Tag Archives: art market

What would Picasso’s hourly rate be?: Art & Copyright on the Internet

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tpb_awkThe new documentary Pirate Bay: Away from the Keyboard is out, telling the story of the three founders of the largest file sharing software in the world as they defend the legality of their role in the sharing of copyrighted information, predominately movies and music. A clear division exists between the defendants, three Swedish computer nerds interested in technical challenges and the open internet, and the plaintiffs, Hollywood and the music industry with its vested corporate interest in traditional methods of pricing and distribution. The defendants claim that Pirate Bay is just a vehicle for sharing information, and that they are not responsible for what any of their thousands of users choose to share. The plaintiffs allege that Pirate Bay actively enables the sharing of copyrighted information, and also profits from it (that is, rather than promoting the free exchange of information they are profiting from it in exactly the same capitalist way that Hollywood et al. does). After an initial loss and lengthy appeals, the founders of Pirate Bay were found guilty and sentenced to jail time—which is happening now.

This case is illustrative of the battle between the vested corporate interests in information and culture production and all the capitalist money-making behind it, and the open, flexible, low-cost alternatives made available by the internet and its ethos of free and open access to information. How the internet is handled—how and to what extent restrictions are placed on it, whether it will be allowed to function as a free and open conduit of information—is one of the central issues of our time, one that will determine the lives of many across the globe, who will either be included into a network of information that can benefit them or who will be excluded and will suffer from that lack of knowledge.

What does this have to do with Picasso? The alternatives offered by the internet are exciting, revolutionary even, in terms of arts and culture. To treat art (by art I am thinking of traditional visual arts, but also movies be they Hollywood blockbusters or experimental art films, music, etc.) as a commodity is standard today. Thus we have the art market, cinemas, expensive DVDs and CDs, an iTunes-mediated music purchasing system. But there is a huge discrepancy between the art market and the art. The value of a Picasso is apparently in the millions, but really this is an arbitrary number. It does not adequately represent the value of his work to our cultural life, nor can its costs of production be calculated the way we calculate the cost of a washing machine. What would Picasso’s hourly rate have been? The questions seem ridiculous. It does not make sense to us that Picasso would have sat at his stool and timed himself while he painted, and then charged an hourly rate for the product. To treat art as a commodity is to stuff a square peg into a round hole; it just doesn’t fit.

A corollary problem of treating art as a commodity is that it turns art into property that can be owned. Just as the art market exists, so too does art ownership. There is nothing inherently wrong in this, but it is an imperfect systems that does not adequately represent the value of art. And we see the cracks in this system all the time. On one hand, collectors buy and own art. Yet we also spend a substantial part of public money and private donations on funding the arts in the public cultural sphere through museums. We talk about cultural heritage as something to be preserved and protected, often in national terms. So we also have a sense of the arts as a societal value and belonging to the public.

Of course, just because the value of art cannot be defined in monetary terms does not mean an artist shouldn’t be able to earn a living, or that what an artist creates is not of value. Quite the opposite. While the art market offers a way for artists to earn a living, it is an imperfect one, based on the buying and selling of objects in a time when art has generally moved away from the central importance of the art object. The mechanics of the art market and the idea of art as investment transfers objects of cultural value into the private sphere, where everyone does not have access to them. But the solution is perhaps not to defend the established modes of copyright, but to create new systems. This might also offer a solution to some of the problems of the art market, which pools its dollars very much on the top end of the market without fostering the growth of emerging artists or the stable development of careers.

How does the internet offer anything exciting or revolutionary to solve these problems? It offers alternative modes of funding and distribution. In fact, there has been an emergence of many different ventures, created by individuals or small groups, that are able to survive because of the low barriers to entry and the active participation of individuals. For example, there are Kickstarter, Bandcamp, the now on-hiatus 20×200 and its subsequent, similar cohort of online fine art retailers. Just as people crowdsource information, through Kickstarter and Bandcamp artists and musicians can ‘crowdsource’ funds for projects. Many artists have successfully funded projects through Kickstarter, and many more have become their own internet business and PR teams, as artist websites become de rigueur and Facebook pages normal. Bandcamp is also notable because the money goes directly to the musicians, they control the pricing, and success is not manufactured by an industry machine with a huge advertising budget. Organizations like 20×200 offer the promise of affordable art to the masses.

The internet is an easy means to distribute your work outside of copyright and the traditional market. Flickr is populated by photographers who post their work with varying amounts of controls over how they can be used, often only requesting credit for the image if it used elsewhere. Radiohead released In Rainbows online, requesting donations in an amount that the user could determine, and it proved remarkably successful. Russian poet and activist Kirill Medvedev has renounced copyright on all his works, and now publishes on his website and Facebook.

Having alternative means of reaching and making, a third way between private and public money, seems incredibly promising. The concept of the internet is based on the idea of individual participation, a decentralized structure of connections, and an exchange of information without a monetary price on it. Yet when artists bring their ‘product’ directly to people through the medium of the internet, and ask for support in terms of a monetary contribution, despite assumptions of human selfishness especially in the supposed de-personalization of the internet, people choose to give. This sort of exchange, which is more marked by generosity and support and the creation of a direct connection to an individual or small organizations, seem to me to be more akin to the nature and value of art than our current system.

