For those who find tourists roaming around museums with their cameras obnoxious, complaints about restrictive museum photo policies by bloggers and open source freaks may not illicit much sympathy. Even I get annoyed by the constant accidental flashes and elbowing in the name of average photographs, and Art Fag City can only benefit from laxer picture taking rights.

That said, I still have little patience for museums and galleries who don’t allow photography. Generally the press is excluded from this policy, but since you basically need to be wearing a hat with a flashing red light reading blogger to keep the guards from harassing you, it seems to me much easier to just let people take pictures as they please. The concerns of the museums are much more complicated than this however, and while I tend not to have too much sympathy for museum stores worried about the loss of postcard sales when they are charging Louis Vuitton rent, the issues they raise need to be discussed. A recent conversation on the icommons list serve did just this so I’m reposting some of the thought expressed in that thread for consideration.

Fred Benenson

After having many conversations with people working at museums who are concerned about photography, the really clear point is that they don’t care about copyright or respecting patrons so much as preserving the income of their gift shops. A museum that prohibits the public from taking home a snapshot of a work they love is also a museum that can charge 1.99 Euro for a postcard of that work, regardless of whether or not it is in the public domain or whether or not they’re trying to assert copyright over it. Museum gift shops are incredibly lucrative and are viable business models that non-profits can depend on, so when something comes along that might appear to threaten their primary source of income, they get defensive. This probably explains why there is such confusion over the rights of museum patrons — some, not all, museums will use any excuse possible to prevent patrons from reproducing the work on their walls.

So museums have the right to grant you access to their (presumably) private property so they can tell you what you can and can’t do on their property. There are exceptions to this (e.g., white folks use this bathroom, etc.) but it doesn’t look like anyone is fighting for the digital-photographer’s bill of rights in the same way other public rights have been established in private spaces.

Jimmy Wales

This is a fascinating point. If correct, then museums really should have “photographer times”, perhaps charging an extra fee. If the idea is that the main income they get is from the on-premise gift shop, this changes my thinking a lot.

I tend to think of museums as wanting to control digital reproductions as an effort to prevent competition from online poster shops, bookstores, etc., i.e. they want royalties from bogusly copyrighted quality reproductions. But if that is not the main point, if the main point of photography restrictions is to get money out of the customers on the premises of the museum (an understandable objective) and also concern about flashes and bothering other people…

An official photography time with an extra fee for a permit would mean a controlled setting, i.e. when you pay your extra $25 to be allowed to take pictures, maybe you have to put down a $75 deposit and if you use a flash (which arguably could damage the works, though I think that’s a pretty dodgy idea) you lose your deposit. [Editors note: I think that fee is WAY TOO HIGH for practical purposes, but the idea is a good one.]

This could actually be a money maker for the museum if they get a professional photographer to teach a class to people wanting to do this. And it would not interfere with gift shop revenues for the bulk of customers who would not be allowed to photograph. And the resulting works would, quite properly, be freely distributable by the photographers if they wanted to do that.

Fred Benenson

My understanding is that flashes do about 10x damage to a work as a flash of sunlight and that this is a very real concern for many works. Even contemporary photography can be degraded with constant exposure to harsh light like a strobe flash.

But the idea of granting a priori access to photographers seems like a great compromise. Along with ‘photo times’ people could also purchase photo passes. Hopefully determining the price point won’t be too difficult, though $25 per museum might get pretty steep for some.

I think this will work the best with museums that have purely public domain works, because works that are protected by copyright would obviously present serious issues.

On the other hand, photography may be seen as a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy and some museum curators won’t want to formally instantiate any kind of program promoting the photography of their carefully preserved acquisitions, even if it helps with a bottom line. I think that as long as we can make the argument that museums are created and maintained for the public good (there are plenty of exceptions to this, I know) we should be able to find some who are relatively open to this idea.

The Louvre might be a good place to start.

I published a few final thoughts on the conference and the AiR panel discussion, which appear on the site here. It seems the location might be a little hard to find however without this direct link, so I’ve simply reblogged the entire piece and added t.whid’s comments (all the images appear on the icommons site however and are worth clicking through for.) I should note that the clarifications Whid makes on his points are thoughts I generally agree with. You can also read these updates on the MTAA site which appear here.

