By Matthew Guerrieri
I’ll concur up front with Lessig’s underlying argumentative framework: that copyright law, in its current state, is onerous and impractical, and that using the courts to determine IP licensing guidelines is ham-fisted and counterproductive.
There were two things, though, that I kept thinking while reading the book. They’re kind of related. The first has to do with Lessig’s whole idea that we need to decriminalize read/write culture–remixing, amateur mash-ups, &c.–because otherwise we’re branding creative activity as criminal. The parade of Western artistic activity (especially in the last century) has included no small number of outlaws and transgressors. Make certain activity legal–even activity that, in a sane world, should be legal–and there’s no shortage of artists (or artistic kids) who will simply seek out another illegal channel. Lessig’s interviewed artists all struck me as either unusually earnest or slightly disingenuous; the aesthetic frisson of rule-breaking is a constant in artistic history. (Do you think Shepard Fairey isn’t at least slightly pleased that Boston cops keep giving him a hard time?)
This might just seem like aesthetic posturing at the margins, but it’s salient to the other thing I kept thinking. If you look at the history of mass media–particularly since World War II, when mass media became lucrative enough to attract people more interested in profit than content–the most artistically rich and rewarding content has come during what might be called “nobody knows anything” periods, when technology and tastes changed too fast for corporate structure to keep up: rock-and-roll in the late 50s/early 60s, Hollywood in the late 60s/early 70s, pop music in the late 80s/early 90s (hip-hop and grunge), and so forth. If Lessig is right that hybrid economies–which leverage the community aspects of internet activity–are starting to emerge as workable corporate models, my instinct is that it signals the end of the current internet’s “nobody knows anything” phase, and online culture is about to get a lot more corporatized. Lessig uses Lucasfilm’s attempt to leverage community–accompanied by draconian licensing terms–as an example of a corporation that doesn’t “get it,” but who’s to say that, in fact, Lucasfilm doesn’t actually understand it all too well? “Star Wars” was the gateway from the nobody-knows-anything New Hollywood to the corporatized Hollywood of the 80s, after all.
As Lessig extolled each example of a hybrid economy (none of which, by the way and as far as I can tell, actually pay their content creators anything), what I kept wondering was not what a widespread network of such hybrids would look like, but instead at what point that corporatization would trigger a rebellion, and what form that rebellion would take. To use Lessig’s categories: my gut feeling is that, the more commerce thrives in Web 2.0, the more art will migrate to Web 3.0, whatever that might be. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure the RIAA won’t like it.
Oh, one more thing, in re: page 95–I’ve listened to Schoenberg pieces a hundred times. Leck’ mich, Lessig!
Really interesting point re: “Is criminalization really so bad?” I would not have thought to go there, but I appreciate the argument you make for keeping things a little unsafe. Creativity and problem solving are related, after all, and there’s nothing worse than sterile art!
Which leads me to concur slightly with an implication of your other criticism: I’m almost afraid to raise aesthetic complaints about the kind of “remix” creativity that Lessig cites because he seems to lash out at such criticisms as reactionary, but it does seem too “easy” — the creation of collages with little or no original content. And if you’re not using any original material, then the tone of your work is limited to commentary on whatever content you’re appropriating.
You’re right about the whole question of aesthetic complaints—maybe one way to approach it is not how the most creative person in the community approaches the technology, but whether the technology sparks more creativity in the average person. (I mean, really creative people will make compelling art no matter what the process.) I’ve been thinking about the easiness of remixing all day, and I think I’ll have to unpack it another post. But I think it goes even beyond the commentary aspect: there’s a certain inverse relationship between the “easiness” of remix/recreation and the shallowness of the result—it’s almost as if, the more user-friendly the technology, the less room there is for the user to be creative.
Something else I’ve not quite gotten my mind around yet is the implications of the fact that all of the remixing art Lessig is referring to is almost exclusively conceptual in nature….
I think we make an enormous mistake by framing the issue of remixing with subjective terms that deem whether the process results in good, worthy art, and whether the remix was easy to create. This stings of the kind of artistic elitism that claims that pop tunes are mere drivel, when in fact we would probably all agree that just as with much classical repertoire, there is drivel and there is excellence, and that whether or not something is easy to create is an irrelevant jab. It’s actually much harder than it may appear to write a compelling pop tune.
