Just Do It - Be Neoliberal! Intellectual theft as a curatorial method Or: How capitalist exploitation is disguised as a "left-wing" strategy
Open Letter, July 3rd, 2005 ( -- Thanks to a lot of friends and colleagues and to Florian Cramer for an almost instant English translation ;-) --) For the exhibition "Just Do It - The Subversion of Signs from Marcel Duchamp to Prada Meinhof" at Lentos Museum in Linz, Austria, the three curators Thomas Edlinger, Florian Waldvogel and Raimar Stange have produced a catalogue consisting of (sometimes very long) passages from texts by different authors. The authors were neither asked for their permission of the reprint, nor do the texts bear any attribution, i.e. they cannot be matched to single authors. The catalogue thus appears to consist of one long, continuous text. The only ones named in this catalogue are Lentos Museum as the editor and the three curators of the exhibition. The publication is commercially distributed. The last page of the book contains, under the headline "Thanks", an impressive list of people. It remains unclear however if those are the names of the authors whose texts were used, people who supported and collaborated in the exhibition or even commercial sponsors. The authors who are named here did not know that they would be put on that list. In most general terms, this is a misunderstanding and even an abuse of the concepts of "culture jamming", "appropriation" and "subversion of signs". Those practices are not a general license for serving yourself with the work of your colleagues, but - mostly in the field of net activism - a strategy of appropriating symbols (trademarks, corporate identities, logos) in order to subvert the authority of large corporations. They are about the critical, artistic alteration of ruling codes, not uncritical postmodern recycling, and they are not meant to free lazy curators and critics from doing their work. In the case of "Just do it", the misunderstanding does not seem to be based on a lack of knowledge, but an intentional carreerist camouflage strategy. A few elaborations: 1) In fields where free distribution of works is more important than commercial use - like in free software, the sciences, certain areas of art and other volunteer work - proper attribution and crediting people is indispensable and part of fair ethics. After all, the authors have no gain from their work except public recognition. The "Just Do It" book is even too cheap for that. If the editors had been consequent, they should have left out their own names, too, instead of taking credit for the texts themselves. EXPLOITATIVE MISAPPROPRIATION OF OTHER PEOPLE'S LABOR 2) According to [continental European] copyright laws, proper attribution is an indispensable right of every author. There can be no doubt that an illegal act was committed here that could be brought to court. 3) Yes, there are pseudonymous and anonymous publications like those of Luther Blissett. But it is solely upon the author to choose such a form of publication, not upon some editor. According to both legal and ethical rules, it is an editor's duty to get a permit from an author for every kind of use, including secondary uses, unless there are other contractual agreements or license rules. The exhibition itself documents that artist transgress these rules. But if editors and curators do the same and claim the same artistic freedom for themselves, they shouldn't mind being called manipulators (just like the artists). 4) Authorship involves responsibility, with the author's signature at its visible expression. Without attribution, all texts are devaluated. PLAGIARISM 5) The catalogue doesn't declare its text a collective, anonymous work, but implicitly ascribes it to the curators. This way, they - respectively Lentos Museum - cash in their value. Other authors can no longer be identified and get purged from history like in Stalinist media. Since the readers get the impression that the texts were written by the curators, this is not simply suppression of names, but plagiarism. Unlike in artistic plagiarism, it's not a (weaker) individual borrowing from an institution, but an institution taking from individuals, similar to a professor who publishes the research of a student or assistant under his own name in an academic journal. DOUBLE RECUPERATION 6) The people listed on the "Thanks" page of the catalogue are being recuperated since at least of the authors I know had not been contacted and negotiated with in advance. This (fictitious) list suggests a quality standard that increases the reputation of the curators and the editor. 7) The authors were removed from the economic value chain of the catalogue publication on full purposes. In a private e-Mail message to me, the curators said that including them would have prevented the publication as a whole because it would have become too expensive. They thus testify to a quite disturbed sense of right and wrong, putting their economic freedom above the legal rights of the producers. 8) With their behavior, the curators demonstrate that they don't understand "appropriation": It's not about saving money for publishers. And not about using other people's work to increase your own reputation and market value. 9) Since Lentos Museum has refused to react so far, I propose the following: - all money made from the sales of the book will be donated to the Free Software Foundation Europe or the Creative Commons project. - the curators give back their honorarium and donate it to Creative Commons, too. - the remaining copies of the book will be given away for free and the manuscript will be put online as a freely downloadable PDF file. - Lentos Museum and the curators will be anonymized on all related websites and printed matters, just like the authors before. 10) Copyright gives me all means for stopping the distribution of the book. Since I don't mind giving away my texts when a minimum of ethical rules are being obeyed, such as attribution of author and source, I will draw one consequence from this unpleasant experience: I will attach a license to all my texts which unmistakably explains the fair play rules for their use, and let a lawyer handle all infringements. Inke Arns -- Dr. Inke Arns http://www.v2.nl/~arns/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net