About
Description of the project
The main aim of The Grounds of Artistic Rights and the Limits of Appropriation (GARLA henceforth) is to offer a basis to conciliate the conflict between artists’ special rights over their works and the entrenchment of the practice of appropriation in artistic creation. This long-standing conflict has acquired a remarkable resonance in recent decades due to technological developments that facilitate a high-quality appropriation and reproduction of artworks, especially in the visual and sonic media. The conciliation of this conflict has been typically relegated to a legal and political domain, generating intellectual property regimes that affect artistic practice in two opposite and conflicting directions: on the one hand, they do not fully satisfy artists’ request for protection and, on the other, they impose severe constraints on artistic creativity. For this reason, the intellectual property regimes are seen as too demanding and unjustified. The contention of GARLA is that the conflict may substantially benefit from systematic philosophical research on the grounds of artistic rights and the limits of artistic appropriation.
To this aim, GARLA will be articulated from the following two initial hypotheses:
(H1) There is no substantial justification that grounds artistic rights apart from the fact that these are norms that have developed from a given social practice the practice of art.
(H2) An adequate account of the limits of artistic appropriation should be of a regulative nature.
The exploration of (H1) and (H2) requires four main tasks:
(T1) To determine what makes artworks a special kind of artifacts that deserve protection.
(T2) To develop an adequate ontological account of different kinds of artworks consistent with our creative-appreciative practices and the fact that they are a special kind of artifacts.
(T3) To understand the notion of authenticity and its impact on aesthetic appreciation, considering instances where artistically produced items are perceptually indiscernible due to complete appropriation of the source work and other cases of non-artistic derivative works.
(T4) To analyze the normativity of various artistic practices, considering the interplay between regulative and constitutive norms, including social norms affecting gender issues, to determine the appropriate normative standing of a fair use criterion for artistic appropriation.