Un résumé de l'intervention du 22/02/04 à Freeedem (que j'ai la flemme de traduire en français)
1- First, let me introduce a little abstract of the history of the Free Art Licence, which roots are coming from three main directions :
- The increasing use of Descriptive Licences since the late 60es by minimalist and conceptual artists, and the drafting of a Licence model for artists by Seth Siegelaub and Rob Pojansky in 1969. Though these licences weren't free at all, the fact that the very material work could be defined as an executive program, by a set of sentences, demonstrated its ability to be reproduced or interpreted by anyone, anywhere. This was one of the conditions that brought the artwork quite close to a software work.
- Several art movements (Dada, Beuys, and the grunge art of 90s) associated with the social evolution that was going more distractive and more workless reinforced the idea that everybody should (or can) be an artist.
- The growth of net art, or any kind of numeric arts, in the 90s, the fast and easy availability of these artworks on the net, lead to break once more, the material boundary between possessing an original and distributing copies of the artwork. In the same time, the movement of "relational art", coined by the French critic Nicolas Bourriaud, stirred up the will of exchange and interaction.
These are the conditions that brought some artists, and first of them, Antoine Moreau, so close to pass a kind of General Public Licence specially conceived for the art works.
One of the specificities of the Free Art Licence is to make a distinction between the original work and its copies. The original (for example a plaster sculpture) is considered somehow as a source code. If the artist doesn't provide a definition of such a work, then, the user can make any right or wrong copy of it and consider it as a consequent art work. Its other quality is that the drafting of this licence is rather short and simple, and it can be understood by anybody, even artists who have few law notions.
2- In a second part, I would like to evoke some ethic problems related to the practice of free licences, in the cultural, educational and artistic field.
What do the young generations understand by "Free"? The plentifullness of dematerialised works,
the weakening of the authorship, the easiness of uploading and mixing anything available ? These facilities leads most of the young screenagers, to consume (either than use or re-create) without any attention to the context and the author from witch they picked the work. When deprived of their source and references, the cultural and educative data becomes more and more meaningless, since it lose its credibility and its connotative value. I wonder what could arise from such a plug & play culture. Would it be just a buzz ? A kind of big mess in which art, distractive culture, educational documents, and advertisements goes mixing together?
But on the other hand, the weakening of the authorship is an interesting issue for art and culture. In these conditions any work or purpose would be appreciated intrinsically for it's denotative meaning and actual qualities. The plug & play culture can become a kind of puzzle game for creating new meanings by diverting data in other situations. Adopting an utopian point of view, one could say that the loss of credibility of information's should be balanced by the users capability to distinguish and appreciate the value, the rightness, or the meaning of any situation.
So, we are in front of a dilemma that some could appreciate as a danger and others as a chance. It depends on how we can use such an opportunity and how mentalities are going to move. In any case, I suppose that we might provide an important educational effort.
The right use and understanding of the free licences as a deontological condition for a free and respectful exchange of cultural data, appears as the best way to inflect this transitional situation.
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