creativity

Have You Gotten To The Point You Care When People Steal Your Work?

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You know how you are supposed to check the batteries in your smoke detectors every time we go on or off daylight savings time? It may be worth having a similar rule for checking your intellectual property licenses for your online presences. Maybe every time you renew your domain name?

There was a recent story about a photographer who had set his Creative Commons License to allow commercial use with attribution.

When a map company used his image on one of their publications giving him full attribution, he sued them for their use of the image and lost.

The tone of the article is that it was sort of silly of him to be protesting the use of his work in a way explicitly allowed.

But it occurred to me that it would be very easy for many artists and organizations to accidentally find themselves in a similar situation as their online presence evolved.

For example, maybe your website or blog just starts out as a source of information for people about what you are doing. You set your license to require people to quote you with attribution or a link. You aren’t trying to monetize anything and you would be happy if people quoted you all over the Internet.

Later, your organization starts a new exciting program where you are producing all sorts of interesting stuff (or if you are an individual, you take up a hobby/refine your skills and get really good).

You start putting images and examples of your work online, forgetting your license is so permissive and the next thing you know you are seeing your work appearing all over social media, people are selling tshirts and tote bags with your images and are using your video and audio tracks in their own videos.

If you have been publicizing/bragging about achievements and have realized ambitions much greater than when you first established your blog, website, Pinterest, Flickr, etc, presence you may want to go back and review how much permission people have to utilize the content of those pages.

A similar issue may arise if you are featuring other people’s work and their more stringent use requirements aren’t clearly discernible.

Upon review, you may be surprised by how lax your settings are. Or maybe you will despair that no one wants to steal your stuff despite how lax your settings are.

The Old Utility of Art Argument

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I bought the bowl below at a sale of student art. I have been displaying it on my desk for the last month or so. I recently had someone come in and comment that the difference between art and craft was whether you could use it or not, so this bowl must be art.

By that definition, the Paul Randolph designed Orange County Government Center must be art because it is a really difficult place to work in.

I grew up in Orange County and was in and out of the center fairly often.  When I was really young it was always a crazy looking place that presented a lot of places to potentially hide and play in (If I could only get away from my mother.)  As I got older, it was still a crazy looking place that captured my imagination, even driving by. But even 30+ years ago I noticed there were a heck of a lot of buckets deployed to catch leaks.

The argument about whether a work of art is worth the expense based on its perceived lack of usefulness is an old one. The criticisms become even more pronounced if the work isn’t immediately aesthetically pleasing or comprehensible.

In many respects, architecture faces greater difficulty with these issues. People may be angered by a performance they attended, but the experience is transitory. People may be scandalized by the amount paid for a piece of visual art, but it often disappears from view behind a museum or collector’s walls. Even if it is a piece of public art that reminds people of their dismay every day as they go to work, the expense of its existence is generally in the past. (Unless something falls off on to your head.)

Buildings, people have to live in and the cost of the distinctive design can frequently persist for years. To paraphrase an old saying, it is easier to buy a piece of art than to live in one. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, for example, has been faced with various problems particular to its design.

Unlike Fallingwater which is now a museum, and similar efforts to preserve  buildings as a historical tourism sites,  the government center is seeking to renovate a building with a long history of problems so that it can continue to serve its original function.

They are faced with a number of options and I obviously like the idea of turning the space into artist residences and workspaces. But this situation provides an interesting illustration of the tension between functionality and artistic and historical value.

Often we hear stories about an historical building being slated for demolition in order to build a parking lot, condo or supermarket. Does it count for anything that these renovation plans will allow the building to continue with its function?

There are a number of art works for which the natural degradation is a planned feature. Since even buildings without a distinctive design inevitably develop issues as they age, should this expectation be factored in during the design stage?

If arts organizations shouldn’t assume they deserve to persist forever, should creatives expect their work to be preserved forever? This is a logical extension of the sentiment that really hasn’t been touched upon.

