Like many programmers, he made his name writing open source software. The work he did became a a calling card or an advertisement for his work.

If we look around the education boogosphere we see numerous examples of the same phenomenon. Jay Cross, Harold Jarche and Nancy White all offer consulting services - and they also make their views known for free on their weblogs. Their free public writings are the best publicity they could hope for as they can clearly demonstrate their talents to others.

8. Helping People Being Creative

I call it the 'butterfly thesis'. It goes like this: people everywhere in the world decorate their homes with wooden butterflies. They are not paid for this act of creativity; quite the contrary, they actually pay for the privilege. But they want btheir houses to look nice.

In a similar manner, the vast bulk of the content on Flickr was produced not by people who wanted to make money from their art but by people who were creative and simply wanted to share.

This becomes a business model when people realize that our desire to share is itself a powerful force in society. From the scrapbooking store down the road to the photography shop to Google Video and YouTube, people have been making a living helping other people be creative.

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The idea that you have to restrict access to make money is a fallacy. None of these techniques require payments or subscriptions or other fees, nor do they require digital rights management or any sort of access control at all. Indeed, many of them depend on free and open access.

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Shifting Morality

Doug Johnson writes, "I am not sure that these kids are less moral - only differently moral."

I think you may also want to examine how publishers and their supporters are changing (or trying to change) the concept of 'morality'. Let me highlight some areas:

- the 'doctrine of first sale' is in the process of being repealed. What this doctrine states is that, if you buy something, you own it outright. You can, in turn, lend it, sell it, use it as a doorstop, whatever you want. Increasingly, manufacturers are retaining rights - not just regarding copying, but where something is used, how it is used, for what purpose it is used, and more. It's fair enough for them to try, but how does it become *immoral* for people to defen their rights under the doctrine of first sale?

- the doctrine of 'fair use' or 'fair dealing'. It has long been understood that a creator's rights under copyright are not absolute. In particular, under 'fair use' (or 'fair dealing' in Canada) we have historically had the right to copy a small portion of the work to use when citing, referencing, criticizing, parodying, or teaching. Publishers simply refuse to respect this doctrine - try publishing work with citations allowed under fair use but explicitly cleared by the other publisher. Or try showing a logo in a video without blurring it our. Meanwhile, DRM and similar technology makes fair use impossible. And such use, we are told, is immoral. How so now?

- the distinction between personal use and commercial use - we have had a longstanding understanding that restrictions on certain commercial activities - making copies onto blank media, for example - are perfectly legal in the noncomnmercial domain. That sharing copies among friends is a fundamentally different type of activity. In Canada, moreover, the government collects royalties on blank media, distributed to content providers, in explicit recognition of such activities. How, then, do they become immoral?

- the idea of 'free access' - from time immemorial, we have grown up believing that performances of various media are free to the viewer or listener. From listening to musicians play on the street or in bars, to watching TV or listening to the radio, to reading books in the library or billboards on the wall, if the media was available, then we could access it for free. There was never a *way* to act immorally in this regard. But now we are required to 'avert our eyes' - to not view, to not listen, to not download - in certain cases (and somehow, to magically know what those cases are). Why is this? Why is it OK to listen to a song for free on the radio but not listen to the very same song on the internet? How does the one behaviour remain moral but the other, somehow, become immoral?

- the doctrine of 'sharing' - as children we were told that sharing is good. And that when there are things that everybody can use - parks, roads, museums, culture - these are good as well. But more and more, we are being told that sharing is bad, and that everything must be owned by some person, who in turn has a 'right' to be compensated. How so? What gave *this* person, rather than the thousands of generations before him that nurtured the concept or the idea, ownership? How did sharing, always a virtue, become *bad*?

You get the idea. Children do not have some fundamentally different morality. Rather, they see - while adults, for some reason, are blind - that the game is shifting, that some very self-centered and greedy people are trying to change the rules. The children - who have no stake in this sudden 'ownership society' - are not fooled. We shouldn't be either.

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