Negativland art show in Los Angeles

Seminal culture jammers and master appropriationists Negativland have an art show hanging September 7 – 30 at Los Angeles’s La Luz de Jesus Gallery. “Our Favorite Things” is a retrospective of their visual collage output and opens with a rare musical performance on September 7. Hi-Fructose interviewed Negativland:

If you could design and set up your own ‘market’ for copyright clearing for works in all easily-replicated media, how would you do it? The goals would be to maximize utility to all parties, guarantee that works enter the public domain after a fixed period, certify originator as well as possibly ‘owner’, and should incentivize creators, re-creators, and consumers alike. Any ideas?

Don: Copyright laws should freely allow any reuse of existing work as long as a NEW work is created from them. Only the reproduction of pre-existing works in whole and unchanged should be prohibited without permission. Collage should be free to practice. (I can easily imagine a system like this gaining enough momentum that it would become the de-facto standard, but you would need an army of lawyers to prop the thing up.) It’s pretty easy to see whether something has been changed from its original form in a reuse or not.

Mark: Your questions are good “real politick” ones about the complexities surrounding these issues. The real world solutions you allude to will always be hopelessly and horribly compromised, and will never work very well due to the technologies we are stuck with. I guess I’m a pessimistic idealist, so I assume that what I would like to see will never occur in my lifetime. My slightly realistic advice to artists about intellectual property issues is “ignore the law and create good work.”

“Negativland: A Hi-Fructose Exclusive Interview with the Pioneering Culture Jammers”