*********

Frankly, with a title like “Building Sustainability for Peer Produced Free Culture” I was surprised that anyone at showed up to the Artist in Residence panel discussion yesterday afternoon. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we were packing any rooms, but we did manage to solicit the interest of at least 15 icommoners, which was more than I had thought would show. Fine Artists don’t share the same concerns as musicians, software geeks, and activists, and since a lot conference has reminded us of these differences, I think most of the artists figured this discussion would do the same.

And in fact this panel held true to this thought, which interestingly, is precisely why it was the most defining moment for the program thus far - it gave artists the platform to articulate these differences. Tim Whidden of the artist collective MTAA was the first to voice these concerns, issuing the disclaimer that he didn’t want to insult anyone with remedial definitions before launching into a basic explanation of art and the art world. These are the kinds of definitions that sound as though they must be utterly boring but are in fact very useful to consider when thinking about the Fine Art community and its place within the commons.

First and most importantly, as Whidden states, the art world is an entity entirely separate from the music, theatre, or activist world. Practically speaking what this means is that in this economy, art is not a term that can be applied loosey goosey to any object or activity with cultural value. It is not subjective, and is easily identified by those working in the profession. What’s more, according to Whidden, no work of art is made better for having a CC license applied to it. Now, this point is clearly debatable, and having observed just yesterday that I liked his work On Kawara Update better for the license I tend to think there are exceptions to this statement, as did a member of the audience who cited the same work [correction: t.whid informed an audience member did NOT cite that work, but commented on a separate issue not worth noting all together - apologies all, my memory failed me in this instance]. That said, I still suspect most artists would generally agree with his statement.

The reason all of this came up in the discussion – and all of the artists were in concurrence with this – is that the culture of the fine art world is such that we typically don’t have to care about copyright. For example, artists who steal from other artists and attribute it are credited with the act of appropriation and lauded for their smart art historical references, where as those who choose not to do this will have their work labeled as derivative crap and are quickly ostersized for being woefully unaware. Guess which option most of us take?

Further illuminating this practice in another presentation, painter Joy Garnett provided a series of slides based on two paintings originally cited by Lawrence Weschler (Mentagna’s The Lamentation of the Dead Christ in 1490 and a work inspired by this piece in the same name by Antonio Bazzi only thirteen years later), and added several centuries of additional remixing. Given the richness of this tradition, I doubt artists are going to start giving a shit about the same copyright concerns that musicians now have to deal with, except in rare cases when someone from outside this economy forces us to (as in the case of Joy Garnett who was threatened with a lawsuit after she appropriated photojournalist Susan Meiselas’s Molotov image.)

As the Fine Art market expands, we may see these concerns come up more frequently, though the community is insular enough that even someone such as myself, who constantly advocates a greater sharing of cultures within these economies, has a difficult time imagining a future when artists become the target of corporations wishing to limit our sampling freedoms. I think we all recognize however, the importance of guarding these rights, so that this doesn’t happen.

Given that the Fine Art community takes very little interest in the concerns of Creative Commons licensing there might be some question as to what we’re doing here in the first place. I think a lot of the artists initially wondered that themselves, and so the preparation our first exhibition and discussion is a means of shaping the identity of the program. As for the answers to this question; they have been as diverse as the community itself. Artist in Residence leader Nathaniel Stern spoke about the ways in which he used licensing to make his work more marketable, whereas media artist Ana Husman had virtually no interest in this, and spoke about making the stories of those close to her free and more widely available. As a moderator, I didn’t have the opportunity to voice these thoughts, but I personally feel that video art distribution and Creative Commons is of particular importance, since the commericial Fine Art world has a good deal of catch up to do in regards to bridging the gap between collectors and museums who think video distribution of any kind devalues the work, and those who wish to make lower qualities videos available to the public without charge.

Providing the most salient image to the conference, Kathryn Smith, a multidisciplinary artist, curator and critic presented Francis Alys’s When Faith Moves Mountains, a photo documentation of a group of collaborators trying to move a mountain. As Smith wisely pointed out, the futility of the act isn’t important, it is the effort itself that marks significance. I would add, that the strength of collaboration and sharing is such that the act of moving a mountain may not be as insurmountable as we think.

