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Traditionally, copyright has been seen as a progressive reform, a cornerstone in the protection of the artist. Recently major corporations in the recording industry have pushed for more stringent copyright legislation to cope with the perceived threat to this form of ownership presented by new developments in reproduction technology and its accessability. The protection of artists has been a major propagandistic tool. Industry slogans endorsed by some artists such as 'Hometaping is Killing Music,' are attempts to legitimate the industry's control of duplicating mediums, and in fact, are part of a major campaign to extend that control. There is a real threat to this control, which I hope to make clear in the following.
Copyright is one means of commodifying cultural exchange. Modern secular culture was supported by a system of patronage where the artist was a vassal of the aristocracy, a purveyor of symbols of power and wealth. As the bourgeoisie became more and more dominant the aristocracy eventually lost its role as patron of the arts. Emphasis was placed upon separable and saleable performance or product. However, as a marketable commodity, art lost its verification of uniqueness that came from aristocratic power. The mystique of genius was transmuted into the trademark of authorship. In order to sell what is useless and free, since art no longer served to document and symbolize power directly, it became necessary to somehow distinguish true art from false art; a distinction that was really meaningless in aristocratic culture since, by patronage of the artist, the results were validated as art.
The rapid advancement of industrialization demanded an ever-increasing number of workers. Peasants were disenfranchised to fulfill this need and the traditional peasant culture was undermined. Peasant culture was amorphous, static and anynomous, but most of all free of charge. The debilitating reality of industrial urban life created a mass of spectators with, for the most part, no time or energy to maintain cultural autonomy. Despite the fact that the new proletariat received wages barely sufficient for life, they refused merely to survive and sought after pleasures they could not afford. This created a market for a popular commodity culture. And so, peasant culture was sold back to those who originally owned it. Broadsides are a good example of this.
These anonymous, free peasant songs were usurped by the same music printers who often controlled the printing of art music. These printers were those best served by the original copyright and performance right legislation. This is the genesis of the culture industry. Copyright is instituted for the protection of sellers, not artists, against other sellers. It is an agreement between the state and the sellers to rationalize the cultural marketplace and to entrench the control by the sellers over the industry. The state will, of course, police the cultural property of the cultural industry.
Royalties must be afforded to the artist in order to seal some economic bond between authorship and the commodity. Without this, mass marketing would be difficult if not impossible. Every consumer must get both the same item as every other and something that is somehow unique, something set apart from local self-generated music:
The process of the selection and emergence of stars in the popular song of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries relates to the same dynamic of musical, cultural and economic centralization. Up until that time, popular song found expression mainly in the street, the traditional domain of the jongleurs. Its confinement and pricing, first in the cabarets, then in cafe concerts, was the precondition for its entry into the commodity market and competition.
Jacques Attali, Noise, p. 72.
With regards to art music, the concert circuit provided advertisement for the connection between the artist and the musical exchange value controlled by the publisher. In both high and popular culture the printer-publisher was a primary source of sponsorship of performance.
Royalties provided to the artist are fixed by law or contract. They in no way reflect any cost or labour of the artist or any value judged by the artist. Royalties buy out the artist, and if bought, exchange the artist's control for a form of payment that is such a small portion of the cost of the commodity it carries no real leverage. For instance, the common recording contract involves the following royalties: $0.10 per record for the performing artists (the band, title artist) and $0.10 per record for the songwriter and/or publishing interest. Though this may look promising, the artists must first pay back the advance made to them prior to production and, in addition, the record company will recover all recording costs before royalties are paid. In addition, the writer/publisher receives a radioplay royalty when a piece receives radio exposure. However, royalties are calculated my monitoring 'representative' radio stations. Because the monitoring is selective, only those artists with broad appeal will benefit. There are therefore enough preconditions to the distribution of royalties to ensure that only those artists capable of fungible commodification on a grand scale receive any substantial reward.
Royalties license the seller to use whatever personal value, inspiration or genius the arttist hopes is in their art that might transcend this debased transaction. The sellers are modest. They appear only to facilitate the transmission of cultural meaning. However, the buying and selling of art has never been an innnocent exchange. In fact, we shall see that buyers and sellers are formative with regard to cultural significance and that those transcendent values implied by the concept of 'original art' are actually used to cover up teh real functions of the art market.
