Dangerous Type: Arguments Against Copyright in the Visual Arts
Gus Longer is a J.D. candidate, 2021 at NYU School of Law.
Creativity breeds innovations. In turn, innovations benefit the creative individuals who birthed them, but more generally, they tend to generate positive effects on society as a whole — at least in theory. In fact, the widely accepted notion that innovations’ net effect on societal welfare is positive is a major justification for copyright law’s bestowal of exclusive rights and protections over creators’ inventions. By protecting creators, the theory goes, copyright law provides incentives to innovate, which ultimately benefits society at large. Notwithstanding the supposedly utilitarian virtues of copyright law, the means to that virtuous end involves bestowing creators with monopoly power, albeit fairly narrow in scope. In Why Art Does Not Need Copyright, NYU Law Professor Amy Adler rejects the idea that Americans are getting the benefit of our bargain in contexts where the monopolized creators are contemporary artists.
One of Adler’s major contentions is that when the utilitarian theory of copyright law is put alongside “the reality of the contemporary art market,” a “fundamental mismatch between the two” materializes.[1] To exemplify her point that art and copyright are incompatible, Adler starts with a case study surrounding “New Portraits,” a recent series of exhibitions by Richard Prince, who has “pushed the legal limits of artistic appropriation for decades” and been ensnared in related infringement litigation, including with respect to “New Portraits.” Arguing that “copying does not pose a threat to visual art,” Adler proceeds with a hypothetical involving the highly prized stencil work of Christopher Wool. Describing Wool’s artwork as easy to replicate, she contends that a “copy of Wool’s painting, no matter how convincing, would never be a market substitute for it” given the nature of modernity.[2] Next, Adler refers to Seth Price’s Dispersion, providing insight into the reality of contemporary artists’ distinctive process for creation. Dispersion portrays a pronounced movement in the art world, accelerated in the wake of constant technological change, from a systemic emphasis on new content to an unabashed embrace of iterative reproduction or repurposing of third-party content as well as works that similarly exude reference to the “originals.”
As recounted by Adler, Price’s work
serves as an explanation as to why contemporary artists are nearly always at
loggerheads with holders of copyright. As artistic practices are indebted to
decades, if not centuries, of prior practices and constellations of concepts, artists
are free to question and resist the strictures of institutionally legitimated ways
and means of creating, though such provocations involve the risk of losing
intelligibility qua art. Price
suggests that, when contemporary artists profiteer from a cultural “system that
depends on reproduction and distribution . . . [and] encourages contamination,
borrowing, stealing,” their works take on new artistic value with respect to their
critical implications about society’s systems of legitimation.[3]
It would stand to reason, says
Adler, that the application of copyright to contemporary art is not sensible.
Adler additionally contends that copyright fails to positively affect the livelihoods
of the vast majority of living artists and that, overall, its application to
contemporary artwork creates a net cost to artists and the public alike. As a
prominent account of copyright goes, copyright has as its aim the prevention of
market usurpation at the hands of unauthorized copies – its protections allow creators
of all stripes to retain their proper incentives to create, and the arts
generally thereby flourish and progress. And yet the rules of the game are
different for an art market that legitimates forms of creativity that accept
copying and curation as axiomatic. So how does the art market make sense of the
legitimate reproduction and distribution of aesthetic objects and cultural residua?
Adler isolates the art market’s mechanism for policing the valuation of works: authentication.
Properly understood, authentication has
a twofold nature: it signals that a work is “not a copy” and attests to the
true identity of the subject’s author.[4] It
is responsive to situations in which an artist contaminates, borrows, or steals
another artist’s “visual content (but not name),” and ensures against the
possibility of economic value being misappropriated through such copying.[5] As
authenticity is seen to drive the art market, Adler considers how copyright fails
to assist the very few artists at the top as well as their less acclaimed peers.
All artists rely upon first sales for their income. Unauthorized copies rarely enter
the picture, because most authentic works – despite headlines touting
record-breaking sales – often fail to have any resale value, and indeed
depreciate in value.[6]
For the sliver of established artists who have not only a resale market but
also the possibility of a market for derivative products, these sales are
“almost always trivial compared to the value of even one unique work.”[7] Thus
artists, practitioners, and the public are being barred from accessing and
utilizing creative works because of economic suppositions that no longer have a
basis in reality. Drawing upon the work of economist David
Galenson, Adler argues that an authenticity-centric conception of
the art market leads to the understanding that value “depends primarily on the
identity of the artist, rather than the aesthetics of the work . . . . [Thus]
stealing another artist’s visual content can never usurp her market power. An
artist who copies another’s work takes the original artist’s visual material
but does not take her brand (which would be forgery).”[8]
As Adler suggests,
copyright law is dangerous insofar as it leads to the impoverishment of
artists, art historians, curators, practitioners, and the public alike, and
thereby works in contravention of the IP clause of the Constitution, which
mandates progress in the useful arts and sciences (thereof, one might add). Adler’s
analysis of the current fair-use jurisprudence for aesthetic works is well
worth reading in its entirety. For the purposes of this blog, her final two
arguments about the dangers that Cariou
v. Prince[9]
presents for the public and for artists are especially poignant. Focusing on the Cariou fair-use
analysis’s new emphasis on aesthetic changes, Adler portrays Cariou as misaligned with the “thrust”
of contemporary artistic practices that, as outlined above, use “copying and
repetition to undermine the notion that art should be understood purely
visually.”[10] More
generally, Adler submits Cariou as evidence that, without guidance, courts
cannot be expected to recognize artistic progress. Adler closes this section by
calling attention to the most critical aspect of the decision for artists: it “further
blurred the boundary separating fair and unfair uses” by finding as a matter of
law that all but five works were transformative, without providing a clear
indication as to how to determine whether a use is transformative. In fact, as
Adler sees it, the decision only “invited more litigation,” “chilled creativity
in the art world,” and doubly harmed the public: not only do we lose access to
works that were never made for fear of running afoul of copyright, we also lose
access to existing works that but for copyright would have reached wider
circulation through exhibitions and art historical scholarship. [11]
Adler argues that the “costs of copyright law” are disquietingly
“borne privately with little fanfare or attention” by “those with the least
resources: ‘graduate students, junior faculty, and academics at institutions
that do not cover permissions costs, along with scholars and independent
curators, who only sometimes receive help from editors and institutions.’”[12] While
Adler does not view copyright protection as adverse with respect to realms of
creation where copying allows for the misappropriation of economic value, I
leave for others to assess whether that characteristic ought to be dispositive.
Like Adler, I also leave for others the feat of clearly articulating a new
copyright standard that could be applied to the context of contemporary art. In
the meantime, art-related copyright
disputes will continue to plague the federal judiciary as much as the art
community.
[1] Amy Adler, Why Art Does Not Need
Copyright, 86 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 313,
321 (2018).
[2] Id. at 344.
[3] Seth Price, Dispersion 5, Distributed Hist. (2002)
http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2016.pdf.
[4] Adler, supra note 1, at 331.
[5] Id. at
330.
[6] Id. at 333.
[7] Id. at 335.
[8] Id. at 349.
[9] Cariou v. Prince, 714
F.3d 694 (2d Cir. 2013).
[10] Adler, supra note 1, at 359.
[11] Id. at 361.
[12] Id. at 363 (quoting Patricia Aufderheide et al., Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use Among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report (2014)).
