Intimation of imitation

In this new age with the computer and the internet... copyright laws are having a hard time catching up.

First of all... a visual artist, in the years when he's learning, will take copies of every cool image he finds on the internet and create a library for himself. Here he can muse and admire and study the work. He will take these images created by other people, and put them through artistic computer filters... and a section of his workshop will be dedicated to this pursuit. This, of course, is what is known as "fair use" in usa law.

The question in the anxious mind of the budding artist, however, is "where are the lines of copyright and fair use?" Well, the truth is that any laws that are created by a group of people for others who pursue a different lifestyle, or have a different culture... these laws will be oafish... And they will be x amount out of alignment with what is ethically proper for those people to do.

The truth is that art is a process of a cultural dance of motifs and motif sets. Motifs are symbols which communicate a message or an idea. Motifs are vague symbols - they aren't specific like words.

Taken to extreme - we have popular music... where everybody uses the same chord progressions, the same riffs, and such things... Of course, at that point, the music becomes boring and loses any meaning it could have had. The symbols have lost their meaning because of the endless repetition of them in a thousand different contexts which are not related to eachother.

Taken to the other extreme... there are many cities in the usa... where it's considered a sin to take a photo of a person on the street in public. The photographer can't even collect a library of images for his own personal study. And so we have a whole cadre of "landscape photographers" - people who are scared to take any photos of anything except plants animals and horizons.

We really cheat our society, as artists, when we refuse to put human forms, and the outlines of human created things into our work. There was a beautiful book I saw at the bookstore recently which was simply a collection of photos by national geographic photographers of children around the world - in different cultural contexts. With the world getting smaller... these cultural differences are going to be disappearing more and more. And there's no better place to document a culture than in the eyes and face of a child. But, if you look around, you won't find collections of professional photos of usa children in natural contexts. Why? Because of a lawsuit addicted society. It's a tragedy, in my opinion. There's so much beauty and inspiration which could be given to the world if photographers felt more free to use people in their work.

I have a writer friend who has just finished his first year of college. And the imitation issue has really bothered him a lot. He's a poet, among other things... and of course one method he likes the most when putting pen to paper, is to look at someone else's piece of art... and muse... and the words which comprise the poem, are a loose artistic portrayal of the art piece he's looking at.

He also draws with pencil - marvelous things. But again... one of his favorite things to do is to create his drawing using a photo he has found in a magazine... And he's afraid to sell those kinds of art pieces, because of anxieties about copyright.

His best works are things where he imitated someone else. There's quite a profound synergy which happens when you use an element in your artwork which has been used elsewhere. Art motifs speak to the human intuition... and intuition functions only when there's been a past experience with the element.. Pretty soon, you have a cumulative effect which can be compared to when you place a mirror across from another mirror.

Now, who sets precedent for how copyright law is viewed and understood in our society? Corrupt organizations. The art barons -the RIAA and the MPAA, and the mainstream publishers. These organizations have forced the people in the usa to live in a world of kitsch - and generally bad art. They have controlled the markets, to where the bulk of musicians, and filmmakers and writers live in poverty. And furthermore, because they themselves don't do art - they are out of touch with the realities of the artist's workshop. So when these organizations press lawsuits... their words are hollow.

So, I believe that we have an obligation as artists to encourage imitation. Tell the young artist that he should relish imitating someone else's work. And, as far as is politically possible, we ought to sell work which contains elements of imitation.

This does not mean that you take someone else's work in it's original form, and sell copies of it. That's entirely unethical -especially since most creative people do live in poverty.