The problem is also that "art" is a very ill-defined term. It's not a physical quantity, and it doesn't actually exist. We create things, and call some of them art. No one agrees as to what "art" actually means, or where the line is.
The point is that it's a made-up term. It's not a thing. We can debate, argue, and wonder about it all we want, but the fact remains that it does not actually exist outside of our own minds. Thus, "art" cannot ever be protected or controlled: only the physical manifestations of that art can be.
An artist's intent doesn't exist. It can never be known unless he tells you, and even then he could be lying. Outside of the actions of the artist himself, that intent has no enforcement, and can only ever be expressed through interpretation. It is also a thing that cannot be controlled, yet also can never be protected.
Some thoughts on artists' intent and destructible artwork.
I'm wondering if anyone has seen images of the Wall of Ice in Jerusalem by Dale Chihuly?
The wall of gigantic blocks of ice was set up with the expressed purpose by the artist to melt. The very reason of its existence was to be enjoyed as it was destroying itself in the hot sun.
You could argue that this piece of art was preserved through pictures and video but you would be wrong. What you have now is a record of the art having existed, not the art itself. The art was not the ice nor was it the wall made from that ice. The art was the completely intangible idea of the the natural destruction of the wall of ice in that specific city at that specific time. There is absolutely no way you could ever even attempt to preserve it.
People make art like this all the time. Dance, theater and all manner of concerts are exactly the same. The art is to be in that venue, on that night performing in a specific way. You can record it but you can not recreate it and the recording will not be the art. It will be a removed shadow of the art.
If art and the people that create it are not allowed to create fleeting works -works whose execution and meaning both to the artist and the audience is inherent in the very concept of mortality and the constant march of time- without preservation then we would barely have any art at all. "Remember, thou art mortal. Remember, thou art mortal." The constant yammering in our ears reminding us that we will one day die... This has been one of the most enduring (arguably the only) motivations for art since humans picked up a stick and scratched it in the dirt. Many have made works of art in a ridiculous attempt at immortality through their art but many, many others have simply wanted to comment on the shitty fact that everything goes away sooner or later including the artwork used to make the very comment. Indeed there have been countless artists who realized this and took it the step further and made the very destruction itself the art and the thing you could make a record of simply the medium through which to display it.
If you do not allow them to end the performance for fear that it may end... If you destroy the art of destruction so that it does not get destroyed... If you clutch to your ever growing collection of weak facsimiles of artwork so that you ignore the actual art... You may as well slap every person that creates artwork in the face and spit in their eye. You are blinded to the message they are trying to get across to you and telling them that you don't give a shit what it was anyway.
As for drm and Lucas....
Yeah that sucks. Sure wish I had those masters. But I don't. Oh well, my life is not going to end. Hey, maybe, just maybe, the "loss" of this artwork could inspire someone else to do something at least as good if not better!
Oh, but why would they? They can just sit at home watching their old vhs copy of the original movies as opposed to going out and creating things themselves.
Yay for preservation of every piece of art that ever existed!
(tongue firmly in cheek at the last in case your tongue-in-cheek-dar is broken)
On the artistic intent front: it is foolish, unrealistic, and tyrannical to attempt to regulate with laws or mechanize with technology anything as subjective as intent. So long as he does not impinge on the rights of others, an artist can take whatever actions he wishes to express his message. And a viewer can make whatever assumptions please him about the artist's intent, or subject a copy that he owns to whatever actions he wishes. Broad attempts to protect or enforce the message itself, as opposed to the medium, are fundamentally doomed to failure, because they require an objective measure of that message where none exists. So while Lucas was a colossal asshat, he was within his rights. We the audience have no right to not be disappointed by him. Express your displeasure to him however you feel is appropriate, and hold on to the copies of the version you like as long as you can.
Ah, but some works of art become so important that they should be preserved regardless of what the owner wants, you say? Well, that's an interesting idea, and one that I'm open to consider if you can answer the problem I set forth above: how does society decide what is important? Given that this is such a subjective decision, I don't see a way to do so that does not put an unfair burden on those who disagree with the work's importance.
