copy culture

(i think i’m doing this right. if not, sorry…)

Copy culture. Someone records a song, or makes a movie, or types a post. Then the internet gets a hold of it, and before long, the music, movie, or words are reimagined in some new context. As The Art Gallery of Knoxville writes, “Information is particularly suited to gift economics, as information can be copied and transmitted at practically no cost. It can be treated as a nonrival good: when you share information, you do not deprive yourself of the information.”

Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs features Marisa Olsen and Abe Linkoln singing posts from their favorite blogs. Though Marisa’s voice is lovely, the songs are often unlistenable, owing to some curious choices of material. But that’s irrelevant. What’s interesting is how it encapsulates ideas about property and culture on the internet. For their header, they seem to have taken an old photograph of a couple holding bulldogs and pasted their own faces over it, which is consistent with the “borrowing” nature of the entire project. The songs are free, whereas ten years ago, the material costs of cassettes or CDs would’ve made free distribution impossible. Also, Olsen and Linkoln use the authors’ language in a way the authors never intended, though the idea of “getting permission” seems unnecessary and antiquated. Nobody is claiming “intellectual property”, or demanding a commission for using words they thought of first. Finally, the immediacy of the posts is also uniquely modern. Some of the songs were uploaded on the same day as the posts themselves.

This seems to be a radical shift from the culture I remember growing up. When “Ice Ice Baby” came out, it sparked a big controversy over sampling. Was it art, or just a David Bowie ripoff? Today, nobody questions Vanilla Ice’s validity as an artist, and sampling has opened up whole genres that were previously impossible. The right to own property, to build fences around “your stuff”, has always been a part of the American definition of freedom, but the internet is challenging the mentality that ideas can or should be owned.

They say if you can’t profit from your ideas, there’s no incentive to innovate. Yet Abe and Mo… well actually, they were commissioned by the Whitney for this project… but in thousands of other cases (including the blogs the work is derived from), people are sharing their works and ideas without the possibility of material compensation. It’s as though all culture is becoming open-source. Perhaps that prevents some from earning a living as artists. But it also invites everyone, everywhere to make cultural contributions, and I think that is ultimately more interesting.