Don’t Stay In Your Lane
By Beatriz Helena Ramos.
This is the first of a series of articles about current issues with crypto art.
The idea that you make a work of art and someone, somewhere, is inspired by it and takes the time to transform it into something of their own is inherent to art. We seem to forget all too often that art has nothing to do with money, scarcity, effort, leaderboards, markets, or copyrights. When it comes to art, I think it is important to always frame the conversation with art and the artist at its center.
Art is a constant dialogue with ourselves and with the world. We don’t become artists in a vacuum. We all learn by imitating others. We all look at our own work and all the influences on it. Unless it is straight plagiarism, there is no such thing as copyright infringement or copycats in art, only people having a dialogue with each other as they search for their own voice.
Finding your own voice can take a lifetime. We tend to confuse voice with style. Having your own voice is not repeating the same style over and over, but it is the ability to transform any raw material into something new in which we can express our essence. It is our own visual language that reflects our interests, obsessions, and unique life experience.
Once our voice emerges, we can work with any style, technique, or medium and always see ourselves in it. But when someone imitates us, we just see them. Our work, then, becomes a reflection of who we are, part of our own identity. This is why I find it ironic that artists become insecure and protective when other artists imitate their styles or remix their work. Style is just form, and in a sense all styles are derivative. Our own personal voice, however, is unique.
A few years back, the Matisse Picasso exhibition at MoMA showed the dialogue between Henri Matisse and his younger rival Pablo Picasso over the course of half a century. It was fascinating, as it revealed how two of the most important artists of the 20th century influenced each other.
It is a well-researched fact that creativity thrives in an environment of collaboration. We all build from each other’s ideas, experiments, and discoveries. We don’t have to actively collaborate; it is enough to be exposed to someone else’s work to be influenced by it. Creative collaboration is fundamental for art and innovation. Creativity flows from interplay.
See what develops with just one chair:
Many of us are working towards an open, decentralized, diverse, permissionless, and uncensored future for the arts. In my view, this is true innovation. Scarcity, copyrights, and exclusivity, on the other hand, are the obsolete ethos of the status quo.
I’m currently working on an art series in which I’m re-appropriating my own work. This is art for which I don’t own the copyrights that I made for some of the biggest brands in the world. I’m remixing my own work, creating completely new artworks that have hints of the original work. It’s a protest against exploitative work-for-hire agreements and current copyright laws. The fact that I don’t hold the copyrights of my own work as an artist is unethical and wrong, even if it is legal.
Art should test the boundaries of power, so remixing my own work is simply an act of resistance. If one of these big corporations screams copyright infringement, I would hope that the crypto art community would have my back. Isn’t what we are all about? But as it stands now, because of this narrow focus on copyright, this particular work could get banned from my favorite crypto art marketplaces.
In my opinion, the revolutionary innovation of NFTs as art does not rely on scarcity, which has nothing to do with the value of art. I believe innovation lies in the fact that attribution and ownership are linked to the artwork, and this artwork can be universally viewed and remixed without permission, while at the same time smart contracts track and reward every contributor.
The law is always catching up to society, always behind the times, yet crypto art is years ahead of the mainstream. Hence, we have an unprecedented opportunity, a responsibility even, to free rare digital art from artificial constraints such as scarcity and copyrights.
We are starting a new Invisible Economy task force dedicated to crypto art in order to discuss these issues in depth and work together towards possible solutions. We’ll meet biweekly starting Thursday, September 10 at 2 pm EST / 8 pm CEST. If you want to participate, please drop us a line here.
