Ars gratia artis, pecunium propter Deum *
On a day when the federal attorney-general defended bigotry as a right (though we don't actually have a Bill of Rights), hot on the heels of the far-right abominable Tony Abbott announcing that there will be no investigation of a murder committed in the Manus Island concentration camp, it would have been easy to fail to notice this story from the New York Times about auction houses fighting a bill that would give visual artists royalties from the resale of their work.
However, this intrigued me in the light of the information that Glenn Brown, the Turner Prize nominee who ripped off a Chris Foss cover (reportedly after Foss, exhausted while working on A.I., gave permission), did not receive a share of the $5.7M paid when the picture was resold... but unfortunately (and, I would argue, much more unfairly), neither (AFAIK) did Foss.
Let me make it clear that I don't pretend to be an expert on the visual arts (not including film, a subject on which I have occasionally pretended to be something of an expert), and that when I call myself a museum junkie, I'm mainly talking about science and natural history museums. I admit that I was stunned when I learned that Oscar-winner Steve McQueen had previously won the Turner Prize, which I've long regarded as art's equivalent of the Ig Nobel (not that I always agree with the Oscars - and as I haven't yet seen Twelve Years a Slave, I can't comment on that particular award). And I admit that I have no proof that the exorbitant prices sometimes paid for modern art (the $5.7M for the Glenn Brown 'homage' is a pittance compared to the $58.4M paid for a Jeff Koons sculpture of a balloon animal) are primarily a form of money-laundering or tax evasion seasoned with potlatch. And if the buyers are spending their own money, they have as much right to do so as anti-Turner protestors had to burn a million pounds, though I have to wonder which of them made the worst investment. (I'm fairly sure that whoever bought the Glenn Brown could, for a comparable sum, have bought an entire building in Perth that has been more than competently decorated with a homage to, among others, Vaughn Bode or Brian Froud). And while I'm not entirely convinced by Glendon Mellow's argument about appropriation as fine art, I agree that all artists "borrow" from other artists as well as from nature.
All that aside, I'm very much in favour of the move to give visual artists royalties from the resale of their work - if the sale is over a certain amount, and if the artist is still alive (my views on extending copyright for decades after an artist's death, mainly for the benefit of the Disney corporation, are another matter, maybe for another post).
On a not unrelated note,
lilysea and I went to Sculpture by the Sea last week. It does feature some fine pieces, some of which comment on the way we're polluting the ocean, and only one or two of which look as though the ocean threw them back. It even has some where you can see a link between the blurb in the catalogue and the piece of artwork, sometimes to the degree that you can tell what it's trying to say before you read said blurb. Admittedly, there are other quite impressive objets d'art where the blurb was either very poorly translated from the Japanese or written by the Postmodernism Generator.
And, of course, there is the giant inflated goon bag, an enormous piece of flotsam which I fear will win the people's choice award. After all, last year, 53.49% of Australians voted for another worthless giant gasbag to represent this country, and some of them still haven't realized the joke is on all of us.
* Google Translate wouldn't provide the Latin for "for fuck's sake". Sorry.
However, this intrigued me in the light of the information that Glenn Brown, the Turner Prize nominee who ripped off a Chris Foss cover (reportedly after Foss, exhausted while working on A.I., gave permission), did not receive a share of the $5.7M paid when the picture was resold... but unfortunately (and, I would argue, much more unfairly), neither (AFAIK) did Foss.
Let me make it clear that I don't pretend to be an expert on the visual arts (not including film, a subject on which I have occasionally pretended to be something of an expert), and that when I call myself a museum junkie, I'm mainly talking about science and natural history museums. I admit that I was stunned when I learned that Oscar-winner Steve McQueen had previously won the Turner Prize, which I've long regarded as art's equivalent of the Ig Nobel (not that I always agree with the Oscars - and as I haven't yet seen Twelve Years a Slave, I can't comment on that particular award). And I admit that I have no proof that the exorbitant prices sometimes paid for modern art (the $5.7M for the Glenn Brown 'homage' is a pittance compared to the $58.4M paid for a Jeff Koons sculpture of a balloon animal) are primarily a form of money-laundering or tax evasion seasoned with potlatch. And if the buyers are spending their own money, they have as much right to do so as anti-Turner protestors had to burn a million pounds, though I have to wonder which of them made the worst investment. (I'm fairly sure that whoever bought the Glenn Brown could, for a comparable sum, have bought an entire building in Perth that has been more than competently decorated with a homage to, among others, Vaughn Bode or Brian Froud). And while I'm not entirely convinced by Glendon Mellow's argument about appropriation as fine art, I agree that all artists "borrow" from other artists as well as from nature.
All that aside, I'm very much in favour of the move to give visual artists royalties from the resale of their work - if the sale is over a certain amount, and if the artist is still alive (my views on extending copyright for decades after an artist's death, mainly for the benefit of the Disney corporation, are another matter, maybe for another post).
On a not unrelated note,
lilysea and I went to Sculpture by the Sea last week. It does feature some fine pieces, some of which comment on the way we're polluting the ocean, and only one or two of which look as though the ocean threw them back. It even has some where you can see a link between the blurb in the catalogue and the piece of artwork, sometimes to the degree that you can tell what it's trying to say before you read said blurb. Admittedly, there are other quite impressive objets d'art where the blurb was either very poorly translated from the Japanese or written by the Postmodernism Generator.
And, of course, there is the giant inflated goon bag, an enormous piece of flotsam which I fear will win the people's choice award. After all, last year, 53.49% of Australians voted for another worthless giant gasbag to represent this country, and some of them still haven't realized the joke is on all of us.
* Google Translate wouldn't provide the Latin for "for fuck's sake". Sorry.