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Whose Art is It Anyway? I’ve just come back from a major exhibition of Rogier van der Weyden celebrating the relaunch of Leuven Museum. Actually, if one’s going to be nitpicky, Rogier van der Weyden 1400-1464: Master of Passions (until 6 December) is not strictly a Rogier exhibition, since it includes only eight authenticated paintings by him. The other 75 works in the show are mainly by copyists and followers – some, to my eyes, as exquisite as those of the master. Eat your heart out, Glen Brown. Postmodernism may think it invented plagiarism, but it’s got nothing on the 15th century. Rogier’s paintings were plagiarised wholesale while the paint was still wet, shamelessly picked over for those signature touches – the flying loincloths, buckle-kneed Virgins and weeping angels – that gave them their emotional charge. Whole tracts of landscape, complete with staffage, reappeared in the back of other people’s paintings. Was he bothered? No; he was coining it anyway. It was flattering to him, and instructive to others: copying, after all, is how artists learn. Then along came multiples, and the trouble started. D¸rer – himself no slouch when it came to ripping off Rogierian drapery – was first off the blocks with threats of confiscation and even GBH against those ìstrangers to workî who pirated his prints. But unlike writers, who won copyright protection under English law in 1710, artists didn’t catch up until 1882 – just in time for the arrival of the runaway multiple, photographic reproduction. Now, as all art publishers know to their cost, DACS must be paid their hundreds of pounds of flesh before a reproduction of an artwork appears in print, unless the artist has been dead 70 years. Worse, money-grubbing museums and picture libraries have got in on the act by cleverly claiming copyright on photographs of works whose authors may have been dead for seventy times seven years. Who gets the money? Apart from museums, which admittedly need it, most of it goes to the rich estates of famous artists whose descendants would sell their own grandfather - as the Picasso family did, to their undying shame, when they licensed Citroen to affix his signature to the back of a people carrier. A people carrier! Beside this, signing napkins is a peccadillo. But as ever, the biggest winners in this game are lawyers, who have really hit the jackpot since the introduction of the hazy notion of ‘intellectual property’ (IP). Issues of old-fashioned copying can be quickly settled, but legal actions over ideas can run and run. These days, what’s more, they needn’t even involve the artist. The octogenarian president of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, is currently claiming ‘intellectual rights’ over the 49m socialist realist sculpture of a resurgent Africa recently erected in Dakar. The work of 50 North Koreans bronze-casters – the account I read didn’t mention the artist - it was the president’s idea to divert £17m of his country’s non-existent GDP to pay for it, so he feels entitled to 35% of the resultant tourist revenues. One American analyst conceded that ìdespite being a boondoggle, it could make a heck of a first impressionî on new arrivals – in the same way, I suppose, as Gateshead’s very own 20m boondoggle or indeed the pyramids, which Egypt has now decided to copyright. The country’s Supreme Council of Antiquities got the hump last year after discovering that the pyramid-shaped Luxor hotel in Las Vegas attracts more visitors than the genuine articles. Well, the pharaohs had dancing girls but they didn’t think of slots. Artistic pride is nothing to the pride of a nation in its tourism figures, but it’s still good business for copyright lawyers. In 2007 Santiago Calatrava sued the city council of Bilbao for ‘moral damage’ after a walkway was added to his Zubizuri Bridge; last summer, following two years of legal wrangling, the judge awarded him damages of 30,000 Euros. Calatrava, who defines architecture as ìa large sculpture that people can enterî, was apparently unconcerned that for people wishing to cross the river on foot, his bridge represented a large sculpture they couldn’t. In the scales of justice, the artist’s moral and intellectual rights outweighed pedestrian rights of way. Sod pedestrians! Let them swim. But the judge in the case – a veritable Solomon of Salamanca – miraculously contrived to accommodate all parties. The city was spared the 3m Euro compensation originally demanded by the artist, and the walkway stayed. Now the city council is appealing to a higher court, so even the lawyers will be happy. Next to issues of IP theft and moral damage, good old-fashioned copying looks corny. When the story broke a few years ago that the figures in Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler had been lifted straight out of an illustrators’ manual, it was hardly news; after all, he was only following in a pattern-book tradition well established in Van der Weyden’s day. The insistence on the uniqueness of an artist’s imagery is a pathetic fallacy of the Romantic era which, like DACs, has only ever enriched already rich artists. Work by unknown artists has no rarity value. But the fallacy does, it’s true, provide artistic nobodies with the chance to rake back a quid or two from the big names. In contemporary art, copying by fellow artists is a non-issue – the real issue is corporate theft of artistic capital. Gillian Wearing was quite right to complain that the use of her signs idea in ads for Volkswagen and Levi Jeans ìstops me doing my work because people think I’m working for an advertising agencyî, as was Andy Goldsworthy to prosecute Habitat for stealing his snowball idea to advertise chairs. Conceptual art is particularly vulnerable to this sort of abuse, as ideas in themselves cannot be copyrighted. Of course there’s an argument for saying that once an idea or an image is out in the world it belongs to everyone; but what belongs to everyone should then be protected from commercial hijack. The corruption of artistic meaning by advertisers is as repugnant as the appropriation of common language by corporations. Who gave Starbucks the right to trademark the phrase ‘Shared Planet’? Things have got a lot more complicated since Millais’s Bubbles was turned into an ad for Pears Soap. The issues here are not aesthetic, they’re moral, and ought to be covered by the ‘moral rights’ legislation now incorporated into UK law, which includes a right of ‘integrity’ enabling authors to object to the derogatory treatment of their work. Needless to say, no sooner were these rights enshrined in law than clauses appeared in publishing contracts signing them away. No wonder Pamela Anderson, whose curves inspired Virgin Cola’s ‘Pammy’ bottle, was caught last year in a long lens pap shot with her nose in a copy of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity. A girl needs to protect her assets these days. But what’s this? A full-page ad for Boeing in The Spectator featuring that iconic boondoggle, The Angel of the North. Has Gormley given it his blessing, having perhaps decided to sell his integrity in his own lifetime rather than let his grandchildren reap all the profits? Or is Gateshead Council claiming intellectual property rights? This calls for a landmark ruling. Watch this space. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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