Cultural commodities are represented in cultural theory as pure transcendent value, and as such, are open to wild speculation. Art is said to be priceless. This is ironic since it always carries a price tag. Whether a cultural commodity is a unique original or a mass produced item, its 'artistic value' is always liquidated, cashed in. The 'original art' market, in its crassness, provides the key to understanding the political economy of mass-produced culture.
The idea of artistic originality is a necessary precondition of art market speculation. Speculation would be difficult, if the art market could be reduced to the buying and selling of, say, oil paintings, since they are abundant. An artificial scarcuty is created by their supposed originality. The functions of this speculation are to create finance capital through rapid amassing of assets or laundering money.
It is established that the historical development of a secular culture required usurping some of the sacred value that religious art monopolized. The bourgeoisie's original interest in art was perhaps an attempt to outdo the aristcracy by appearing forward-looking and modern. However, it rapidly became evident that these cultural commodities could be manipulated as investments.
For instance, it is now a well-documented fact that purchases of 'great paintings' are more often than not, fraudulnet. Owners of large collections of a particular artist will place a single painting on auction and will pay someone to stand in as a purchaser and have them buy it at an inflated price. They may even pay for phony bidders or manipulate the preconditions of the sale in some other way. The end result is that the perceived value of the collection rises and so therefore does the financial leverage of the owner. Even in the case where the auction is not tampered with, the common economic interests of buyers produce similar results.
Market value, however, does not remain separate from cultural value. Either as a result of the kind of sale mentioned above or as a preparation, books are published. Major monographs rarelyy, if ever, have sales that justify the enormous printing costs, fine reproductions and luxuriant paper. Reputable critics and historians are hired to write copy for these coffee table advertisements. The large expensive monographs seem to create a need for more inexpensive books. Museums and art galleries organize shows and retrospectives. This can make a hitherto unknown artist famous or revitalize and confirm a major artist's status. The new art histories will be compelled to take into account these developments. Many of those involved in this process may see what they do as making art more accessible to the masses, but what motors all this is money, and the art-historical process is a legitimation of this profiteering.
Copyright is not really a central issue for producers of original art work who usually only receive the first paid price of their work, except as it bears on forgery. Forgery is actually a very telling activity since it bears on all the issues surrounding the concept of originality. In order to command attention, great art must be, it is said, truly unique, a work of extraordinary genius. However, by simulating a masterpiece, the forger puts that uniqueness into question since the same effect can be duplicated 'inauthentically.' The forger is a theological problem. The question, 'If art is transcendent how can it be simulated?' parallels, 'If god is all good, how can evil exist?' In a sense, the forger is a devil who attempts to confuse the faithful. The forger is an inverted genius, and the exposing of forgeries is a process that merely reconfirms the concept of originality because it seems to prove the existence of the expert knowledge of the art police.
The basis of copyright is the notion of transcendent uniqueness in cultural productions and is fundamental to the understanding of the spheres more directly affected by copyright.
Copyright affects duplicating media. It pertains to books, records, photographs, printed matter, radio-play, video, film, as well as the performance rights of music, theatre, dance performance art. It declares ownership of such nebulous things as language, image, style. The new technology, though engendering many problems for copyright, has also created its own areas of authorship and ownership: computer programs, software and hardware, synthesizer patches and even the formulae and hardware for creating synthesis and now, because of the verisimilitude of digital sound sampling, copyright wishes to claim the 'sound' of an instrument as performed or recorded. Copyright attempts to restrain the free play of the imagination just as the church, via the Index, attempts to control the free exchange of ideas. One is made wary of trespassing upon someone else's intellectual or cultural property. In school we are prompted to put into 'our own words' what we understand from what we read. This to a child seems utterly inane but we will be punished if we don't try. In university, plagiarism is punishable by expulsion. A cottage industry is therefore created so those students who care about their marks can limit their level of boredom by purchasing essays that best mirror the mediocrity of their professors. Finally, in the 'real world,' trespassing against the laws of authorship becomes, with copyright, criminal.
The irony, of course, is that ideas, images and language protected by copyright are rarely 'original' at all. The boring mediocrity of most modern culture contradicts the ideology of copyright said to provide the author with protection against unscrupulous exploitation. A tame, safe culture of the most simplistic, inane and tedious commodities, easily packaged, trademarked and identified, as well as most amenable to corporate control, is that which is most vigorously protected by the watch-dogs of copyright. Whatever of value resides in this culture, and there is value here, is not protected from exploitation by copyright. In fact, copyright is one vehicle for exploitation.
