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Don't Share It, Delete It!

Guest post by: Herb Gilliland

Article Overview: Why bother producing content in America? It will just end up in the bargain bin.

Don't Share It, Delete It!

Why bother producing content in America? It will just end up in the bargain bin. If you think that someone may give you a job because of that great novel you wrote: think again. Your novel means nothing if it's not on the New York Times Bestseller List. And of course those lucky authors who do make it there will tell you just that. Business, despite its veneer of social collaboration, is actually just a big paper shredder shredding everyone's documents. Let's be honest: no one in industry works collaboratively inside the institution unless it's a University, and only then in the Art department or in a trans-disciplinary sense. I'm not looking to the geeky engineers or the business majors when it comes to revolutionizing art and commodity.

We lose it all to the black hole of corporate ownership. It's one thing to lose your estate to an attorney, or watch your funds disappear down the money market toilet bowl, but artists have been dealing with their loss of ownership since the beginning. We all know that Robert Johnson created Rock-n-Roll (or do we?) but very few of the recordings of his work were ever technically his. Artists want their voices heard: studios want to expand their vault. Worse: artistic estates. The Jimi Hendrix Estate sued a fellow student in one of my classes for $100,000 because he mashed Hendrix solos under what he contends as "fair use" (he said you couldn't even tell it was Jimi anymore). The defense lawyers for the Hendrix estate eradicated his album from indy music stores on the notion that he had unlawfully used Hendrix as a marketing point. His album was, of course, a tribute.

Art-commodity is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the argument for it suggests that art-commodity provides insurance of art as a profession. The idea that art is valuable, and that it can be sold, and that its creator benefits, is not new. The history of art in Europe and abroad is also the history of art-commodity. (Thus, all those stories about international art thieves.) At the same time, the commodification of art becomes the very thing that broadsides young and underground artists, and slows their progress toward success and acceptance in the art world.

When we speak of art, or of craft, we are speaking of an ancient, common human experience. Our ancestors made clay pots which they imbued with special symbols for a wide range of purposes. This was done with a basic necessity in mind (survival), but onto that modern industry has attached a number of systems which were designed, initially, to enable artists to avoid copycats, knockoffs and the devaluation of their artistic identity. This is all added in many layers on top of the clay pots we originally made. Slap a "Martha Stewart" brand logo on it and it suddenly becomes something different.

I'm not the first person to bring this up by any means: you may wish to read a few great books on the subject which I highly recommend.

They are:

• Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
• Simulations by Jean Baudrillard
• Soft Subversions by Felix Guattari
• T.A.Z by Hakim Bey
• The Reproduction of Daily Life by Fredy Perlman
• For those interested in challenging the authorities that control artists and enable commodification of human experience:
• Against the Megamachine
• An@rchitext: Voices from the Global Digital Resistance
• Economising Culture
• Molecular Invasion by Critical Art Ensemble
• Electronic Civil Disobedience by C.A.E.
• Pirate Utopias by Peter Langborn Wilson
• All available from Autonomedia

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Article Tags: artist, artist rights, artistic, bargain bin, copyright, copyrights, critical art ensemble, hakim bey, jean baudrillard, music sharing, RIAA, sharing, situationalists, video sharing, youtube



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