In the current social environment, the population lives in a tug-of war between the imposing restrictions of copyright and the freedom of copyleft. Copyright is more focused on maintaining ownership and gaining monetary rewards for work, while as copyleft allows people to use the work, share it with others, and build on what it started. In allowing the sense of freedom from open source or copyleft attitudes, people are almost allowing their work to become a library system that pushes the advancement of knowledge. In creating a world that’s void of copyright, society gains knowledge, inspiration, and a way of expanding their reach, but at what point should the audience give back to the artist?
What if the MOMA’s online database or the library wasn’t free? In the world of remix culture, I think it’s important to use the content in a way that has a strong majority share in being authentically a unique production. It’s important to have a level of freedom in art that can draw a form of inspiration and some creation from other’s work, but has a different stance on why the work is being reproduced in a new form. In the digital field, I think it’s hard to restrict the use of popular culture or iconography in other people’s work, because it plays such an integral part in the way we communicate through social media and our work. On the flip side, using a something with a brand cache attached to it will draw the ire of many of the original loyal followers and possibly incite plagiarism comments. It’s easier to fight copyright infringements in the material world, than in the deep abyss of the internet, because there are an incomparable amount of places where infringements could be lurking. Social media, YouTube, and an innumerable amount of google pages hold people using blatant forms of plagiarized designs and slogans, but there are just too many people to catch every person.
The main person who struggles in the free culture society is the artist, who despite all their time spent on projects, will gain no sort of monetary reward. While the artist is continuing the cycle of inspiration that leads to future artists, it’s hard to make ends meet by living in a world dominated by copyleft. When it comes to art, I think that the choice to make something free or copyrighted depends on the what the artist wants from their work. In making something free, you are allowing it be rethought out and possibly in a form that’s better than the original, but you are also allowing your work to travel into the hands of more people. While as a copyrighted art may still have popularity power, it becomes more about how the viewer will be able to see it and find a way of collecting inspiration without sending themselves to a penitentiary. One of my favorite pieces of art is Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, which draws on the repetition and unoriginal methods of marketing, but is ironically created by hand. I think his final piece is meant to educate the culture on how branding can affect our psychology and lead us into a sense of desire to be uniform. While the piece does remarkably resemble the soup cans, that’s part of what makes the art succeed. I recently painted a piece that focused on the marketing of cereal box characters, such as Front Loops and Trix to depict the darker parts of the industry. I tried to take into account how I could develop my own narrative for this art piece that pulled little inspiration other than a semblance of likeness to the characters. The reason that many artists use popular brands in art is to make the audience look or dive deeper into what goes on behind the marketing.
Copyright and copyleft will continue to battle over what should rein knowledge or power, but in reality the world is best served by a balance. The free culture will only work in entirety if the everything, down to the grocery store is a cycle of giving. An artistic career is one that defies the logic of gaining success in the monetary forms that a career in business, pharmaceuticals, or banking could, but also requires imbedding new forms of culture into society. In creating a world that’s void of copyright, society gains knowledge, inspiration, and a way of expanding their reach, but at what point should the audience give back to the artist?
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