The Disclaimer for using Andy Warhol's image from "About.com/MOMA"
I found the videos, especially “God Copy, Bad Copy” to be intriguing and most thought provoking. As a trained fine artist, I believe that the images I create are in fact products of my making and are therefore my intellectual property and thus need to be protected by law. I want my work to be protected; yet visual art especially has a long history of artists paying homage to previous generations’ artists. However, having stated this I am reminded by Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans and images of Marilyn Monroe among others. I find it very interesting that although Warhol seemingly thought nothing of using Campbell’s soup cans as imagery in his work, that his work is now copyrighted by both his estate and the Campbell’s soup company according to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), as stated by About.com.
As stated above artists throughout history have paid homage to past artists and styles, for centuries. It was once common practice to actually set up a canvas in a museum and literally copy the masterworks, line for line, stroke for stroke. This was seen as a way to learn how to paint, and was done literally for centuries. There are many paintings signed by the artist as “artist’s name ‘after’ master’s name”.
Copyright is such a complex issue, even for me. I want my images to be seen, yet am hesitant to put them up on the web, because they can be “stolen”; yet it is also seen as a form of flattery that an image has been repurposed. Therein lies the conundrum.
I also found it interesting that “Good Copy, Bad Copy” has listed in the end credits a copyright by CreativeCommons. Thus an expose of the copyright world has a copyright. Hmm.
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Hi Jolee, I must agree that once your images are placed online, they can not only be copied, but printed and sold. I have a lot of my material online but one think I should do is watermark my photgraph's and other content. It takes extra time but in the end its worth it, since I have such a large accumulation of work, I need to watermark them.
ReplyDeleteI understand paying homage to previous artist and dont exactly see it as a bad thing. Can you think of any ways for the modern artist to protect their work, prints, or projects?
We have to be more innovative nowadays lol. Im trynna think of ways myself.
Great observations. It is foolish for media companies to put their profit interests ahead of the cultural need to use and re-use cultural icons, images and symbols that we have used to define ourselves. Protecting artists need to make a living from their art is a given, and it's difficult for some media industries to take the moral high ground when it's part of their business practices to separate an artist from his art as cheaply as possible, sometimes with arrangements that make the artist a debtor with no means to get out of debt. Just sayin'
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