o p e n content

One of the main advantages to an open content approach is that it makes creation less about an individual monetary goal and more about expanding ideas to achieve a better, collective final product. Restricting rights results in isolation and fear, which ultimately limits the potential for creative consumption. Copyright law’s legal sanctions and labeling the reuse of material as immoral suppresses creative expression as artists struggle to create something entirely original. It prevents knowledge from building to its full ability. I have heard that humans, as a species, have succeeded in ways that other animals have not because we teach what we have learned to each other, allowing our ideas to be used, expanded on, and applied to a variety of environments and contexts. Furthermore, the use of others’ ideas and materials is inevitable, but when it is moralized against it becomes dangerous to admit. Less people get influential credit this way than if it was acceptable to appropriate and commonplace to think about where one gets his/her ideas rather than focusing on the independently innovative self. A slight transmutation of Jim Warren’s statement concerning software, that when it “is so inexpensive that it’s easier to pay for it then to duplicate it, then it won’t be ‘stolen,’” can be applied to creative works. When artists (and furthermore the people who represent them) become less concerned with profit and ‘originality’ and creative monopoly, the use of their work will no longer be considered theft.

On the other hand, while open content has great potential for developing creative thought it also possesses a danger of promoting stagnancy and rereregurgitation of the same ideas rather than remixing and expanding on these ideas. I think because of this there needs to be a reconfiguration of the whole system, where artists place themselves within this system, and what is valued within the artistic subculture. This probably means a separation from galleries and the traditional money-making outlets for artists, so that respect for the individual artist’s creativity is retained while allowing that creativity to be shared property. The internet provides a productive setting fir exposure, collaboration, and the gathering of free artistic material. Many artists are currently using it for this purpose but it is important that the old system does not get internalized within this digital space as it is in the mainstream economy.

Isabel Samaras is a good example of an artist who blatantly appropriates well-known images -- like many artists she remixes scenes from art history but she tends to replace the figures with ones from television. Aside from her more obvious stance about the omnipresent role of mass media I think her choice is interesting in that it allows for a discussion on what forms of art are allowed to be appropriated and what are not, based soley on if something happens to have copyright, which is determined by the time, place, and culture the work was created in. Before this class, I never thought of my own work in the same genre as appropriative work or remix but I've found that this is exactly what forms my process -- I take everything that surrounds me, including compositions, characters, patterns, images, etc. from past and present works of art and put it through my own filter, which is how I think I've attempted to communicate with others through individual experience.