[…] no work of art is made better for having a CC license applied to it. Now, this point is clearly debatable, and having observed just yesterday that I liked his work On Kawara Update better for the license I tend to think there are exceptions to this statement, as did a member of the audience who cited the same work. That said, I still suspect most artists would generally agree with his statement.Trying to clarify my point…An art work’s meaning will be changed by context. Making a work available via a CC-license may change or augment the context of a work thereby changing its meaning somewhat to some viewers (make it better or worse). My point is that the vast majority of viewers of an art work will not notice this context shift — they have no idea what sort of copyright laws are being applied to a particular art work. Many of those that do notice will simply disregard it and focus on the traditional measures of an art work’s worth: the form, content, subject, etc. I personally would never measure a particular work’s value by its license — it wouldn’t even go into the mix. To me (unless the cc-license is part of the content of the work) it’s simply a sort of artificial add-on. Now, if I like something on its own merits and then notice it’s cc-licensed I will think the artist is enlightened, but that’s just my opinion of the artist and not the work. Think of one of your favorite art works. Do you know its license? Do you just assume copyright has been applied? Would you really think it was more [beautiful, intelligent, engaging, enthralling, etc] if the license changed? twhid · New York City (United States) · Jun 20th, 2007 12:04 am your call: is this comment useful? your take:

I just can’t leave it alone…more here: http://www.mtaa.net/mtaaRR/news/twhid/artificial_legal_add_ons_to_art.html

Ready to read some old news? This Sunday past Tim Whidden of the collective MTAA bought his own art at the icommons summit in Dubrovnik. The original post on the iCommons site republished below.

You read it right folks! Artist in Residence Tim Whidden of the collective MTAA bought his own art less than an hour from the time this post was written. Produced for the isummit this year under a CC license, MTAA’s “Art Happens Here” has been featured on virtually every distributable surface I’ve seen in the city. And now he buys back his art…or is it his t-shirt? Oh, the questions this act evokes!

View original post and photos here.

My full review of the icommons Artist in Residence exhibition can be found on the icommons site now. I have taken the liberty of sampling a larger portion of the text than I usually do, for no other reason really than to give readers the opportunity to read a little more meat on this site before deciding to click to another.

iCommoners and the artists in residence had the good fortune of sharing the street outside the gallery with every drunk teenager in the city last night. I suppose I should feel sorry for the six or seven boys I saw through the course of the evening hunched over a sink in a bathroom, but seeing as how I recognized a lot of these guys as the cat callers who had annoyed me earlier that day, my sympathy isn’t what it might be otherwise.

The exhibition itself looks good over all. Not much larger than a mid to large sized bedroom, the gallery presents a real challenge to work with, so it has to be said the artists did an excellent job of creating a space that didn’t immediately evoke feelings of claustrophobia. Supporting this statement, Dubrovnik’s gallery goers were by far the most eager to engage in participate in the work than any other I have seen this year, (barring perhaps the art rock concert by the Final Run-Ins at Taxter and Spengemann gallery in New York two weeks ago), a crowd behavior that simply would not occur if the gallery was installed poorly.

Individual works are of varied success, largely reflecting the portability of the artist’s practice. In that respect probably the most successful work in the show, came from the New York art collective MTAA whose net art piece On Kawara Update displayed beautifully on an “antique” computer screen dating to (I’m guessing) the early 90’s. Unlike some many art titles that leave viewers befuddled, this work tells you exactly what the piece does. Drawing upon the canonical On Kawara’s “Today Series”, an ongoing project whereby the artist creates Spartan black canvases with only the date, and a separate collection of news clippings from the day, MTAA’s update recreates that same canvas for the web as a splash page displaying only the date which is also a link to a program that pulls news stories from that day with Creative Commons licenses [editors note: apparently most newsfeeds are CC licensed so MTAA decided it wasn’t worth the effort to make a specific filter]. Now, to be honest, I’ve always had problems buying into the original series MTAA draw inspiration from, namely because the artist spent a life time doing the project without apparently getting bored of it. For me, this piece immeasurably improves the latter not only because the filter [if it existed] adds a layer of specificity to the work, but by automating the repetitive aspect of the work, thereby eliminating criticisms lodged against artists who remake the same piece through out their lifetime.

