<nettime> [0100101110101101.ORG] IN ANTI-COPYRIGHT PARADISE

[PROPAGANDA@0100101110101101.ORG]

>From �Orf�, 20 Mar 2000
http://www.orf.at/orfon/kultur/000320-3138/3141txt_story.html

IN ANTI-COPYRIGHT PARADISE

Olia Lialina has drawn criticism because she wants to sell net.art.
Critics complain that she wishes to "let net.art regress to the status
of traditional art".


In her online gallery Art.Teleportacia, Olia Lialina offers net artworks
for sale. She drew heavy criticism from the net.art community for this
since the project started in summer 1998. On the Nettime mailing list,
important questions concerning the copyright of net artworks and the
concept if selling online art were raised and discussed in a sometimes
very polemical style.

Ignorance of Copyright?

The net.art activists 0100101110101101.ORG regard Lialina's activities
as plain ignorance of the real strengths of the Internet. They find that
the question "How to sell net.art" blurs the actual intention, namely to
let net.art "regress" to the status of traditional art.

If copyright on net.art works is enforced to create the necessary
precondition for selling them, then this would put an end to the hopes
of early net artists, according to 0100101110101101.ORG: "Within two
years, net.art will be in all museums and art history textbooks. The
names of the 'protagonists of the heroic period' (an allusion to
Lialina's exhibition ''miniatures of the heroic period') will be known,
influences, generations etc.  will be written down forever. In other
words: the same shit we've been eating every time."

"The Real World instead of Confusion and Exchange"

At last, the utopia that everything would be better and different was
particularly common on the net. As 0100101110101101.ORG puts it: "The
web is a paradise of anticopyright, of plagiarism, of confusion and
exchange. Why the hell do some people have to create a copy of the real
world at any price?"

Olia Lialina objects that the net simply exists in analogy to the real
world and moreover belongs to it. Her intention, she argues, is not to
defend any particular concept, but to accept the reality of the world
where we live, online or offline.

To Buy Genius with the Artwork

Another disputant, snafu, is even more radical than 0100101110101101.ORG
arguing that it is not just copyright, but its underlying concept of the
original which contradicts the nature of the Internet. Originality, he
says, is after all the basis which allowed "in the past 200 years to
steal artworks out of their contexts and abduct them into Western
Museums and Galleries. The artist's genius has always been there, caught
in the artwork.  You buy the artwork and receive a piece of genius."

In the end, snafu proposes a compromise: "It is not wrong to demand
money for net.art, but neither is it perfect to create art for money".
Lialinas reply: "But it is :)".

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