From 72ee66c1d2b6562ef34886b3cf8bb191e4124b67 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Tomislav Medak Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2023 12:40:05 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Add 'content/shard/subversionofcopyright.md' --- content/shard/subversionofcopyright.md | 51 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 51 insertions(+) create mode 100644 content/shard/subversionofcopyright.md diff --git a/content/shard/subversionofcopyright.md b/content/shard/subversionofcopyright.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9396f48 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/shard/subversionofcopyright.md @@ -0,0 +1,51 @@ ++++ +title = "Avant-gardist subversion of copyright" +glassblowers = ["tomislavmedak.md"] ++++ + + + +Even the avant-gardes in all their inappropriable and idiosyncratic +recalcitrance fall no less under the legally delimited space of +copyrightable works. As they shift format, new claims of ownership and +appropriation are built. Copyright is a normative classification that is +totalizing, regardless of the effects of leaky networks speaking to the +contrary. Few efforts have insisted on the subverting of juridical +classification by copyright more lastingly than the UbuWeb archive. +Espousing the avant-gardes' ethos of appropriation, for almost 20 years +it has collected and made accessible the archives of the unknown; +outsider, rare and canonized avant-gardes and contemporary art that +would otherwise remained reserved for the vaults and restricted access +channels of esoteric markets, selective museological presentations and +institutional archives. Knowing that asking to publish would amount to +aligning itself with the totalizing logic of copyright, UbuWeb has +shunned the permission culture. At the level of poetical operation, as a +gesture of displacing the cultural archive from a regime of limited, +into a regime of unlimited access, it has created provocations and +challenges directed at the classifying and ordering arrangements of +property over cultural production. One can only assume that as such it +has become a mechanism for small acts of treason for the artists, who, +short of turning their back fully on the institutional arrangements of +the art world they inhabit, use UbuWeb to release their own works into +unlimited circulation on the net. Sometimes there might be no way or +need to produce a work outside the restrictions imposed by those +institutions, just as sometimes it is for academics impossible to avoid +the contradictory world of academic publishing, yet that is still no +reason to keep one's allegiance to their arrangements. + +At the same time UbuWeb has played the game of avant-gardist subversion: +"If it doesn't exist on the internet, it doesn't exist". Provocation is +most effective when it is ignorant of the complexities of the contexts +that it is directed at. Its effect starts where fissures in the defense +of the opposition start to show. By treating UbuWeb as massive evidence +for the internet as a process of reappropriation, a process of "giving +to all", its volunteering *spiritus movens,* Kenneth Goldsmith, has been +constantly rubbing copyright apologists up the wrong way. Rather than +producing qualifications, evasions and ambivalences, straightforward +affirmation of copying, plagiarism and reproduction as a dominant yet +suppressed mode of operation of digital culture re-enacts the +avant-gardes' gesture of taking no hostages from the officially +sanctioned systems of classification. By letting the incumbents of +control over cultural production react to the norm of copying, you let +them struggle to dispute the norm rather than you having to try to +defend the norm. \ No newline at end of file