Artist? Try Marketing Exec...

[viktor_haag]

Copyright has, for many years, been a bastion against (oddly enough) commodifying art. But Terry McBride ("top music manager and label boss" according to The Register) says that's over, baby. Forget creativity. Forget art. Embrace the new wondrous corporate feudal state where art becomes "an upsell technique for [art] related products, e.g. ... clothing ... branded physical products".

What really bothers me about this attitude is that it favours ephemeral art. Why the heck would a writer want to toil away on a lengthy, deep, detailed novel? Embrace the word-bite! Blog yourself! Become a celebrity! Use your clever wordsmithery to shill for hip high-tech commerce!

I do not claim the novel is dead, or that film is dead, or that theatre is dead. But the destruction of copyright removes the principal way in which artists directly control the means of production, and are compensated for their efforts.

Do we really want a full-bore return to the patronage system?

(I am not unaware of the irony of asking this question, in this way, in this forum....)

Comments

[mylescorcoran]

"What really bothers me about this attitude is that it favours ephemeral art."

Sing it, brother. I fully believe the current copyright regime is screwy and benefits primarily the big media corporations rather than the artists, but a move to patronage and 'upsell techniques' is worse.

[madmanofprague.livejournal.com]

Well, if we can utilize the internet as sort of a 'diffuse patronage' thing...

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

That's fine, but this requires the artist to develop "1ntarw3bz skillz" in order to effectively market him/herself on the web, no? Now, granted, I suspect that such "skillz" are not all that hard to marshal, and can presumably be effective for that little investment: were that not the case, I would not so be able to account for the remarkable success and variety of "web comics".

But we're still talking here about effectively ephemeral art forms, no?

I don't know of any authors who serialize their novels on the web a la Strand Magazine (or Dickens). On the other hand, that's not to say such doesn't exist, and I also suspect that the internet is ideal suited to such a thing.

What's needed there, I suspect, is a useful and widespread micro-payment system, so that people can read serial contributions "for the cost of a cup of coffee". Or, alternatively, the serial posts can act as vehicles for in-place advertising (in which case, we're back to the commodification argument).

As a narrative artists, I don't especially want the pages of my novel being littered with directed advertising tailored for the reader...