Conceptual Art and IP November 18, 2008
"LeWitt's "Distorted Cubes" A piece by Chris Cobb in the new Believer—only the beginning of which is currently available online—describes the author's experience installing works by the American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt at an enormous exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. It's interesting reading on its own terms, but I link it here because it's also an interesting case study for folks who enjoy thinking about intellectual property. First, the epigraph from LeWitt that opens the article:
When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
For LeWitt, that meant producing almost gnomic descriptions of installation works that would actually be constructed by folks like Chris Cobb. Here's one example:
343. On a black wall, nine geometric figures (including right triangle, cross, X) in squares. The backgrounds are filled in solid white.
Cobb later tells us that "the commercial side of the art world dictates that access to the instructions is limited," and that the works have been "loaned" to the museum, meaning "the owner has given MASS MoCA permission to have them executed for the show." My (layman's) first pass reaction was that this didn't sound like it could possibly be legally enforceable. Even if those two very short descriptive sentences are subject to copyright—whatever that's worth given that they've just been quoted in a widely-read magazine—the relevant statutes seem to rule out any monopoly rights in the abstract instructions they express, given the explicit exclusion from copyright protection of an "idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." Any particular output of this "machine for making art" might be a copyrightable image or structure, but intuitively, the prohibition on executing the abstract instructions would have to be enforced by the conventions of the art world rather than the courts." [ArsTechnica]
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