Let us begin with a story about art. In this story, art produces aesthetic works of durability and stability — things that “stand up on their own”. The act of artistic production doesn’t come from nowhere; neither is it born in the heads of private individuals. It doesn’t dwell in a social nothingness. Nor does it start with a blank canvas. Any moment of production involves the reassembling and rearranging of the diverse materials, practices and influences that came before it and which surround it. Out of this common pool, art creates aesthetic works with emergent properties of their own. From the social world in which it lives, art creates affect and precept. It forms new ways of feeling, seeing and perceiving the world. It gives back to us the same object in different ways. In so doing, art invents new possibilities and makes available new forms of subjectivity and life. Art is creative and productive.

The act of artistic production doesn’t come from nowhere; neither is it born in the heads of private individuals. It doesn’t dwell in a social nothingness. Nor does it start with a blank canvas

Art as property?

This is a plausible story about the “truth” of art. But it’s not the story we are commonly told. Normally, art and creativity are associated in people’s mind with a more heroic tale. Here, the moment of production is reduced to the actions of an individual creator. Creativity is considered to be a moment of individual genius, born out of a social vacuum, solely from the minds of private individuals ex nihilo. In this view, art is an autonomous sphere, existing independently from and impervious to other aspects of the social world (e.g., technology, economics, politics). It is this enduring discourse of artistic creativity that sociologists and philosophers have had so much fun demystifying and debunking in the past. Time and again they’ve highlighted the absurdity of romanticism and subjectivism. They remind us that there is no such thing as a private language of creativity. Artistic creativity is a social practice. It cannot help both influencing and being influenced by other aspects of social life. As if anyone ever really doubted these things in the first place.

Critiques of romanticism and subjectivism have been restated so many times that they may sound tired and repetitive to some. It might appear trite and even boring to keep remaking this case. But even so, discourses of subjectivism and romanticism continue to permeate interpretations of creativity. Nowhere is this clearer than in legal and economic definitions. In intellectual property law, for instance, we find that discourses of the author, romanticism, subjectivism, originality and genius are still rife. Given this, it is no surprise that sociologists will keep reminding us, pointing to the sociological “facts” of art and creativity.

Copyfight 1 - art by Trine Bjørkmann Andreassen

Political economists take a different approach. They ask why these specious discourses of romanticism and subjectivism remain pervasive. And they argue that the reasons are clear-cut. Look no further than the commodification and privatization of artistic creativity. The story goes like this: in order to generate profit from art, creative products must be transformed into property that may be owned and exchanged by private profiteers. “Intellectual property rights”, enforced by the state, are the mechanism for achieving this. Intellectual property requires a legal persona who “owns” the creative product in order to function: the “author”. This legal fiction is the sovereign “individual”, endowed with the power of creation, someone who “justifiably” has ownership rights over their creative goods and “deserves” to be handsomely rewarded. These creative goods, even though they were created in and out of the public, may then be owned by private entities (and not necessarily the “original creators”) and removed from what we share in common. Then, as property, these creative products can be exchanged among private hands, and traded and consumed in the market place.

Creators may be understandably flattered by their association with the mythical identity of the creative genius. They can easily forget how they were inspired and influenced by others (friends, lovers, enemies…) and of the legitimacy of any previous “sources”

Creators may be understandably flattered by their association with the mythical identity of the creative genius. They can easily forget how they were inspired and influenced by others (friends, lovers, enemies…) and of the legitimacy of any previous “sources”. They might yet start believing that they are above and beyond this world: the true romantic genius. But they will soon be brought back down to earth in one respect. For they will also have to be their own mini legal-experts. They must manage and defend the alleged misuse, unauthorized reproduction, or plagiarism of “their” works by others. It is no wonder that new digital technologies — media for sharing and reproducing immaterial goods like never before — are so dangerous and alarming. Fortunately for them, this situation will not be so for long. Many of these creative and freeing technologies are currently being brutally reconfigured to prevent the re-use of immaterial goods, such as sampling CDs, recording and reusing television or invoking montages of images on a computer screen. Our artistic geniuses (and their corporate friends) may sleep soundly in bed again.

The alternative vision

It is too easy for the creative to overlook how the myth of the romantic creator allows creativity to be linked into the system of profit — that it is most often employed to justify the ownership and exploitation of creative works by private corporations. This tendency is further supported by the claim that art is somehow autonomous from society. In truth, like many of us, artists are of two minds where money is concerned. Sometimes they are critical. But mostly they collaborate. The art market sustains the livelihood of many independent artists who are understandably wary to bite the hand that feeds them. Nonetheless, the art market also has pernicious effects. Capital has always shaped and controlled bourgeois art, whether through speculators and investors, corporate art portfolios, or indirectly through government pressure to create artists who are vocationally trained, ready for the advertising agencies and marketing departments. But there is now a new intensity to capital, a new plane of organization that segments and overcodes the practices and subjectivity of the creative. Private corporations (creating what Walter Benjamin called the mythology of “newness”) harvest the work of artists so that new commodities can promise beautification and aesthetic “novelty”. Numerous artists are co-opted into the ranks of bureaucrats and managers, finding themselves no longer creating art, but marketing and selling commodities. Art has obsolescence built in, oriented towards fashion and the valorization of the putatively “new”. Arts and Humanities departments in universities make room for “Marketing” and “Creative Industries” departments, where the value of creativity is reduced to its profitability.