Similarly, my sympathies are very much with the pirates, the hackers, and the free and open source of information that the internet should be. Traditionally the hacker ethos behind the structure of the internet is not a destructive one, but a creative one—one that creates systems and facilitates the sharing of knowledge. This ethos finds a complement in academia, where scholarly results are published for the good of the community (and/or scholarly prestige/tenure, etc.) but not with expectations of high profits. Hackers are rarely destructive, except maybe of an ailing industry’s profits. I think the movie and music industry can hardly expect to stop the millions of people around the world who download music and movies by suing three men in Stockholm. They might more profitably investigate how to increase the value of DVDs with special features and alternate methods of pricing and distribution.

Sharing information online is not always illegal; the organization of non-copyright information shared over the internet has proved highly valuable. Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg are great examples of sites that contribute to human knowledge through the collaborative efforts of individuals across the world. (Did you know anybody could become a proofreader for Project Gutenberg? I just joined myself.) Most libraries and museums are dedicated to moving their collections into the online sphere. With the alternatives that the internet offers, the large, creaking corporate juggernaut of copyright could indeed be forced to adapt to how new cultural products are shared in a structure that might be less profitable for companies, but could enable a long tail of cultural producers to produce their artistic work through self-organized or small organizations.

Oil Painting and Art as Commodity

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Art Collection of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Teniers, 1651

A long, forgive me, but interesting quote from John Berger‘s Ways of Seeing, which I just read for the first time.

“Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It turned everything into an object. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity. The soul, thanks to the Cartesian system, was saved in a category apart. A painting could speak to the soul –by way of what it referred to, but never by the way it envisaged. Oil painting conveyed a vision of total exteriority. 


Pictures immediately spring to mind to contradict this assertion. Works by Rembrandt, El Greco, Giorgione, Vermeer, Turner, etc. Yet if one studies these works in relation to the tradition as a whole, one discovers that they were exceptions of a very special kind. The tradition consisted of many hundreds of thousands of canvases and easel pictures distributed throughout Europe. A great number have not survived. Of those which have survived only a small fraction are seriously as works of fine art, and of this fraction another small fraction comprises the actual pictures repeatedly reproduced and presented as the works of ‘the masters’. 


Visitors to art museums are often overwhelmed by the number of works on display, and by what they take to be their own culpable inability to concentrate on more than a few of these works. In fact such a reaction is altogether reasonable. Art history has totally failed to come to terms with the problem of the relationship between the outstanding work and the average work of the European tradition. The notion of Genius is not in itself an adequate answer. Consequently the confusion remains on the wall of the galleries. Third-rate works surround an outstanding work without recognition –let alone explanation– of what fundamentally differentiates them. 


The art of any culture will show a wide differential of talent. But in no other culture is the difference between ‘masterpiece’ and average work so large as in the tradition of the oil painting. In this tradition the difference is not just a question of skill or imagination, but also of morale. The average work –an increasingly after the seventeenth century– was a work produced more or less cynically: that is to say the values it was nominally expressing were less meaningful to the painter than the finishing of the commission or the selling of his product. Hack work is not the result of either clumsiness or provincialism; it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the art. The period of the oil painting corresponds with the rise of the open art market. And it is in this contradiction between art and market that the explanations must be sought for what amounts to the contrast, the antagonism existing between the exceptional work and the average.“

– John Berger, Ways of Seeing, pp.87-88. 

Think of all those still lifes. The value of the object being protrayed helped determine the value of the painting itself. It was an argument for the patron’s wealth or beauty or other impressive quality. Today, with an open art market in full swing, such forms of representation  are just  as present, albeit in a questioning manner. The photographic “portraits” of Cindy Sherman and certainly the oil paintings of Julie Heffernan come to mind.

Look What Happened to the Art Market

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“Without Wall Street many forms of books, incunables, high spots of modern literature, are already unobtainable by the average collector or even fairly well-to-do collectors. Think Great Gatsby at over a $100k…Look what happened in the art market, where paintings that used to cost thousands are now hundreds of thousands, and paintings that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars are now millions of dollars…. 

If Wall Street gets hold of books and turns them into high priced investment widgets, then look out. No one will be able to afford them any more and some of the joy of collecting will be gone.”

This quote from The Man who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession came from a book dealer upon hearing that book collections were being characterized in Worth magazine as good investments. It certainly hard to imagine people like to Vogels collecting in todays market, which bounced back from the financial crisis without losing much of the gains it has made over the past 20 years.

Does the rare book market share the same future? If so, I’d better scrounge up my first editions. It’s interesting that this book dealer, who would profit for this more than the average collector potentially, doesn’t like the idea of pricing people out of their collecting hobby. The dealers arguably benefit more than the collectors or artists, because many collectors are priced out and because fewer contemporary artists make the cut for the higher prices being paid at auction. But on the other hand, perhaps it is a sign of the health of the art market than it can command such record high prices.

By the way, the book itself is proving quite enjoyable. It’s the true story of a book thief who stole rare books and hoarded them in the modest apartment he shared with his father, not unlike the art thief of my novel who steals to create his own personal collection that he keeps at his mother’s house.