Re: "art" & money, was: amanda palmer

[Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@gmail.com>]

Hey guys!
Interesting points everybody.

I would like to make two small points here, but in my opinion, very important.

1.
We all hear that they say "an artist has the right to decide what people do with his creation".
However, I would challenge this statement and here's how.

A person can make a decision solely by himself ONLY if that decision affects only him. As soon as the decision
affects not only him, but someone else too, it would be just to decide together with the affected party. Moreover, this approach should not be simplistic, meaning that in each particular case you have to analyze to what degree the decision would influence all sides and thus give the more affected side
more power in the making of a decision.

In case of music very often the situation will be that it affects the musician indirectly, while the license that dictates what the public can or cannot do
with the music affects everybody directly.

And so musician cannot be the only one who decides what everybody should do with his music - musician and the public should decide on this together, with
the public having a louder voice in the making of such a decision.
Saying that the artist as the "creator" should have more power to decide, means elevating the personality of the artist above everybody else, attempting
to say that being an artist means being the benefactor of society and that society is now in debt to all artists. I personally do not believe this is true.

I also do not believe that there can be a solid line dividing people into artists and mere consumers. This is hardly the case.

2.
And in conclusion I would also like to point out that all these copyright discussions heavily concentrate on the economic side of things, as if the world
of art in all its complexity does not matter and the only significant part of creativity is how much money people get. But this is not just simplistic, this
is actually completely wrong. Art is much more than its economical side of things, the side which was never uniform throughout the history and which differs even today in many countries drastically.

So in these discussions one must also weight the value of economics in art versus other factors, such as spiritual value of art and community value of art at the very least.

Hope this small insight is useful in spawning an intelligent and in-depth discussion of this most interesting matter.

Louigi Verona.
http://www.louigiverona.ru