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Subject: Creative Commons-Eyebeam Forum 2003 November 12-19

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  • From: Heather Ford <heather AT gn.apc.org>
  • To: cc-eyebeam AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-eyebeam] A Commons in not a Market
  • Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2003 21:56:06 -0800

Thanks so much for this, Joline - it is really useful to get some ideas for new models - really good models at that.

I'm so glad you've brought up the point that a commons is not useful if it is a market - I think it really expresses the kinds of ideas that I have been having for the social entrepreneurship fellowship that I am doing this year. When you have to find a great 'product' that is 'sustainable', often the very goal that you were pursuing is forgotten. When you are trying to get out a finished 'product' that you will unselfishly 'donate' to the world, you often forget that life is really only made meaningful through the processes, the journeys that we go through in communicating and sharing our ideas with others in order to solve problems - this is really what art is all about.

It also brings me to the fact that new technology should be seen as a way for us to play - to have fun, to experience freedom, to meet people and make meaningful connections - without the shadow of having to allocate play time to something of value on your time sheet. Creativity can only really happen in play time - and I don't mean computer games - I mean that it should be a way for us to experience the world around us in a different way - to make connections with people - to play with others in a context of freedom and creativity.

At this point I'm probably sounding more like a San Franciscan hippie than a technologist, but technology has allowed me this space and so I shall use it ;) In the so-called 'developing world' we are under such incredible pressure to make sure that technology lives up to its 'promise' and 'saves us' all from the 'poverty and degradation' that we seem to be heading towards (if we are not there already). What we should be doing is finding ways to use technology to play with one another - art is an excellent way of doing this within a community.

And I agree that by forcing artists to create commodities for the market, we won't be able to create varied and locally-responsive culture. In South Africa, we have a lot of artists trying desperately to sound like another counting crows or u2 - they even use an American accent when they sing!! If we were better at supporting our artists they would feel freer to be able to pursue the kind of art that they wanted to - purely by not being afraid that the audience might be too small to make any money. Instead, they bank on an audience that they know has supported particular types of music and they go with that.

The sad reality is that government spending on the arts around the world is decreasing and we're heading towards a society where the value of art is viewed in an extremely simplified format i.e. value of 1 product = $x per 1 person x no. of people, rather than art = creative value x x numbers in community i.e. community pays, rather than person pays.

I hope that makes sense.

Heather.

At 08:16 PM 11/17/2003, you wrote:

A Commons is not a Market.

While artists need to make a living, creating
commodities for the market may not be the
best way to a)produce good art, or b)help
artists earn a living. Making art subject to
the logics of profit making and marketing and
large scale competition may actually
discourage varied, dispersed and locally-
responsive and responsible culture
production.

During the last week of the symposium, we’ll
be discussing some ways to address the
question of art as market, or art as
challenge to the market, or marketing art.
But this week I’d like to address the
possibility of a creative commons. Commons as
opposed to “private property” or
“intellectual property”. Commons as an
alternative to “property”. A space that is
supported and owned and nurtured by the
community for the community. Not a place to
make money or compete or sell a label, but
rather a space of cultural exchange that lies
outside the market. There has been a good
deal of work done to prime the pump for such
a possibility, including the excellent work
done by Creative Commons, EFF, Chilling
Effects, Open Law, and similar projects. But
I’m not sure if their notion of a commons is
the same as mine.

But if we really want to support the
emergence of common spaces for creative work,
we are going to need a new model(or learn
some lessons from the historical model). I
don’t have such a model, but here are some
approaches, from least appealing to most
appealing:

1-Pay artists to work (this work can be
defined differently by each community), not
to make objects.
a)While an imperfect model, academia does
offer an alternative. Academics are
technically not paid by the number of
articles they write (though tenure does
depend on production more and more to the
detriment of teaching and community service),
but they are paid to do “academic research”
and they need to produce a certain amount of
quality work in order to retain their
positions. Academics are paid by their
communities—whether state-based, or private(a
more elite community, often more dispersed).
b)Europeans use this model too. JODI do not
get paid by the number of art works they
produce. They receive a grant from the Dutch
government to “be artists”.

2-Restructure the work week, so more people
will have time to make art.
a)Part-time work: many people would(and do)
work part time (with a pay cut) in order to
have time to engage in creative work. In the
pasts we’ve had chemist-composers and
pediatrician-poets (Borodin, Ives, Wallace
Stevens, William Carlos Williams).
b)Interruptible work schedule: sabbaticals
for culture production might be implemented
in many fields. Since “creativity” is now the
corporate buzz word, there might even be a
good argument for producing more creative
workers simply by letting them take time off
without penalty to job advancement.

3-Community supported art:
premise: the possibility of making art might
be considered a human right that all should
have access to; how does a community support
this kind of activity?
a) reward artists for work produced, but not
on a commodity model. Young artists just
entering the field could apply for 1/4 ­time
support until they build a repertoire and
thus move up to 1/2 time support, and so on
to full time support. The support would be
based not solely on output, but on value to
the community. An artist who inspires others
to work and teaches young apprentices might
be given full support though her work level
might drop a bit while “teaching”. This
system can support a rather large number of
part-time positions in addition to some
dedicated fulltime positions. If we just take
the funds that any given community now spends
on advertising, there might be enough funds
to create an initial phase of community-
supported culture production.
b) cut down middleman waste—take all the
funds currently being wasted on middlemen of
various types (publishing houses, recording
and film industries), and pump that money
back into the communities. Instead of paying
$10 for the latest Hollywood film, give that
$10 to your local film coop and support their
work.
c) Give tax breaks to community culture
production and tax broadcast culture
production; tax religious organizations &
give tax breaks to culture production that is
live (including spiritual work, if the
community decides); ie support living
culture, not dead culture.
d) Change our education system from one in
which children are consumers of culture to
one in which they can become, progressively,
producers of culture

What kinds of models can we imagine for
supporting cultural production in our
communities? And what role do we want that
art to play in our lives? Each community may
need to decide that for themselves, but
giving communities the ability and tools and
support to do this may be a first step.
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This discussion runs 2003 November 12-19. Submissions are licensed
under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
license <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/>.

Heather Ford
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Reuters Stanford Digital Visions Program
http://reuters.stanford.edu
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Stanford, CA 94305-4115, USA
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