Copyduty, beautyduty
Going back to Alphia Hart's attitude about copyright, which started my thoughts about the need to switch from "rights" to duties. When I wrote this a few months ago I hadn't quite assembled the theme:

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Reviewing Hart's view of copyright, which was unique in 1954:

Copyrighting everything you write is a confession that you have little faith in your ability to continue producing salable stuff--and that there may come a time when you'll have to fall back on your own, protected material to make a living. When we can't produce new copy for The ABERREE, The ABERREE ceases to exist, because we're certain no one wants to read what we said yesterday and today tomorrow.

I reached a similar conclusion a long time ago in making courseware. The restrictions of 'digital rights' get stricter and more tangled every year, but they don't bother me because I have CONFIDENCE in my own ability to produce new images and animations.

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Now framing it as "rights" to duties: The newer Disney versions of copyright law show the insanity of "inherent rights" more perfectly than other applications. In this dyslogical delusion, every "creative" product has the "inherent right" to be held and sold. When everything is automatically "protected" without any form of registration or payment for title, raw force is the only determinant of title. In plain reality, the Disney law gives total freedom to the mafia with the largest army of consiglieri, which mysteriously and astonishingly turns out to be Disney.

When you start with the GOD-ASSIGNED DUTY to create order and value, the selling is secondary. You can try to sell your created products for money, and customers can buy them. You can't transfer the DUTY OF CREATION to a publisher because the publisher didn't create the item. You can pay the publisher to disseminate your product, or you can persuade the publisher to bet on your product, splitting the profit by negotiation. The publisher is not the owner, it's just providing a service for you. (This is parallel to the sharia paradigm of capitalism, which STRONGLY encourages you to USE your capital instead of hoarding it. Land should be USED for growing crops. Money should be USED to make products for people to USE. Skill should be USED to invent and develop more products and services for others to USE.)

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An excellent essay by Gregory Wolfe published this week in Imaginative Conservative brings beauty into the realm of duty:

Whereas I once believed that the decadence of the West could only be turned around through politics and intellectual dialectics, I am now convinced that authentic renewal can only emerge out of the imaginative visions of the artist and the mystic. This does not mean that I have withdrawn into some anti-intellectual Palace of Art. Rather, it involves the conviction that politics and rhetoric are not autonomous forces, but are shaped by the pre-political roots of culture: myth, metaphor, and spiritual experience as recorded by the artist and the saint.

No argument with the above. Some argument with this part:

Thus I was forced to account for the fact that many conservatives had succumbed to philistinism. Why did they utter these blanket condemnations of “modern art”? Why would anyone demand that art—a subtle medium, characterized by the indirections of irony, ambiguity, and hidden meaning—preach the “truth” directly? Why categorize artists and writers as good or bad in terms of ideology, rather than of imaginative vision?

The root of the problem, I believe, is a misunderstanding of, or aversion to, the nature of the imagination itself. Part of this can be traced to the Puritan and pragmatic strains in the American character. Conservatives have, by and large, focused their energies on political action and the theoretical work necessary to undertake action. The indirection of art, with its lack of moralizing and categorizing, strikes the pragmatic mind as being unedifying, and thus as inessential. Insofar as the great artists and writers of the past are admired, it is for their support of some idea, rather than for the complex, many-sided vision of their art.

Here Wolfe is short on knowledge. Part of the Repoof condemnation of "modern art" was specifically GENERATED by CIA as part of its campaign to use chaos as a universal smasher and wrecker of civilization. CIA's salesmen to conservatives (eg Buckley and Skousen) made sure that conservatives spent lots of energy attacking COOL shit. When everyone sees that Repooflicans are UNCOOL and Democrats are COOL, Deepstate wins public support.

On the question of indirection and subtlety, there's no difference between the sides. Since the '70s, ALL publicly visible "art" has been moralistic and preachy, devoted solely to political action. Nearly all of this comes from the Left because the Left owns all the media. There are a few equally preachy and clunky productions from the non-Left (eg Christian movies and Christian rock music) but those preachy and clunky productions lack the quality and punch of the Left's preachy and clunky productions, so the Left wins it all.

Above all, I don't buy the basic assertion that art is supposed to have "irony, ambiguity, and hidden meaning", because I don't buy the implication that only trained and professional artists can produce art.

Everyone can produce beauty. Everyone is MEANT to produce beauty.

A janitor who buffs a tile floor to a mirror finish every night produces INFINITELY more beauty than any professional artist of any description. His beautiful floor allows YOUR imagination free rein to see the sun and the furniture and the people from a new angle. A car body man or a house renovator who restores order after the chaos of a crash or a flood is generating INFINITELY more beauty than the TV "comedian" demon who mocks the car body man for being UNCOOL. The repaired house or car grants you the ambiguity and indirection of USING the house or car to satisfy your own creative ends. Before the repair the house or car was incapable of serving your desires.

Life is purpose. We are indescribably complex artworks, created directly or indirectly by an indescribable source of purpose and order. Our DUTY is to make more life, more order, more value, and more BEAUTY.

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A later and perhaps more useful thought along the Hart lines.

Labels: Aberree, From rights to duties, Natural law = Sharia law

  ¶ 11:44 PM