Andy Warhol was the innovator of Pop Art. He took everyday mundane subjects -- the graphic art of products and brands -- and made them art objects in and of themselves, as with the Cambell's Soup can art images he made beginning in the early 1960s. He also took stars in the popular culture -- Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe -- and made iconic images.
One of Warhol's Cambell Soup Can images, right, sold at Christie's last spring for $11.7 million. The soup images are part of our artistic heritage, our cultural memory, our graphic visual product structures. Warhola's images are more referential, perhaps, than the product images themself, because they are purified, enhanced and appreciated off-the-shelf.
What is happening, though, to art now and who owns it and can keep it contained in terms of traditional copyrights? If you want to try to find what art the Andy Warhol Museum might carry, you are out of luck if you search the museum's web site. A myspace blogger, JeDonnea, took photographs from the museum and posted them on her site, one of which is below, right.
For the myspace site, the copyright holder is myspace. Does this mean that myspacers lose all rights to their images if posted on myspace?
Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig is attempting to make sense of all of the digital rights and copyrights needed in the newer structures and formats. The new Creative Commons copyrights are intended to make the structures easier. A very interesting post and commentary on the free economy and the for-pay economy is on Lessig's blog this week, on the economies of culture.
The digital online space is an entirely different way of appreciating, sharing and enjoying art and how ownerships are defined and contained, monitored and protected will be one of the interesting areas of study. The sands are shifting daily. The issues of copyrights and functional business models for sites like YouTube and MySpace are being debated. Free creative content and the issues and trying to generate revenue from them are topics of articles in CNet and Newsweek this week: Is You Tube a Flash in the Pan, Analysts Don't Like YouTube's Chances, and Battling over YouTube. Blogger Yeuda puts U.S. Copyright code to verse.
The economics of artistic and cultural production...fair use, grey areas in the digital realm....
Photos: top left, top right, bottom right,
Love the Campbell Soup Can! Just for fun check out my bead art created with Recycled Wine bottle glass. Today recycle is as important as the art itself. Your blog is wonderful. Rowena Tank, Prescott, Arizona
http://rowenablog.typepad.com/rowena_bead_and_fiber/
Posted by: Rowena Tank | April 27, 2007 at 09:04 AM