Creative control

agentfreewill:

Who owns art? 

Certainly the artist has some integral claim, and might reasonably want to make sure that other people don’t get credit for or profit from their work.  Plagiarism is roundly condemned.  A tumblr example is posting someone else’s photo or art without crediting them; most especially if you’ve lifted it unedited from the original artist’s own post.  You would then be garnering likes and reblogs that by rights “belong” to the artist who made the work, you are stealing attention and reputation from them.

But then; who owns REACTION to art?

If a story, a film, a picture, a poem, a statue, a song moves the person experiencing it SO MUCH that they are in turn inspired to be creative in response – that would seem the highest praise one could give.  Do they re-crop and re-tint a photo?  Write a story with the same characters / in the same world? Draw their own picture?  If your art stirs the imagination in others and births more art, how are we anything but enriched?

The problem is when people want to control the reaction to art.  Whether it is the original artist themselves, or the company making money from the art, when people are told that they are responding wrong, stop, behave the way I want you do then things get problematic.

When it’s men telling women (again, here as well) that their reactions and desires are less important, less valuable, less respected than what men want and do.

When it’s an author hoarding her characters like a dragon, spitting fire at anyone who wants to imagine them differently.

When it’s music studios that shut down remixed songs so that no-one gets any money from anything their artists did but them.

When we stifle creative reactions to art, we are stifling art.

Because the fan that writes those stories using characters and a universe established by other authors?  Those are original works too.  Those are stories that can be plagiarized.  Those are stories that can be criticized for having the “wrong content”.  Those are stories that can have their own fans, who may in turn make more art in response.

If you want to say that “fan” art is somehow less valuable than “real” art I ask you – what is your criteria for “real” art?  If it in any way boils down to “art that makes someone money” then you are not valuing art, you are valuing capitalism. If it is “original only” then I invite you to find me any art that does not in some way borrow elements from predecessors.  If it is (even if you can’t admit it) “art created and/or controlled by men in some way”, well, you can see yourself right out. 

When we stifle creative reactions to art, we are stifling art.

Fan art is art.