With limited resources, preserving every work exactly as it was made is simply not possible. And transferring it to another medium (which would also, I'd say, include any actions taken to preserve something that is inherently ephemeral, such as casting the aforementioned wax sculpture in bronze) will cause a loss of information; this is particularly evident in any attempt to digitize a physical work, where a perfect copy would have to record the state of every atom of the original (and given something that changes over time, this state would have to be recorded over all points in time). I lean towards a rather free-market style solution to all this, which is that it's up to each person or (some of whom may have been selected as representatives of a larger group, such as a government-funded museum) to preserve what they think is worth preserving at their own expense. The rest of us will have to accept their decisions, or put forth some fragment of our own energies to do it differently.
Now to DRM.
The idea of DRM springs from a confusion between ownership and copyright. If you have copyrighted a work, you do not own every copy; outside of the purely electronic realms, this is trivially obvious. Inside them, some people seem to be confused on this point, and attempt to enforce ownership over copies that have passed on to others. I do not believe it possible to actually own information in any kind of enforceable sense, only to own the medium on which it is encoded. Copyright is something else: a set of rules about information transfer put together to give creators the ability to make a physical living off of nonphysical creations.
DRM has nothing to do with preserving artistic intent, and everything to do with changing copyright into ownership. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it theft: someone (a content creator) asserting ownership over something I've purchased. Realizing this, media companies are attempting to redefine "purchase" so as to remove the actual transfer of ownership from the equation. But they're doing it in a basically nonfeasible way; to boil it down real simply, just about every operation a computer system does with some piece of information involves copying it in some fashion or another. An attempt to discern acceptable copying from unacceptable copying is just as subjective as artistic intent, and mechanizing that decision fails for exactly the same reasons.
While something an artist creates is not in the public domain they, of course, should have rights to change it, get money or credit from it or refuse money from it (last night on the New Inventors a TV show a guy who'd made a cheap and effective way of stopping mud-brick houses falling down on people in earthquakes announced that he would not be patenting the system because he wanted anyone who needed it to be able to use it).
However if I buy their product I also have rights. If I buy your book while it remains your intellectual property the actual physical pages are mine. Van Gogh may have burnt many of his paintings but they were still in his physical possession. If he had come into my house and set fire to the painting I had bought from him and hung on my wall he would have been charged with arson.
Creators should have rights to update or change their works but they do not have the right to come into my house, get out their pen and change the words in the book that is sitting on my bookshelf. Even in the case of product safety recalls companies that are recalling their products can't actually compel me to return the packet of cereal I bought, if I wish to keep it I can because it is my property.
Say Rym and Scott decided that they wanted to stop the How Computers Work series. They can do that, they can even delete the MP3s of the episodes that they have already done and prevent people from downloading them. They cannot and should not be allowed to remove the copies I already have in my possession. I know GeekNights is creative commons and all that but the core issue is still the same, once I possess something, whether I buy it or get it for free, as long as I have obtained it legally the rights to the physical thing is mine. In the case of digital media even though there is not an actual 'thing' I can hold in my hand it still exists and I have a right to whatever makes it an MP3 or other type of media file.
Comments
The point is that it's a made-up term. It's not a thing. We can debate, argue, and wonder about it all we want, but the fact remains that it does not actually exist outside of our own minds. Thus, "art" cannot ever be protected or controlled: only the physical manifestations of that art can be.
An artist's intent doesn't exist. It can never be known unless he tells you, and even then he could be lying. Outside of the actions of the artist himself, that intent has no enforcement, and can only ever be expressed through interpretation. It is also a thing that cannot be controlled, yet also can never be protected.
I'm wondering if anyone has seen images of the Wall of Ice in Jerusalem by Dale Chihuly?
The wall of gigantic blocks of ice was set up with the expressed purpose by the artist to melt. The very reason of its existence was to be enjoyed as it was destroying itself in the hot sun.
You could argue that this piece of art was preserved through pictures and video but you would be wrong. What you have now is a record of the art having existed, not the art itself. The art was not the ice nor was it the wall made from that ice. The art was the completely intangible idea of the the natural destruction of the wall of ice in that specific city at that specific time. There is absolutely no way you could ever even attempt to preserve it.
People make art like this all the time. Dance, theater and all manner of concerts are exactly the same. The art is to be in that venue, on that night performing in a specific way. You can record it but you can not recreate it and the recording will not be the art. It will be a removed shadow of the art.
