CHArt Twenty-First Annual Conference

Jacob Lillemose and Mogens Jacobsen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Do you copy? - Art and questions of digital rights

Issues of copyright have been an inherent part of modern art since its very beginning. Manet plagiarized works by Goya, Duchamp put a moustache on Mona Lisa, and Warhol used the brands of consumer culture as his motifs. With the digitization of art these issues are raised anew. Today, copying, distribution, and sharing of artistic material is much more comprehensive and easier than ever before. P2p services, open source networks and pirate copies are challenging our traditional concepts of copyright, and so is art.

On one hand, artists such as Cornelia Solfrank, Kingdom of Piracy, 01.org and textz.com question how far art can stretch the law and the extent to which the law should control artistic production. On the other, a large number of artists are also explicitly protecting their works against copyright by releasing them under a variety of alternative licenses (such as Copyleft and Creative Commons), arguing that ‘information wants to be free’ and that art is the means to fight for this freedom. The relationship of digital art with the law can thus be summarised as follows: art should not be illegal but it should not necessarily be completely legal either. This presentation will address this paradox and call for questions about legality, rights, democracy, ethics and tactics in this information society to be readdressed.

Jacob Lillemose will give a historical and theoretical perspective on the aesthetic issues outlined above, and Mogens Jacobsen will talk about his installation ’Crime Scene’ and the legal issues involved in it.

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