Classical Values :: my context is not mine

February 26, 2008

my context is not mine

What is creation? I'm not getting cosmic here, because I'm talking about the manufacturing process -- whether in the artistic sense or the commercial sense or both -- when a thing or things are made by man. In the broad sense, creation can be said to be anyone making anything, but in the property sense this is a little too broad. Because, anything which is made (or created) is not really considered a creation until the creator deems it so. Thus, if I stop writing this post right now, and I do not publish it, I cannot be said to have created or authored this post even though I wrote it. There are many hundreds of unfinished posts in the archives of this blog, and if someone managed to dig them out, it would be wholly unreasonable (and probably illegal, although I don't know the exact law) for that person to declare me the "author" of what I did not release and publish. To say that I "wrote" it might even be a stretch. If an artist takes a blank canvas and paints a background color, then throws a few colors on top of that to see how it looks and ultimately loses interest in the subject, can it really be said to be a painting by that artist?

Likewise, in manufacturing, a product cannot be said to be a product of a company which never releases it for distribution -- even if it is identical and made by the company employees in the same factory. To illustrate how crazy this is, when I was in Bangkok in the 1980s, the same factories that made name-brand La Coste shirts by day would keep cranking them out by night, only the night-time shirts were unauthorized, even though they were identical in every detail to the officially licensed versions. You could call this a form of theft by the workers, and obviously an unlicensed version of anything makes it less than real thing -- no matter how real it is. No expert in those days could possibly have been able to distinguish between the "real" La Coste shirts made by day and the "fake" La Coste shirts cranked out of the same factories by night, because they were identical. So what is a creation? Something made? Or something authorized and licensed? It strikes me that there is no agreed-upon definition.

Salvador Dali was much ridiculed for allegedly declaring that art by him was not his even though he had "created" it and signed it, and the following anecdote is well known and often repeated by art critics and gallery owners in support of the position that Dali had no standards:

The French art publisher Jean-Paul Delcourt, a signatory to some controversial Dali prints, tells about acquiring a dozen "Dali" lithographs from an American publisher and reselling them to an English dealer. The Englishman complained later than Enrique Sabater had declared them to be fakes, and a customer wanted his money back. The American publisher refused to do so because he had certificates of authenticity. Delcourt says he saw Dali at the Meurice Hotel and showed the prints to Dali and Gala.

"Dali whispered into Gala's ear, and Gala repeated his statement to me: 'Dali says the picture is good, the signature is good, but the work is a fake,' " Delcourt recalls.

"Why is it a fake?" Delcourt asked.

"The answer: 'Dali has not been paid.'

Now, admittedly, that looks like a ridiculous and arrogant statement for any artist to make. But why is it more ridiculous than it would be for the La Coste trademark owner to assert that shirts made in its own factories bearing its own logo were less than genuine if they went out the back door at night?

What is the difference between unauthorized creations and remarks made by politicians who speak "off the record"? And what about context? Does that mean anything?

Yesterday there was a big flap over Barack Obama's native costume. I thought it was a big yawn, but I guess he's lucky that he wasn't dressed up as one of the Three Kings for a Christmas pageant. What ought to matter is the intent.

I mean, here's Hillary Clinton, advocating white supremacy:

There's a more recent actual statement by Hillary which struck me as so surreal that I thoroughly enjoyed taking it "out" of "context." On Saturday, while waving her hands in an apparently enthusiastic manner, Hillary told her admiring reportorial entourage that she was running for president. The full video is here, but I have deliberately taken her "I'M RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!" remark out of context to illustrate my point:

Hey wait a minute!

I just said I was taking out of context Hillary's remark that she's running for president.

Well, she did say that, didn't she?

And she is running for president, isn't she?

Something does not make sense.

MORE: Pajamas Media has a roundup of reactions to the Obama costume context flap. (Via Glenn Reynolds, who knows that sartorial diversity can lead to problems.)

posted by Eric on 02.26.08 at 08:59 AM

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Comments

None of which applies to the Rolex watch my son purchased in Times Square.

Thanks for the post.

OregonGuy · February 26, 2008 01:22 PM

Hmm, I dunno. You can call it unlicensed (or outright theft, I guess), or unauthorised, even piracy, but you do not get to say "This is not my product".

You may recall that Iowahawk got seriously upset over the drive-by cut-and-paste of his BURMA SHAVE advert :) on Cranmer's blog as a comment. This, I believe, is closer to the La Coste analogy.

And I am pretty damned sure that the flap over P2P and WGA was corporations asserting their intellectual property rights. Think about it. They're basically saying 'This is our stuff, and you're pinching it from us'. They don't call it 'fake' software, but 'pirated' (ie stolen).

So what are fake goods? They're only fake if they're imitations or knockoffs. If it's the same bloody factory, under the same QA requirements, then it's the real deal - just stolen, or unauthorised, or pirated/whatever.

A crappy novel by Victor Hugo is still a Victor Hugo novel, even if he never published it before he died. For that matter, if yonder 'artist' had, in fact, started to do something with his canvas, that something is still his creation. Unfinished, maybe, but still.

An unfinished, never published blog post is still your creation.

GK · February 27, 2008 01:29 AM

I will also have to disagree about "this is not my product". Try using that excuse with the police should they find anything incriminating in your writings (of course assuming that what you wrote was, say, conspiring to commit a felony or some other illegal practice). I doubt they would take the fact that you did not formally publish it to disclaim your creation of it.

Also, the Dali anecdote, while cute, doesn't really shed light on reality. How should a collector look at those items? Dali implicitly said that he created them, but perhaps didn't release them through normal means or (strangely) didn't get royalties from the resale and so doesn't recognize it. I could see it dipping in price due the uncertainty for a time. However, now that the artist is dead and cannot continue to disapprove of future owners, there should be less of an effect. If anything, I think those items would increase in value relative to the value of nearly identical items, simply because of their involvement in such a famous incident. Also, how should investors distinguish between nearly identical pieces that Dali would have certified versus pieces that Dali would NOT have certified?

The analogy also has a weakness in that Dali (presumably) is the only source of Dali works. How can he pirate his own works? Whereas the workers at the factory are not La Coste, nor do they officially represent La Coste. So, there is nothing inherent in their production that makes it a La Coste product. Commodity products like that are also different, because there really isn't anything keeping someone, not from the factory, from making essentially identical products. Usually, though, the economics of the knock-offs encourages them to cut corners (can't sell it for anywhere near full price, therefore, they get less profit)

anomdebus · February 28, 2008 09:56 AM