Please do not write novels

I shall never write novels.

When I was a little boy, a priest confiscated the novel I was about to read. I now understand he did it for the completely wrong reasons. His idea was that various sexual references included in the book were a threat for the purity of my soul. He did not realize that familiarity with sex and romance is part of a good education and a precious stock of knowledge. The problem with novels is elsewhere.

There is nothing neutral about a literary genre. Each one conveys a specific view of things. The vision of the world you can find in a novel will never be the same than the one you get from a tragedy or from epics. They cannot be translated into one another other. A Shakespearian novel would be a total impossibility. Each society puts some genre above all others and for good reasons: our favourite literature reflects who we are. The novel is the democratic genre par excellence. No matter the author, the message is the same: do not worry about your low level of self-esteem, other people, particularly the ones with noble aspirations, grand ambitions or romantic hopes, can be much more miserable than you could possibly fear to be. The entire art of the novelist is to tell their story, torture them like an entomologist pinning an insect on a piece of cork, humiliate them in all imaginable manners, show their weaknesses and - above all – make sure not a drop of illusion does remain in their heart when we turn the last page.

Tragedy does exactly the opposite. Shakespeare always treats his monsters with utmost respect, and shows divine forces animating their dark projects. Lady Macbeth, Gloucester, even Shylock are never mocked. The grandeur of their crimes is what brings them onto the scene. They stand there with as much dignity as Juliet.

“Lost Illusions” could be the title of any good novel. “Journey to the end of Night” is an alternative. No wonder Louis-Ferdinand Celine, immense genius and abject man, is by far the best French novelist in the 20^th century. His character was the person he despised most and knew best, i.e. himself. Debasing so much and so well one’s own double cannot be the act of a good man. But who told us after all that an artist should be a moral person?

If modern novels are a long exploration of the gutters of the mind, the spirit and of society, classical novels were already of the same vein. It all started with Cervantes depicting a brave man trying to restore the values of chivalry and exert the proud virtues of knighthood, as a grotesque example of the vanity of men. Mrs de Lafayette turned the loving Princess of Cleves into a harlot. Flaubert forbade mutual love or even intelligence to all his characters. For a while, however, American novels kept an epic tilt, while Russian authors were still breathing the sharp air of the steppes. Melville could not help being fascinated by Ahab’s folly. Dostoyevsky felt visible compassion for Raskholnikov’s. But when Jack London’s Martin Eden came, the game was finally over. Humiliation was to be from now on the only reward of extraordinary men.

I read novels. I must confess I do it with great pleasure when they help me discover aspects of the human heart I did not know existed or could not understand. I have generally little personal sympathy for the imaginary world novelists live in. All they can get is my admiration. This is not enough to want to be one of them.

No matter what my own preferences are, novels will remain one of the best expressions of our time.

This is how the world goes.

Intellectual Improperty (Part 3 – end)

In the same manner that new technology and market forces are undermining the role of copyrights in performing arts and related industries (see previous post), plastic arts (sculpture, painting, photography, etc.) are being forced to change directions and return to more traditional solutions.

Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol are landmarks of contemporary art which cannot be fully understood without their contributions. Although both were gifted artists under classical standards, showing great talent at creating individual and carefully crafted masterpieces, their fame came from their opposite stand that major art may come from minor displacements in our relationship to highly reproducible objects. Duchamp introduced ‘ready-mades’ and his famous ‘Fountain’ (a mere urinal) as a proof that industrial objects of minimal value can acquire an entirely new meaning when the very exhibition of art is used as an artistic tool. Warhol continued the demonstration with reproducible images of commodities, such as Campbell cans, Brillo boxes or icons of movie stars.