Working with the familiar, shows up in other strong works in the show. For example, Ana Husman’s, Make Yourself at Home and Welcome!!! , a free travel guide for tourists, informs icommoners about local customs, and warns of common missteps that might identify you as an annoying visitor. “Avoid walking in the small gutter along the Stradun”, Husman tells us, “Otherwise they say you will never get married!” Knowledge I wish I had known prior to arriving also shows up in the book. “Citizens of Dubrovnik rarely know the names of streets.” The artist doesn’t add cab drivers to this observation, but anyone who took a cab from the Dubrovnik airport can. Probably my favorite part of this book comes from Marcell Mars introduction, who bemoans the inherent lack of “retellability” of the sublime in art. In a community that seeks and trumpets the sublime over almost any other attribute in work, I find it refreshing that someone has taken the time to point out the value of art with mime like qualities. Nobody will argue that the discipline needs to communicate, but the idea that art that renders the viewer speechless is somehow inherently better seems awfully narrow to me.

To read the full review click here.

A photo credit I’d gladly pass on to someone else. Photo AFC

As evidenced above clearly I have not been blessed with the best photographing skills in the world, so I can only hope that the written support I provide will be enough to make a small, but amusing point. Cudos to readers who manage to discern what they are looking at prior to my description, but for those who find the job of speculative jpeg musing overrated, the photo above was taken at this morning’s welcome with Heather Ford and Tomislav Medak, and features the screen displaying the live feed of the event into Second Life (a virtual 3-D world built and owned by its users.) The view you are looking is that of the second life avatar M12, who was gracious enough to provide live footage, and evidences the equivalent of big-hats-in-the-crowd footage. I have to say I find it rather entertaining that the ability to give your avatar wings results in the predictable problem of blocked screen views. It’s sort of a shame that the avatar’s burden of finding a new view point during an opening can be a little disruptive to the footage, because it really would have aided those of us in the audience who decided to fixate on the virtual conference footage as opposed to the real time event unfolding in front of us.

This post and more can be found on the icommons blog.  Don’t miss Sneak Preview of Incomplete Art Work!

Perhaps my inclination towards jealousy of any sort results in a complete lack of interest in viewing photographs of people I know in far away places. As a result, you’re not going to see countless pictures of Dubrovnik on this blog, though I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t at least observe that the city is easily the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.  Five million photos taken by the artists in residence document this, and can be seen on Joy Garnett’s flickr stream.

As far as Fine Art goes, the majority I’ve experienced thus far seems to exist within the gallery walls of the AiR program. This isn’t to say that there isn’t art here - in fact Dubrovnik has a reputation for being a cultural hub of sorts - but whatever there is I haven’t encountered yet. A full post on the exhibition will arrive tomorrow once it has opened. In the meantime look forward to upcoming posts about how AiR situates itself in a program that would seem largely for lawyers and activists of free culture, and an interview with Second Life artist Cao Fei!

In case you’ve been wondering what I look like when I’m at the “office”, the above image should satisfy that burning question. Do note however that I am only committing the narcissistic act of publishing a photograph of myself for the purposes of the following interview. Artist Nathaniel Stern offered to close off the icommons interview series you’ve been reading on this site, with a discussion about my own work as a blogger. Naturally I find the conversation utterly fascinating.

Known for her uncanny ability to be concise and catty while still maintaining a level of depth (if not, at least, substantiated criticism), Art Fag City’s Paddy Johnson has become an oft-looked to voice in the blogosphere, for news, gossip and criticism of contemporary art, digital and net.art, pop culture, and the general gallery scene in Chelsea, NY. If you don’t know it or her, check out her blog and/or this great interview with her on artlist.biz.

As the resident blogger/arts critic at the upcoming iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, Paddy’s been interviewing the six invited artists and posting on the iCommons site regularly. I thought it might be a good idea to reciprocate and see what she’s thinking, simultaneously giving insight to Commoners as to why we thought she’d be the ideal candidate to invite along. — nathaniel stern

NS: First off, I’d like to know more about the power you attribute to blogging and writing online; and I guess more importantly, can you contextualize that importance to the Commons?

PJ: Well certainly, blogging gives you an amount of visibility that I think is pretty important. But I would say that first and foremost, one of the reasons I blog is that I’m not necessarily that great on my feet [Nathaniel laughs]; so you know, one of the great things about blogging is that I’ve got, like, 5 hours where I can sit and think about a good one-liner [laughs].

NS: I’m so with you.