We need a perch perspective to grasp the challenges of altering how we perceive the issues of copyright and of art. The latter, to me, is far simpler: it is not for us, or anyone else, to proclaim whether or not something is worthy. In my view, art always has worth, if only to its creator. It should not be defined by its worth to others. Whether others resonate with it or not is secondary to the fact that it exists.
Getting our knickers in a knot over whether a remixed creation has artistic merit, or whether it sparks greater creativity in lay people, is immaterial to the main issue at hand: the new paradigm of the digital age. We all recognize that the horses have fled the barn long before anyone figured out how to shut the damn door. So be it. While I have a hard time wrapping my little brain around some of Mr. Lessig’s positions, one that I do agree with completely is that the horses ain’t coming back: technology is not rescinded once it’s released to our ill-prepared species. It’s used for good and for evil and for everything in between. We have no choice but to reconstruct how creators will now seek remuneration for their work. But whether the work is good or easy to make, has nothing to do with the quest for a new, fair paradigm.
I’m writing to address this idea that the absence of “original material” relegates the final product to “commentary.”
I don’t think that Joseph Cornell’s boxes were simply commentary on their contents, any more than I think that the compact one-song cut’n’paste reworkings of artists like underground hip-hop producer Y?arcka (check out his Appreciation SP collection, via myspace.com/youngarchitect, in which he takes songs by Sly Stone, Fela and the Jackson 5, just to name a few, and slices them into new-sounding works) are commentary. Please give them a listen, and experience how a smart producer can take an existing work and create something that, despite the familiarity of the source material, has the special spark of a new listening experience.
In the contemporary creative realm that Lessig is talking about, I’m not sure there’s much difference between an innovative reworking of existing source material (a remix, as it were) and what in the past would have been called a cover version. A truly successful remix is a cover version, in which the remixer’s personality and interpretation make an impact on the pre-existing cultural artifact.
In that way, all covers and remixes are a form of commentary (though I’m emphasizing that they’re not “limited to commentary”). In the work by Y?arcka I mention above, he is, in essence, commenting on the original material. For example, his remixes tend to focus on the supporting instrumentalists and back-up singers, sort of like he’s rooting for the figures in the background. The way his mixes re-focus the listener’s attention to previously unassuming aspects of the original material bring to mind how a cover by Lyle Lovett of “Stand By Your Man” changes the meaning of the song purely through context and intonation. (That’s the lesson of cultural literacy that I think Lessig’s getting at, especially in his coverage of that media-learning effort in Houston.)
And while on the subject of commentary, one thing that Lessig begins to touch on, but doesn’t take the time to explore, is how lack of clarity in “fair use” has affected commentary. In academic criticism of comics, just to use one example, scholars are stymied in their research, because they cannot often get permission to reproduce panels to support the arguments in their papers.
“if you’re not using any original material, then the tone of your work is limited to commentary on whatever content you’re appropriating.”
Speaking as a fan of Joseph Cornell and as a composer who has used sampled material in my own music, it may surprise some of you that I have found the use of sampled material – i.e. a portion of another person’s recording dropped into my own mixes – to be a creative “dead end.”
Various legal and financial constraints I encountered during one project led me to try recreating the material I had planned to sample – and the results were revelatory. To recreate the sample in question – a recording of a blues singer from 1936 – I invited a vocalist to sing the song. I took just his vocal track and – after doing a fair amount of research – worked to degrade, compress, and rerecord (even going so far as to retrack this newly recorded vocal playing through a large paper one ala a Victorola) his voice until I ended up with something close to an early 30’s recording. You end up with something far more surreal and far more evocative with this process.
And yes, it’s a lot more work. I’m not saying work equals quality but…sometimes you get what you give.
I hear so many Y?arcka’s these days (Wow! He uses Sly Stone, Fela AND the Jackson 5???) – and I am sorry that sounds glib but I don’t know how else to put it. But I can’t really name you someone creating visual work that comes close to Cornell’s boxes. His work is truly special, and worthy of a better analogy to 20th and 21st century music.
Molly adds: Hey, Chris. Your experiences make an important cautionary statement. In most of Remix, however, Lessig is pointing to the kind of cultural commentary that is really only possible by playing off of original source material–say, a commentary on FOX news. That just wouldn’t work without the original material.