The irony was that while both artists were denouncing the fetishism traditionally associated with art, their own works became subjects of more veneration and more fetishism than anything before. Collectors started purchasing at prices never heard of and storing inside vaults objects which could have been obtained for a dime, and that a better understanding of the artists’ explicit intentions should have led to acquire preferably from supermarkets. The comedy was to reach a climax when Duchamp’s Fountain was hammered by a fan at the Beaubourg museum. During his trial the iconoclast explained that he agreed to pay for the repair, within the limits of what a decent plumber could ask for, as opposed to the half million requested by the museum as the actual cost of the restoration by experts trained in works from the Renaissance. He also claimed to be recognized as a co-contributor to the piece and a co-beneficiary to all related copyrights. Hilarious indeed and a good example of the paradoxes of copyright…

For a while photography was threatening sculpture and painting to become the major form of contemporary art. Serial art was reaching the same prices than unique pieces. Things have been recently calming down, and the specific quality of each singular copy is again considered as an essential factor of its economic value.

Absurdity, however, has not completely left the field of photography, as owners of rights to the objects that are being photographed are also granted rights to the picture itself. I am not talking of the legitimate right to privacy and control over one’s own image, but the strange idea that the mere image of material objects should be appropriated by someone. The city of Paris has a claim, for instance, on any picture taken of the Eiffel Tower. One could understand that smaller museums with limited funding would ask for a modest fee for using a camera within their premises. There is no justification, however, to limiting the passive reproduction of images of things already offered to public view, unless we adopt the metaphysical and rather primitive creed that the essence of things resides in their image.

In the distribution of digital copies of images of any kind, a part of the value comes from the service of distributing them, sometimes more than from the image itself. An image bank can draw revenues from gathering pictures, classifying them and making them available for downloading. The bank still has to pay for procurement, particularly when images are associated to trademarks, as trademarks imply contractual arrangements with their respective owners. A photographer’s trademark may or may not be important, only the market can decide. What is certain is that no one can contract on behalf of Leonardo when dealing with a picture of the Mona Lisa!

Protecting artists against unauthorized commercial use of their work does not mean preventing unlimited duplication for private use, nor the free secondary reproduction of images taken of any primary work.

Analogue is the situation of writers. In the case of journalism or screenplays, the work being created at someone else’s request for immediate release, a simple contractual arrangement is sufficient to generate payment. Such contract may very well include an override on future revenues. If the signature of the author has any residual value, then it can be treated as a trademark and protected as such for a while against infringements during secondary distribution. If on the contrary the market does not acknowledge any value to the trademark, i.e. if the text is completely dissociated from the author’s name when reproduced or used, such text has become a commodity, and I frankly would see no reason to grant it any privilege, compared to ideas or concepts. I feel sorry while writing this for one of my closest friends who specializes in remakes of foreign films. I simply hope he will see the advantage the recommended change could mean for the creation of films in general.

It is considered ignorance or bad taste to refer to a concept without mentioning the name of its first author, unless the reference is implicit or obvious. Nevertheless, it would not cross anybody’s mind to initiate lawsuits for payment of fees to Freud’s or Lenin’s heirs for use of their respective notions of the unconscious or the proletariat. Why then should we be fined for having bought a cheap copy of a Gucci © handbag, at least when the trademark is not used? Infringement of the trademark should be repressed (through sellers not buyers), as it can induce the consumer in error about the genuine quality of the object. In the absence of a trademark, however, the transaction bears on the idea of a Gucci © handbag, which is a totally different reality.

A world with no patent and copyright (and yet with trademarks) would be a better world, more logical and efficient. Creators would still create, and their creations would be used more. Trade would continue, based on services rendered and contractual arrangements. Lawyers and monopolies only would have something to lose. Who do you think will win, at least on the short term?

This is how the world goes ©.

Intellectual Improperty (Part 2)

Copyright is the minefield of intellectual property. Its main beneficiaries seldom are intellectuals, and yet find among the intellectuals their best allies, copyrights applying to books, newspapers, plays, films, software, websites, painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, etc.