PJ: It’s so much easier than getting on the phone with somebody and talking to them about your work… With blogging you can just create this distance, and give yourself enough time to formulate exactly… what I think and the way I want it to read.

NS: And yet it seems off the cuff.

PJ: Yeah, exactly. It’s a particular skill, for sure and I’m lucky enough to have it… But one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about recently in regards to the power that actively participating in a community gives you,comes from this lecture I went to, I guess about two weeks ago, at the Cue Foundation, a non profit arts organization for emerging artists in Chelsea. They hosted a Q&A with Monya Rowe and Michael Gillespie of Foxy Gallery on the topic of what you, as an artist, can do to get into a gallery…

To read the full interview click here.

I didn’t notice any public art commissions during my 6 hour layover in the Frankfurt airport, which basically leaves the poor quality of airline food to report on.  Even working with the belief that angel’s wings are probably made of butter, it doesn’t naturally extend that I want the taste of a meal to consist entirely of that condiment.  Naturally I will forward this post to Lufthansa airlines. I’m sure the staff will recognize the gravity of bad press from an art blogger. 

Nathaniel Stern, Wind, 2006, archival lambda print.

I was travelling for most of yesterday so I didn’t have a chance to mention that my two part interview with new media artist Nathaniel Stern went up on the icommons blog yesterday. You can read the full discussion here and here, but I’ve included teasers from both interviews below since each part deals with different subject matter. In the first post Stern and I talk about his art work, and in the second, we touch upon how the concerns of the Creative Commons effect artists. Stern speaks with great eloquence on the subject, so our conversation is not to be missed!

Inspired by pioneering artists in the field of Interactive art such as David Rokeby and Myron Kruger, Nathaniel Stern builds upon their work by reintroducing traditional art- making techniques to reinterpret digital records of movement. In the first half of my interview with the artist we discuss works leading up to, and informing his current body of prints he titles Compressionism.In these images Stern manipulates visual documentation of movement distorting memories or impressions of the body.

Art Fag City: So I wanted to begin by discussing your work, and so I thought we could start with the prints you make. I wonder if you could talk about your process a little bit because you have the Compressionism series that you’ve been working on, and, you use a lot of ‘techy’ things, but the actual process is very traditional. You’re also making very traditional art historical references and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that and what your interest is in pairing those things?

Nathaniel Stern: Absolutely. I guess obviously with any series I’m pulling inspiration from various places, but I think when that series started my interests led me to two things: the first was I was working with interactive installation and performativity, trying to get people to move in ways they normally wouldn’t, and that was kind of my mantra for a while; rather than trying to think of immersion as a goal, I thought of immersion as a side effect of playing with affect – the involuntary ability to effect, and be effected - and how such art can sort of put the body in quotes. And what I found was that it was a very special kind of person that would actually engage and interact with those pieces; most people would just kind of watch and talk about the work, and it was everyone from, like, my mother, who didn’t understand the technology - and just kind of said how proud she was and sat in the corner - but also the writers and critics who really liked my work would kind of stand back, and nod, and talk about how it’s interactive, and it’s performative, and playful, but they would never actually use it.

To read more of part one click here.

A sampler from second half of the interview below.

I think the discussion right now is in the wrong arena – copyright or CC, Fair Use or piracy, this is what big companies should worry about, not artists. Artists should raise questions around if you release the full high-resolution or lower-resolution under CC, or whether you allow people to exhibit the video or do you sell the exhibition rights separately - I think these are the models that are different for each and every one of us, potentially for each and every art work. - Nathaniel Stern

The following is the second half of a two part interview with the iCommons Artist in Residence coordinator, Nathaniel Stern. In this post we speak specifically about the concerns of professional artists vis a vis copyright or CC.

Art Fag City: So we’ve talked a little bit about the prints. I should note that you also make videos, which are on your site as well, before we move on so readers will know to check that work out. I wondered if you could talk about your connection with Creative Commons.

