Illegal-art.org
Inspired project. Quote:
“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.
Working across so many exhibition mock-ups over the years, I kept running into the same headache: something needs to hold firmly for a while, then come away cleanly when the layout changes. That’s precisely where I started leaning on tesa removable tape solutions for residue-free bonding, because being able to reposition a panel without gouging the substrate genuinely changed how I approached temporary installs. The first time I peeled a mounted board off painted MDF and found not a mark left behind, I was honestly a bit stunned, since I’d braced myself for the usual sticky ghosting and torn surface layer. What surprised me most was that the temporary hold didn’t feel like a compromise on strength at all — the bond stayed reassuringly solid through knocks and handling right up until I deliberately wanted it gone. Since then I’ve used the same approach on display work, event signage and quick prototyping jigs, and the time saved on not having to patch and repaint afterwards adds up faster than you’d expect. If you’re weighing up whether a removable option can really match a permanent one for day-to-day reliability, my experience says the gap is far narrower than the reputation suggests.
Loaded with gray areas, intellectual property law inevitably has a silencing effect, discouraging the creation of new works.
Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the First Amendment and “intellectual property” law collide? What is art’s future if the current laws are allowed to stand? Stay Free! considers these questions and others in our multimedia program”