As post-Guttenberg kings were trying their best to make sure no publication would escape their control, free minds were left with no other choice then than finding publishers in foreign republics, drawing small income from their works, if any at all. At the end of the 18^th century, an awkward alliance took place between the censorship of governments and the greed of authors. Beaumarchais, the author of the ‘Marriage of Figaro’, also an arms dealer and a tirelessly litigious character, succeeded in combining things at his best advantage: from now on the legal control of printing would be used not only for censorship but also for remunerating authors. This was the beginning of copyright.

Not a philosopher nor a mathematician, Beaumarchais did not bother to protect ideas or concepts, no matter how valuable they were. As a matter of fact copyrights do not protect any such things, or for that matter, anything immaterial. They only protect the material form of the specific types of immaterial creations people like Beaumarchais could produce. No wonder paradoxes and contradictions would flourish on such grounds.

The current problems are quite different depending on the area of we consider: e.g. performing arts, writing and plastic arts. Performing arts have found themselves in the eye of the cyclone since the introduction of digital technologies. Verdi never sold music; he contracted with owners of theatres to sell seats, and became rich. One would purchase a ticket to listen to his performances, and the Italian wall painters whistling his best airs next morning on their scale were not asked for a fee. A contemporary Verdi can do exactly the same, leaving Sony Music desperate. Record companies had a short moment of glory. Among the mass of would-be musicians, they used to pick talents on a commercial basis. In the digital world, the audience is in charge of discovering new artists, for free, mostly though websites and (still illegal) copies. No one can impose purely commercial choices anymore, and talents can emerge as they did in older times, by the force buzz. Successful artists give concerts and can make fortunes. Copyright in music is useless and should therefore disappear. It will unless an irrational protection is given to an obsolete industry.

The next victim, obviously, will be the film industry. The disaster is soon to occur. There is simply no way to prevent a digital copy of a film to spread over the Internet in a matter of hours. The good news for the industry is that most people would probably be ready to pay for the service of a guarantied quality of the files, and of large bandwidth for faster downloads. The bad news is they would only pay a modest fee, unlikely to be sufficient to amortize the cost of Hollywood productions. The only reasonable solution I can see, other than fighting lost legal battles against millions of consumers, is to change the very nature of future films, dividing them into two completely different types. The first group would be productions so spectacular that it would make little sense to watch them on a TV or computer monitor. Such films would be placed in a situation very similar to live concerts. After all, who would bother downloading a digital copy of an Imax movie? The second group would be inexpensive and smaller films, typically shot with video cams, and perhaps pre-financed by subscriptions. The film industry is likely to resist as much as possible this evolution which will however open new paths to creation. Yet, inertia guarded by lawyers is a losing strategy.

(to be continued)

Can museums make money?

I am not sure art gained much from deserting the service of the gods for the service of money. Once the harm has been done, however, better be consistent. New puritans of art, replacing older puritans of religion, frown at the opening of a branch of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi (next to the Guggenheim’s).

This is strange, really. None of us has had time to see all the works belonging to the Louvre, or, for that matter, all works exposed in the regional museums participating in the project. So, the “Oh no, we won’t see these 300 works for 30 years!” sounds hypocritical to say the least. Why not start by having a better look at the tens of thousands of remaining works we keep neglecting every day?

As to the so-called “alienation of national treasures”, one should remember that many of these works were stolen by French armies or bought at a time when France had more cash than Abu Dhabi, and that they will be back anyway.

More importantly, even if museums are now quite uncertain of their missions, education certainly remains one of them. Educating other people to European art sounds like a decent idea. Doing it for a price makes perfect sense when you lack money and such people hardly know what to do with theirs.

The problem is that we are not very clear either about what education is. Understanding a work of art implies some knowledge of its iconography (another word for its “meaning”) and historical context. In order to acquire this kind of knowledge, digital copies can be used until a minimal level of familiarity is reached. They can easily be multiplied all over the world, while original works are used to show the real thing to people in grade of appreciating them. We are not exporting this to Abu Dhabi for a good reason: we don’t have it even at the Louvre. All we seem to offer to the masses of tourists invading the premises every morning are “Da Vinci Code trails”. Lucky Abu Dhabians who will be deprived of such achievements!

This is how the world goes