Nathaniel Stern: Admittedly, it’s by default that I’ve become a bit of an iCommons activist. I was one of the few people who had a blog in South Africa - now there’s many, but I was one of the earliest ones there and certainly the first in the art world - and it was under Creative Commons, so I was contacted by the South African CC team early on. Since then, I’ve become an impromptu spokesperson for them on some level and I’ve tried to direct that dialog not only toward my personal interests but also the interests of professional artists more generally. I guess I have two main themes with regards to Creative Commons: the first is that I want to ensure that we make work that’s free and available in the public domain for remixing and playing and generating discussion, but that’s not exploitative of artists. And so with this, ideally, I guess I’d like to see Fair Use expanded exponentially and I see various CC licenses as doing exactly that. With issues of distribution I guess I like to differentiate between ‘art’ and the art’s ‘content’ - the former is for collectors and the latter is free: I think it should be available to everyone. I believe, for example, that you should be allowed to download and play with my video art; I give away files for my prints, they are available on my site - not at super high res, but high res enough that you could print them out or re-mix. I think it’s important that they are out there. That’s the art’s content, not the art itself. From my perspective, with Walter Benjamin‘s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he was right in saying that potentials for easily copying work changed the relationship we have to art objects, but he was wrong in saying that the more copies, the less the authentic original has value: it’s exactly the opposite - the more people that have posters of the Mona Lisa, the more collectors will want the original; the more people that watch my videos.

To read the full interview (part two) click here.

My next interview in the series Art Intercom is up on the icommons blog. This week I interview artist Jaka Zeleznikar. Check it out!

Much like Robert Rauchenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, Jaka Železnikar often begins with pre-existing work and then transforms, sometimes even destroys it to make new art. Such studio methods can create a wide range of works, a number of which I discussed with Železnikar over the phone last week. The majority of the discussion centres on what he will be making at the iCommons Summit and his online works, though he has an array of excellent offline pieces that can be seen here.

AFC: So you do a lot of on and offline work. To make the interview a little more concise I’m just going to focus on the online work for now, and go through a few pieces on your site. Your most recent piece Letters, that’s a Firefox extension right? Now I haven’t installed this in my browser - frankly I’m a little fearful to do so…

Jaka: (laughing) It doesn’t bite!

AFC: Well, I’m a little worried about adding any additional distractions to the ones I already have to my work… Can you tell me how it works?

Jaka: It’s an online visual poem in the form of an extension for the Firefox browser. If you look at the project page there is a rotating letter ‘A’. Okay so you’ve got the whole alphabet – actually a mix of the English and Slovenian alphabet in rotating letters. Regardless of which page you are looking at, it adds this alphabet over the page, and then you can move letters around or if you type, these letters will appear and disappear, and you can make them move around the page by themselves. Plus I made a little button so you can switch it off to surf normally.

AFC: [laughing] How kind of you! So do you work with this Firefox extension regularly?

To read the rest of the interview click here.

Joy Garnett, Juke Joint, 2007, oil on canvas, 26 x 46 inches

My second interview in a series of six with artists the residence program at iSummit this year went up this morning on at iCommons. An excerpt below for your reading pleasure.

New York based artist and blogger Joy Garnett frequently uses images depicting natural and technological disasters she finds on the web as a starting point for her paintings. However, the real objective of her work is not to make political commentary, but to reveal the malleability of meaning within these images.

Joy is well known for her involvement in a copyright fight called “Joywar” which began when the well-known photojournalist Susan Meiselas threatened to sue her for the use of part of a photograph she had taken in 1979, as the basis for her painting Molotov. Joy removed the image from her website, but by that time artist members of Rhizome.org had already copied it in protest inspiring countless online permutations of the painting. Joy also runs the popular and often political reblog NEWSgrist.

AFC: As an artist who makes and sells paintings, what is the role of Creative Commons for people such as yourself?

Joy: To me painting has always been a remix. It is a really old technology that excels at remixing. But the remixing has to do with the eye, the hand, the memory… So I think the idea that the commons is something we just thought of is a misconception. It’s just that we’ve had to re-identify it because our culture has become so proprietary and it’s been leaning in that direction for some time. As a painter dealing with the idea of copyright, I see that it doesn’t really function for us as it was intended to because it doesn’t really apply to “one-offs”; copyright was first devised in the context of publishing and it is meant to function for works that are mass produced. So for me, Copyright has nothing to do with how I earn my living, and it has nothing to do with how painters earn their livings.

AFC: So given this statement, does Creative Commons have a place in the professional art world and amongst artists?

Joy: Yes. To me the idea of Creative Commons licensing is the beginning of a way for artists to take charge, to try and understand how claiming or relinquishing property can serve them and the community.