In recent years an idea has been espoused that legacy arts organizations have become too entrenched in their practices to be responsive to an environment where expectations shift so quickly. The suggestion is that it is arrogant for them to think they deserve to be continually funded if they are not effective at delivering their services.

By that thinking, does the Orange County Government Center deserve to be preserved if it doesn’t allow for the effective delivery of services?

Should a sculptor expect their fountain to be preserved forever after the mechanisms to keep it working are no longer made? The full intended effect of the work is diminished by the impossibility of restoration.

Should muralists expect their works to be restored after a leaky roof damages it? What if it were demolished by a tornado?

I am not suggesting that some performing arts organizations don’t need to do a little introspection about their existence. Or that the Sistine Chapel’s time has come. I just want to point out that when you start to employ criteria like effectiveness in relation to the arts, you open the door a little wider for the age old utility argument.

Along those lines, it occurs to me that one of the reasons many of our public buildings are functional but so uninspiring and unremarkable is that governments don’t want anyone becoming invested in preserving anything about them.

 

Evidence of Creativity

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Since Americans for the Arts is having a blog salon on Arts Education, this seems like a good opportunity to call attention to one possible solution to the question of how you integrate the arts and creativity into academic subjects.

While he isn’t specifically integrating the arts into instruction, teacher Larry Ferlazzo is using episodes from the National Geographic show Crowd Control to inspire his students’ projects.

His goal is to get his students to investigate a question and create their own evidence.

“Another that is considering the role of imagination in art talked about their creating various items and having people evaluate them using an imagination “criteria.” One other group taking on the topic of if technology is truly necessary in order to “advance” society said they might come up with a list of technology achievements and ask people which one they think would be most important if they had to choose one for a brand new country they were creating.”

This approach gets students invested a project they care about and helps them learn from the experience. The questions they ask and the results they receive might be flawed, but the process they engage in will inform future learning.

Besides, arts organizations can’t cast too many aspersions. The questions and methodologies used in audience/community surveys are frequently just as flawed.

A creative approach and an empirical approach to problem solving are not mutually exclusive. The poop-o-meter in the Crowd Control video Ferlazzo uses in his post could have been just as easily used to incentivize the submission of samples for a canine health study instead of getting people to clean up after their dogs.

Memento Labore

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Last month I wrote about a 2012 study that found the biggest impediment to creativity identified by Americans is lack of time.

A recent piece on Medium tells the story of an author who contacted 275 creatives to be interviewed for a book he was writing and was told “No” by one third of them. Another third said nothing.

Of those who did say no, a great deal of them cited a lack of time as the reason. The article author, Kevin Ashton, suggests that the reason why so many of these creatives were successful is that they said no to requests which would divert them from their work.

Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the work of becoming expert through study and practice, the work of finding solutions to problems and problems with those solutions, the work of trial and error, the work of thinking and perfecting, the work of creating.

Creating consumes. It is all day, every day. It knows neither weekends nor vacations. It is not when we feel like it. It is habit, compulsion, obsession, vocation. The common thread that links creators is how they spend their time.

No matter what you read, no matter what they claim, nearly all creators spend nearly all their time on the work of creation. There are few overnight successes and many up-all-night successes.

From time to time I have written about how companies will bring a consultant or improv group in to teach their employees exercises that will help them become more nimble and creative. The mistake being made is thinking the exercises are the answer to the problem rather than recognizing it is the time spent with a shifted mindset that yields creative results.

The emphasis being on time spent.

Even creative artists can fail to recognize that their “break out” work was actually the result of a long period of failure and refinement and become discouraged when inspiration doesn’t immediately gift them with their next great idea.

I revisit this idea here periodically because it is useful to be reminded.

I frequently arrive at the solution I seek when I am mowing the lawn or in the shower. But generally the process hasn’t just encompassed the time it takes me to mow the lawn. I have already done a great deal of thinking and research leading up to that moment or have drawn my knowledge and experience to that point. The flash of insight I receive while mowing helps to coalesce all the ideas into a possible course of action.

[The title of this post is a riff on the Latin memento mori – remember you must die. My cobbled together meaning is remember you must work]