Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age.
ILLEGAL ART EXHIBIT:
by illegal-art.org
Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age
http://www.illegal-art.org
The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork–as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s–will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.
The irony here couldn’t be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.
The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the
"degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal
fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have
eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court. Loaded with gray
areas, intellectual property law inevitably has a silencing effect,
discouraging the creation of new works.
