[0100101110101101.ORG] IN ANTI-COPYRIGHT PARADISE

[PROPAGANDA@0100101110101101.ORG]

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>From “Orf”, 20 Mar 2000
http://www.orf.at/orfon/kultur/000320-3138/3141txt_story.html


IN ANTI-COPYRIGHT PARADISE

Olia Lialina has drawn criticism because she wants to sell net.art. Critics complain that
she wishes to "let net.art regress to the status of traditional art".


In her online gallery Art.Teleportacia, Olia Lialina offers net artworks for sale. She
drew heavy criticism from the net.art community for this since the project started in
summer 1998. On the Nettime mailing list, important questions concerning the copyright of
net artworks and the concept if selling online art were raised and discussed in a
sometimes very polemical style.

Ignorance of Copyright?

The net.art activists 0100101110101101.ORG regard Lialina's activities as plain ignorance
of the real strengths of the Internet. They find that the question "How to sell net.art"
blurs the actual intention, namely to let net.art "regress" to the status of traditional
art.

If copyright on net.art works is enforced to create the necessary precondition for selling
them, then this would put an end to the hopes of early net artists, according to
0100101110101101.ORG: "Within two years, net.art will be in all museums and art history
textbooks. The names of the 'protagonists of the heroic period' (an allusion to Lialina's
exhibition ''miniatures of the heroic period') will be known, influences, generations etc.
will be written down forever. In other words: the same shit we've been eating every time."

"The Real World instead of Confusion and Exchange"

At last, the utopia that everything would be better and different was particularly common
on the net. As 0100101110101101.ORG puts it: "The web is a paradise of anticopyright, of
plagiarism, of confusion and exchange. Why the hell do some people have to create a copy
of the real world at any price?"

Olia Lialina objects that the net simply exists in analogy to the real world and moreover
belongs to it. Her intention, she argues, is not to defend any particular concept, but to
accept the reality of the world where we live, online or offline.

To Buy Genius with the Artwork

Another disputant, snafu, is even more radical than 0100101110101101.ORG arguing that it
is not just copyright, but its underlying concept of the original which contradicts the
nature of the Internet. Originality, he says, is after all the basis which allowed "in the
past 200 years to steal artworks out of their contexts and abduct them into Western
Museums and Galleries. The artist's genius has always been there, caught in the artwork.
You buy the artwork and receive a piece of genius."

In the end, snafu proposes a compromise: "It is not wrong to demand money for net.art, but
neither is it perfect to create art for money". Lialinas reply: "But it is :)".

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