Consider the cash made available to develop and foster new, up-coming artists by western democratic Governments. Economists have a technical term for the absolute amounts that actually make it into the pockets of these sculptors/painters/poets/etc (it’s actually an acronym) – SFA. Relative to the amount of money spent on self-promotion, ‘the Big Arts’ (Ballet and Opera), Public Servant wages and of course Health, Defence, Transport – it’s bugger-all.
There is an argument that it’s more efficient to fund Arts Hubs who then distribute the funds into the community on an ad-hoc basis. This assumes that these NGOs are efficient in themselves.
Sadly this may not be the case. Managed by well-meaning volunteers, established artists, community representatives, business representatives management committees are as much an intricate web of competing interests as any political party and often the interests of the actual artists and the general arts community can be well down the list of current priorities for a committee. These committees aren’t permanent even during the best of times when there’s lots of spare money floating around. Elections are held, new members elected, older members die of (both literally and figuratively) people lose interest or haven’t the time any more so whatever links these Hubs have with the arts community of an area are constantly being established, broken re-established, new links formed and old links lost.
What does remain constant is the source of funding – the taxpayer
So far there isn’t any real problem, arts funding, by the very nature of the parties involved is always going to be a mess. Muses don’t work Monday to Friday 9 – 5, the artists can be wilfully difficult and the so-called product can be shite to everybody except the person who has created it. Many taxpayers will have a look at what they have paid for and feel slightly cheated – so what ? You can’t quantify art and you can’t expect it to return anything that can be entered into a ledger.
What the hubs do do well, is pass on their reputation to the people they are supporting. For this reason patronage of the long-established (and probably better funded) establishments is highly sought after.
Here’s this weeks beef. What if there’s a young exciting artist, someone who has had a few successful solo exhibitions, (whether it’s painting, sculpture or ceramics is irrelevant) and is starting to make their own name around town. Largely because most people who have experienced the work agree that it’s high quality, it’s consistent and it’s good. Having this person involved with a community-based artistic institution would be mutually advantageous for all the parties involved. But how does one deal with a situation whereby an informal arrangement (that is there’s nothing in writing) is established to bring a few of the works into the building for exhibition and sale – that’s got to be good for the artist, they get to show their stuff off and make a few quid for themselves, and it has to be good for the institution they can prove to the funding body (the Government) that they are using the tax-dollars as they were intended, to foster the arts at grassroots level. The institution can claim they are ‘fostering and nurturing’
But they aren’t professional bureaucrats, you can say what you like about the public service, but they are uniquely able to allocate the scarce resources that are tax-revenues. How then do we view a situation where our previously-described up-and-comer has brought some stuff in and asked to help other artists by sharing techniques and designs ? this still sounds good and probably looks good on paper. Unless the artist who created the original works decides that they have cultural and personal attributes that can’t possibly be passed on to another person who hasn’t any common or shared story. Normally this would be the end of the game, full-time and the fat lady has left the stand. That project should be quite properly shelved or cancelled. But the institution has already told some kids/new artists that they could come in and learn and decide to continue anyhow, they still have the work on show and simply arrange for the new people to copy the ‘style’
Isn’t this an infringement of the original artist’s copyright ? It’s pretty hard for anyone to separate form and content, both are united to create a style. An outright copy is a pretty obvious theft adopting someone else’s style is more subtle.
While record companies will seek and obtain millions of units of currency when they detect the theft of a few bytes of one of their songs (just because they had almost no role in the creation of the original work is deemed irrelevant by these big business entities) What redress does this painter/sculptor/ceramicist have – probably nothing, unless they can hire their own lawyer and pursue their own redress in the courts. Then it will become, most likely, a political question. If someone along the food-chain thinks that it’s interests will be best served by settling out of any court then it will be, if not then it will become a fight between who has the deepest pockets and the most time up their sleeves. But luckily in a western democracy there are regular elections and usually members of parliaments become accustomed to their positions as do the elected members of NGO management committees. If we can accept that the skill and talent that goes into developing an individuals style, that the many hours of practice and sacrifice an individual makes to establish a style is worth protecting then we may have established the merit of a genuine copyright protection for artists rather than the protection of the profits of major economic entities.
The whole copyright issue has been clouded and obfuscated by the Hollywood studios and the music labels. rarely are individual artists involved – but they should be !
By the way if you think downloading music off the internet is another form of theft, then you have a different opinion to people like Elton John and Paul McCartney. It’s only the record companies and Hollywood studios who will benefit from having you worried about getting your connection severed because of a download or two, there’s no evidence that record sales have declined at the same time as the use of the internet is increasing and I’m pretty sure that the people who actually wrote the scripts/songs don’t get much of a cut of the (now) multi-million dollar fines imposed on illegal downloaders
Further reading, and, and, and, and finally there’s the $22,500 per song