Copyright issues in a visual arts classroom is often the centre of focus. In my opinion, it is an unreal expectation that student will go out and photograph their own reference images and too often Creative Commons images do not provide students with an mage that is suitable for a particular work. That being said, students are reminded to identify and give credit to any image they use. We use the analogy of a works cited list for a paper – what resource/source imagery have you used in the production of your work of art? Unfortunately, there is no Bibliography that accompanies a work of art.
When we consider the skills that we are teaching students and the tools they use – ones that allow them to easily mix audio and video from different sources, the idea of ownership becomes blurred. When the latest craze is to ‘mash-up’ different songs, videos and images into something new, how do can we speak of intellectual property. YouTube alone is an excellent example – how much of the content on YouTube is original? How much is repurposed or mashed-up? Who is the artist? To whom should the credit be given? Is it the original creator or the individual who took parts of it and transformed it into something new?
I think of Richard Prince, the artist who ‘rephotographed’ hundreds of Instagram selfies and sold them at auctions for $100 000. Prince took images by other people (usually attractive, 20-somethings) added some creative Instagram-like text and emojis and printed them on a large scale. Prince never asked permission from the subjects of the photos to publish them, nor did he compensate any of the individuals. Is this not an infringement on the individual’s privacy? Firstly the images came from accounts that are not private, which means they are viewable by all. Secondly, because Prince added comments and deleted the existing ones, he can argue that his work is ‘transformative’ and under the US Copyright Act he is protected.
In this era of online digital editing tools and Web 2.0 media creation tools, issues of copyright must be re-thought and redefined.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/18/instagram-artist-richard-prince-selfies