The revision of copyright protections is now necessary, because media artists of every variety have long since left Congressional intentions of cultural ownership in the rear view mirror. This, I believe, is as it should be. But, in doing so, today's artists are driving their sporty little art illegally. They can be pulled over and sent to debtor's prison because their only license is an artistic one.
Yet these vehicles of appropriation present no menace of any kind to the general population. The only supposed threat is to the unsatisfiable greed of an extreme minority of private cultural owners. The reason for today's repressive cultural traffic laws is based purely on economic control, and, as such, serves to keep many artists off roads they need to be exploring. The significant urge to incorporate found sound into contemporary music, for instance, is now in virtual gridlock - on the way to a drawbridge that's always up. We should be giving our artists a wide open freeway through an environment full of media influences, but this route is being aggressively denied by "art cops" working for the self-serving marketing system that has imposed itself on culture.
What am I driving at? The undeniable wisdom of letting artists - not business interests - determine what art will consist of. The need for various arts of appropriation should be obvious. Artists have always seen the entire world around them as both inspiration to act and as raw material to mould and remould. For most of this century, artists, like everyone else, have been subject to a growing media environment. Today, we are surrounded with canned ideas, images, and sounds. My television set told me that seventy to eighty percent of the population now gets most of their information about the world from their television set! Large increments of our daily perceptions are not supplied by the physical reality around us but by the media that saturates it. Both the content and the programming techniques of electronic media have inspired the current art trends of appropriation, but it's nothing new.
Any serious observer of modern music can cite a multitude of examples - from Buchanan and Goodman's humorous collages of song fragments in the fifties to today's canonisation of James Brown samples - wherein artists have incorporated the actual property of others into their own unique creations. The whole histories of folk music and the blues are typified by creative theft. Jazz and rock are full of this, too. In the visual arts, there is a long-standing tradition of found image collage, from Schwitters and Braque to Rauschenberg and Warhol. This is a twentieth century mode of artistic operation that is now nothing short of dramatic in its proliferation, in spite of all the marketplace laws designed to prohibit it.
It is important to note that this mode of operation has continued to grow in artistic relevance as its major source of inspiration - the media environment - has continued to grow. Appropriation isn't limited to any medium, and it doesn't fade away as mere styles do. Appropriation's major jump from visual work to audio work in recent years only underlines the emotional relevance of the technique. What's going on here? I believe it has to do with deep stuff like media saturation and the opportunity for self-defence against media coercion that appropriation engenders. It also has to do with the Surrealist/Dada concept of detournement. In modern terms, appropriation is often about culture jamming-capturing the corporately-controlled subjects of the one-way media barrage, reorganising them to be a comment upon themselves, and spitting them back into the barrage for cultural consideration. A sometimes nasty (but wholly appropriate) response to a society in decline and denial. At the very least, appropriators are claiming the right to create with mirrors. Corporate culture is trying to reach the end of this century maintaining their skewed view that there is something wrong with all this.
But, perceptually and philosophically, it is an uncomfortable wrenching of common sense to deny that once something hits the airwaves, it is literally in the public domain. The fact that the owners of culture and its material distribution are able to claim this isn't true is a tribute to their ability to restructure common sense for maximum profit.
But art is what artists do, and we can only hope for laws that recognise this. Just as the dictionary recognises new words - even slang - that come into common usage. Until then, we are stuck with copyright laws which were designed solely by publishing interests and cultural manufacturers who maintain virtually unopposed lobbyists in Congress to ensure that their present stranglehold on the reuse of culture will remain intact. These cultural representors claim to be upholding the interests of artists in the marketplace. And Congress - with no exposure to an alternative point of view - always accommodates them.
A more generous and enlightened approach to copyright law would have it prohibit straight-across bootlegging, provide cover version royalties, and practically nothing else. Virtually all the volumes of statutes which now go far beyond this are not only unnecessary, but counterproductive to the now common practice of piece meal appropriation in the creation of new work. The crucial difference between simply bootlegging entire works in order to profit from someone else's creativity and the creation of new work which incorporates elements of existing work for the referential or commentary effects thus produced must be made clear to lawmakers. The present "broad brush" of copyright law is acting to censor what artists want to do. Not a desirable role for government.
Culture is more than commerce. The law should begin to acknowledge the artistic domain of various creative techniques which may actually conflict with what others claim to be their economic domain. Art needs to acquire an equal footing with marketers in court. The question that must rise to the surface of legal consciousness now is: At what point in the process of found fragment appropriation does the new creation possess its own unique identity, which supersedes the sum of its parts, thus gaining its own right to legally exist?
The media and electronic publishing industry's argument that appropriation equals rip-off is truly irrelevant. Unlike bootlegging, appropriation in no way prevents an artist from profiting from his or her own work through every form of sale which would normally occur. Beyond that, it is only greed and opportunism which assumes that others' partial or fragmented use of that work - being no part of the original artist's efforts - should additionally profit that artist. It is simply unearned gravy, existing only because of another's efforts to begin with.
A revamping of copyright laws envisions a more free-wheeling and referentially unconstricted art world. This, of course, would be a lawyer's nightmare of lost work and layoffs. But for the culture at large, it would be a vast improvement. For instance: if you are making a movie and want to use a section of a song in the soundtrack, you wouldn't need to clear it and you wouldn't need to pay the artist. You would be free to put that fragment in your work whether it appears to be a favourable context to the publisher or the artist or not. However, if you wanted to use the entire song in your Movie - a complete self-contained creation by another - or put out a soundtrack album with the complete song on it, then you would need to clear it with the artist and pay royalties. The difference between referencing a fragment of a publicly available cultural artefact, and presenting that artefact as a complete and self-contained performance should be the defining guideline for artist profit.
In such a world, when an artist releases his or her work for public consumption, they would not only receive the benefit of public sales; they would also give up what now amounts to undeserved control over all forms of public use of that material. If they want to operate in the "public domain", those would be the consequences. To say that artists and their companies and their companies' lawyers would suffer some kind of devastating economic hardship by the loss of all this second-hand, uninitiated income from outside sources is no longer tolerable when our very process of cultural evolution is now so straight jacketed by opportunistic claims of ownership that it amounts to censorship. Art is not defined as a business. Let me repeat that: Art is not defined as a business. The reuse of culture should be encouraged, not inhibited and litigated.
Today, our entrenched copyright, publishing, and cultural property laws stand as a monument to private greed. They need to be brought, kicking and screaming, into our real world of modern capturing technology and find a comfortable accord with the artist's healthy and inevitable impulse to incorporate public influences.
Crosley Bendix.