If art and the people that create it are not allowed to create fleeting works -works whose execution and meaning both to the artist and the audience is inherent in the very concept of mortality and the constant march of time- without preservation then we would barely have any art at all. "Remember, thou art mortal. Remember, thou art mortal." The constant yammering in our ears reminding us that we will one day die... This has been one of the most enduring (arguably the only) motivations for art since humans picked up a stick and scratched it in the dirt. Many have made works of art in a ridiculous attempt at immortality through their art but many, many others have simply wanted to comment on the shitty fact that everything goes away sooner or later including the artwork used to make the very comment. Indeed there have been countless artists who realized this and took it the step further and made the very destruction itself the art and the thing you could make a record of simply the medium through which to display it.
If you do not allow them to end the performance for fear that it may end...
If you destroy the art of destruction so that it does not get destroyed...
If you clutch to your ever growing collection of weak facsimiles of artwork so that you ignore the actual art...
You may as well slap every person that creates artwork in the face and spit in their eye. You are blinded to the message they are trying to get across to you and telling them that you don't give a shit what it was anyway.
As for drm and Lucas....
Yeah that sucks. Sure wish I had those masters. But I don't. Oh well, my life is not going to end. Hey, maybe, just maybe, the "loss" of this artwork could inspire someone else to do something at least as good if not better!
Oh, but why would they? They can just sit at home watching their old vhs copy of the original movies as opposed to going out and creating things themselves.
Yay for preservation of every piece of art that ever existed!
(tongue firmly in cheek at the last in case your tongue-in-cheek-dar is broken)
Ah, but some works of art become so important that they should be preserved regardless of what the owner wants, you say? Well, that's an interesting idea, and one that I'm open to consider if you can answer the problem I set forth above: how does society decide what is important? Given that this is such a subjective decision, I don't see a way to do so that does not put an unfair burden on those who disagree with the work's importance.
With limited resources, preserving every work exactly as it was made is simply not possible. And transferring it to another medium (which would also, I'd say, include any actions taken to preserve something that is inherently ephemeral, such as casting the aforementioned wax sculpture in bronze) will cause a loss of information; this is particularly evident in any attempt to digitize a physical work, where a perfect copy would have to record the state of every atom of the original (and given something that changes over time, this state would have to be recorded over all points in time). I lean towards a rather free-market style solution to all this, which is that it's up to each person or (some of whom may have been selected as representatives of a larger group, such as a government-funded museum) to preserve what they think is worth preserving at their own expense. The rest of us will have to accept their decisions, or put forth some fragment of our own energies to do it differently.
Now to DRM.
The idea of DRM springs from a confusion between ownership and copyright. If you have copyrighted a work, you do not own every copy; outside of the purely electronic realms, this is trivially obvious. Inside them, some people seem to be confused on this point, and attempt to enforce ownership over copies that have passed on to others. I do not believe it possible to actually own information in any kind of enforceable sense, only to own the medium on which it is encoded. Copyright is something else: a set of rules about information transfer put together to give creators the ability to make a physical living off of nonphysical creations.
DRM has nothing to do with preserving artistic intent, and everything to do with changing copyright into ownership. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it theft: someone (a content creator) asserting ownership over something I've purchased. Realizing this, media companies are attempting to redefine "purchase" so as to remove the actual transfer of ownership from the equation. But they're doing it in a basically nonfeasible way; to boil it down real simply, just about every operation a computer system does with some piece of information involves copying it in some fashion or another. An attempt to discern acceptable copying from unacceptable copying is just as subjective as artistic intent, and mechanizing that decision fails for exactly the same reasons.
However if I buy their product I also have rights. If I buy your book while it remains your intellectual property the actual physical pages are mine. Van Gogh may have burnt many of his paintings but they were still in his physical possession. If he had come into my house and set fire to the painting I had bought from him and hung on my wall he would have been charged with arson.
Creators should have rights to update or change their works but they do not have the right to come into my house, get out their pen and change the words in the book that is sitting on my bookshelf. Even in the case of product safety recalls companies that are recalling their products can't actually compel me to return the packet of cereal I bought, if I wish to keep it I can because it is my property.
Say Rym and Scott decided that they wanted to stop the How Computers Work series. They can do that, they can even delete the MP3s of the episodes that they have already done and prevent people from downloading them. They cannot and should not be allowed to remove the copies I already have in my possession. I know GeekNights is creative commons and all that but the core issue is still the same, once I possess something, whether I buy it or get it for free, as long as I have obtained it legally the rights to the physical thing is mine. In the case of digital media even though there is not an actual 'thing' I can hold in my hand it still exists and I have a right to whatever makes it an MP3 or other type of media file.