The bootleggers who provide 'more of the same' for sale, areeasily contained by their own greed which they share with the corporations. They admit too easily to being illicit and thus confirm copyright rather than challenging it. However, it is those who provide copies of any or all materials for free who the corporations fear and who provide the real threat.
Copyright is theft because it claims ownership of a common cultural heritage. It loots ideas, images and sounds from the naturally free-flowing cultural milieu. To copyright something is to deny sources. Copyright presents as the property of one, that which is taken from the lives of many. Authors imperialize their influences when their work is copyrighted.
This imperializing of common culture is made evident by the legitimatizing machinations of modernist historiography. We have already seen how cultural values are driven by cultural exchange. This certainly goes some way in explaining why artists such as Picasso, Joyce or Stravinsky have the particular historical position that thay do. Though this pivotal position may have been established and secured by economics, its historiographical significance goes beyond mere economic clout.
Picasso with regard to his own contemporaries is historically transcendent. Picasso seems to be forever prior to even those closest to him, such as Braque. Even though many movements similar to Cubism, such as Futurism, Vorticism, Suprematism and Constructivism were virtually simultaneous with Cubism, it is always read as historically first. This is because Picasso is first, the original, the cubist among cubists. All other are derivations, and therefore of lesser value. This of course more or less corresponds to the dollar value of the various lesser lights. They may jockey somewhat for position but Picasso is basically secure.
The justification for Picasso's position is his supposed originating genius. But why is Braque less than Picasso? Has the money sought out truly higher value when it pays more for Picasso? It is difficult to argue this point because all art history has faith in the transcendence of Picasso. Braque is less than Picasso because Picasso is the standard by which Braque is measured. Circular logic has never troubled the faithful. Picasso, as the great god Pan, is a little less than ironic. The humble Basque beginnings of this art star only make him more like the carpenter's son.
Good art historians will point out many influences Picasso brought to his work, but the flattery really only works one way. The influences are important only because they arre influences on Picasso. Thus the cultural value and exchange value of Cezanne and African Art are enhanced by their relation to Picasso and not vice versa.
Picasso comes before African Art because Picasso made African Art a commodity. This recalls the broadsides that sold the new proletariat their own prior peasant culture. Afracan Art could not be sold back to the Africans until they were separated from their culture. Generally speaking, the trinkets pilfered by colonialists have been elevated from exotica to great art not by a realization of the value of primitive culture but by a greed, fulfilled by the opportunity for exploitation, provided by Picasso.
This commodification of primitivism wasn't solely the responsibility of the Picasso cult, but the way in which Picasso, the original, usurps his influences is exemplary. The same is true, say, of Joyce, who used techniques which predated him. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is often given as an example though Sterne's importance is always read from Joyce's vantage point. Sterne becomes what Joyce makes of him. Joyce seems to derive less from Sterne than vice versa. Similarly, it doesn't seem to matter whether Virginia Woolf is doing the same thing Joyce was doing. She will nevertheless seem derivative.
Another denied source is everyday life. It is well documented that the source of Molly Bloom's monologue at the end of Ulysses is Nora Barnacle Joyce. It is also said that D.H. Lawrence read his wife's diaries and that this provided the basis for his ability to write from a woman's viewpoint in some of his novels.
The fact that both these cases involve women is undoubtedly not coincidental. Certainly this is part of the process described by feminist cultural historians whereby women's writing is submerged. However, in addition to this, it also may show that authorship is the real area of male control since much of the content is stolen and therefore belongs in some way to the history of women's culture. Of course, it is not only women's culture that is usurped. Zola's portayal of the new proletariat belongs certainly to the latter, despite distortion or whatever. The idea that the portrait belongs as much to the portrayed as the portrayer is anathema to modern culture. It is, however, accepted in feudal and sacred cultures and is the very basis of oral culture.
By examining the legitimating processes of modern culture we find a curious dilemma. The culture that bases itself upon authorship and originality is in fact stolen from those without a voice. It is ironic that plagiarism is the sin that modernism is most guilty of. Copyright allows the thief to claim ownership and make those who were robbed pay to get back their property.
note: this article appeared in Sound by Artists edited by dan lander and micah lexier, published by Art Metropole and Walter Phillips Gallery, Toronto
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