How much should an artist get paid for its work? Can’t settle that, ok, what is an art item then? A unique, or an almost impossible to repeat, happening; a singularity; then, yes, it’s possible to copy it but not make it happen as it happened. Not even the artist itself can’t have the same revelation twice, only recoils or follow-ups.

Then one cannot institutionalize artist payment (well-define a price for an art item), that’s forcing the artist to transform in a production line. That’s how most of the art is now: a production line, well, producing mostly profits for those having nothing to do with arts. Sometimes an artist got richer than Boltzmann; and that makes me wonder also. When that happened, in my view, an artist became a little wheel in a bullshit-selling industry; nothing to do with art anymore.

An art item cannot be verified if it’s art or not, a science/engineering item can, it’s almost its definition, it’s verifiable. I believe that one can establish/institutionalize a price for what is verifiable, which means repeatable, which means socially meaningful, which means significant to any human. For an art item, the price can be established by a group of humans who consider it significant but that price remains valid only for that group, at the society’s scale, the real price of art scales to zero.

The verifiability is the only basis for building trust in the humanist society. It follows that a humanist society should not be concerned at the institutional level with the artist’s condition. That’s a condition in which any human can happen at times nothing can anticipate, or maybe, for some, it never happens, without degrading their human status. In a humanist society, an artist is somebody who happens to create something beside the verifiable things one has to do in a society. That’s a human’s individual need anyway: the need to express, to symbolize, to enrich or twist or recheck the verifiable reality or announce a newly discovered but unverifiable reality. That (the artist’s condition) comes with being a human, not with a payment established by the society as a whole.

The artist’s condition, being unverifiable by definition, cannot be trusted socially, although various groups can always appreciate or have an intuition of it and pay for that, then promote it and sell it for profit. The usual notion of art in the current society is just a convoluted way for tapping into the public money: when an art item becomes so expensive no one hopes to resell it, guess what, a museum buys it with public money so you’re doomed to repay it one last time; in the process, some people made their living off your (ancestor’s) back. Over time one gets to learn about them in the school manuals and call it culture. I’m pretty sure the real heroes remained anonymous, perhaps Internet will change that.

The copyright for artwork is as meaningless as the copyright for work paid by the public. Copyright is nothing more than a tool in some profit making industry, and, as long as this concept exists, there should also be a copyleft one can use to protect oneself from it (Creative commons is a more refined approach) .

If you’re using your copyright to buy an SUV from your book’s selling, that’s a guarantee you’re dimming yourself to the point of extinction from humanity’s memory. Anyway, if you were doing that, I’m pretty sure you were not doing it for the humanity’s memory ;).

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under humanist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.