AFC: And do you think that the community at large is basically on the same page about copyright as artists?

Joy: I think not; one of my favorite judges, who specializes in issues of copyright and fair use, Judge Pierre Leval, said something at a recent panel discussion regarding this very issue that made me and other art professionals in the audience jump.

He said, “Without copyright, authors and artists would still be at the mercy of and dependent on the good graces of wealthy patrons for their living” Well, we all know that artists are dependent on the whims of the wealthy and that our careers aren’t really affected by copyright. So that was a revelation to me: that there is such a gap in understanding between these different realms of expertise, that there’s such a split between art people and law people. And even within the artist community there is a gap between those who feel like they need to control their work because people might steal it — there’s paranoia on the one extreme end — and then way on the other end there’s the open source sampler position . And there are many shades in between. It’s very interesting to see how polarized the community is. I think redefining the commons can help us create a dialog.

To continue reading click here.

Part two of my interview series is now up on the icommons blog. The teaser immediately follows below with a link to the full interview.

The following is the second post in a two part interview with conceptual art collective MTAA. I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit. We concluded part one of the interview talking about how MTAA define the workings of a ‘collaboration’, and the discussion continues below. (Read part one of two in this series here.)

T.Whid: So we’re making this new graphic illustration or diagram and my first inclination was that I don’t really need to collaborate with the people running the Summit. It’s like, I’m giving them this thing, and they can do with it what they will. But at the same time, I want it used there, so I guess I have to be proactive in asking for certain things.

AFC: Right, but just to be clear on collaboration at the Summit, when you get there you’re doing some sort of collaborative project are you not?

T.Whid: I guess. But we’re not sure what that is yet! So then this other piece we’re thinking about doing is this thing called On Kawara Update, which we had done a few years ago, and it lived on Rhizome’s site for a while and then it broke when they reconfigured their web server so we decided we would have to remake it at some point… The way that piece works is that it updates [the conceptual artist] On Kawara’s dating process, so you go to a web page and it displays the date for that day. If you click on the date, you’ll see news stories from that day, and then there’s an archive where you can go back and see other days. Because the way On Kawara’s paintings work is that he’d paint a painting that day and then he’d package it in a box with news clippings from where he was that day.

To continue reading the full article click here.

The first part of my interview with artist collective MTAA is up on the iCommons blog. I’ve posted a teaser below, but as always, click through to read the whole piece.

Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the conference, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists’ work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Artists to be interviewed include Ana Husman, Jaka Železnikar, Joy Garnett, Kathryn Smith, Nathaniel Stern and this weeks interviewees, Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden (who go by the names M.River and T.Whid), of MTAA. Tim will be representing MTAA as one of the Artists in Residence at the iSummit in Dubrovnik.

MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) is simply described on their website as “a Brooklyn, New York-based conceptual and net art collaboration founded in 1996.” I like them because they give me wine when I visit their studio. I like their work, because it is characterized by economy of expression without being generalized or simplistic. What’s more, they frequently extend this aptitude to create feedback systems that require the same streamlined response from their audience. The result is very clean and eloquent communication mediated by or in the form of websites, installations, sculptures and photographic prints. Creative Commons licensing plays a critical role in their work, because it provides a set of pre-established rules for use of their work so that they don’t have to. In short, it simplifies the conversation, and facilitates the elegance that defines their art.

In the two part interview that follows I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit.

AFC: So you guys are a team - how will you be working with one of you in Croatia (Tim Whidden) and the other one (Mike Sarff) in New York?

M.River: I’ve defaulted to Tim!

T.Whid: Well, I guess there’s… sort of an online discussion happening, so we’re both taking part in that and then in Dubrovnik I’ll just be there as the representative of MTAA so I’ll have to email Mike before I do anything and ask “Mike should I do this?”

M.River: “Get lunch first!” (laughter)

T.Whid: We had two ideas and we wanted to do both of them, so the first idea was that we have this illustration called the ‘Simple Net Art Diagram’ that has had a Creative Commons licence applied to it for a few years now, like one of the most liberal licences beyond just going in the public domain.

AFC: What does a “very liberal” licence mean?

T.Whid: I guess it’s called the attribution licence meaning that any one can use it for any purpose as long as we get attribution. So that means someone could make t-shirts and sell them and that’s fine with us….

To read the complete interview click here.