“Art Is Not A Loaf Of Bread”
Posted by Dan on 18 Nov 2004 at 04:56 pm | Tagged as: Uncategorized
“Tweedy: A piece of art is not a loaf of bread. When someone steals a loaf of bread from the store, that’s it. The loaf of bread is gone. When someone downloads a piece of music, it’s just data until the listener puts that music back together with their own ears, their mind, their subjective experience. How they perceive your work changes your work.Treating your audience like thieves is absurd. Anyone who chooses to listen to our music becomes a collaborator. People who look at music as commerce don’t understand that. They are talking about pieces of plastic they want to sell, packages of intellectual property.
I’m not interested in selling pieces of plastic. ”
Tweedy: “If they succeed, it will damage the culture and industry they say they’re trying to save.”
free culture. Despite his one line slurs on anarchism and ‘extremism’, Lessig’s book is a good “common man” reading about the dangers of unwittingly placing too much stock in intellectual property and digital rights management.
If I give you my intellectual property, I have not lost anything other than leverage against you — leverage for wealth making at your expense. If I give you the ‘digital’ art or ideas I make, I still have them. I haven’t lost anything. But now you have it too. We are both the better for it.
In our current culture, I believe we don’t live out or haven’t been taught that ideas can benefit everyone and that in turn, people with ideas deserve gratitude (a living) for them. Rather, we require strict, orwellian laws for such an obvious and honest transaction to take place; laws that I believe become slowly more and more twisted to maintain power and wealth in the hands of a few. We have been schooled in the assumption that opposition of self interest is natural and good, and so rely on those laws to define our morality, letting our individual desires spread like a virus. Our lives, both economically speaking and otherwise, are based around competition rather than giving.
Who can offer a new paradigm but for the creator who gave up everything and promised that we could accept his life, sacrifice, and rebirth?