Boing Boing has a post about the LACMA's Magritte Exhibition
The "Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images" exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art manages to both celebrate and betray fair use at the same time.
Inside, they've hung many of Magritte's famous works, and, accompanying these works, they've placed dozens of contemporary sculptures and paintings that riff off of Magritte, making fun of him or paying homage to him or commenting on him. These are canonical fair uses -- an artist who takes from another artist and uses his work to make new work.
The pro remix message: Culture is well-served by liberal rules that let one person remix another's creation.
The anti remix message: The exhibition policy on photos: no photos are allowed in the exhibit. If you take out your camera, one of the bowler-hatted guards will come up to you and shout at you (literally shout at you!): "No photos allowed!" They won't even let you take out a phone or PDA and make notes with it, in case you're sneakily taking photos on the premises.
Boing Boing asks:
This is a riddle: does the Magritte exhibition celebrate fair use, or deny it? Does it want to inspire us to remix Magritte, or warn us off the idea of reproduction without permission?
Commentary from members of MCN-IP SIG:
At first glance, the article contains quite a few mistakes regarding legal issues.
Example: "When we absolve curators of responsibility for defending our fair use rights..." Well, we do NOT have a fair use right to photograph, without the artist's permission, works protected by copyright -- wherever they are displayed -- except for certain very limited purposes, and property, privacy, and contract law may indeed preempt that. Only a court of law can determine whether the purpose of the photography was fair use or not. (And it could be argued that a curator's repsonsibility is to keep his or her museum away from courts of law.)Yes, that's the problem with the fair use concept as currently expressed in the US copyright code, but that's another article altogether -- one that should be written by someone who does their legal research a lot better.
While I sympathize with the fair use spirit of the article, one has to get one's facts right in order to make a decent argument for ...anything.
Another museum professional said:
I'm pretty pro-CC and free-use in most cases, but as noted above, museums don't always (or usually) have the option to make everything fair-use. It's really out of our hands. And so I find it intensely frustrating that a lot of copyfighters insist on blaming the museum for copyright on artwork. It undermines public perception of the museum as a publicly-funded space, with numerous complaints by photographers about why a public institution doesn't allow the public to photograph within modern and contemporary art galleries.
And finally this comment:
I wonder if the guards at LACMA (or any museum) could tell disgruntled patrons there are images of the exhibition on the museum website that are available according to the Terms of Use, which almost always allows downloading without permission for personal, non-commercial use such as "remixing" and so on, as it does in LACMA's case.
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