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+title = "Avant-gardist subversion of copyright"
+glassblowers = ["tomislavmedak.md"]
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+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.