What to do about Bad Art...
Posted: 04 Feb 2012 16:00
This may or may not have been discussed before in some form. If so, I apologize, and I hope the following adds to that discussion in some way.
So, I was walking down the street earlier today and I happened upon a street vendor hawking second-hand paperbacks. I saw that he was deeply engrossed in Kevin J. Anderson's seminal piece "Dune: House Atreides"--and then it occurred to me. There's got to be something we can do about bad art.
I know what you're thinking. Bad idea. Sure, we can try, but ultimately we're just going to end up with some garbage censorship system a la Victorian England or a glut of soulless, politicized hackery like the kind produced by Soviet flirtation with "socialist realism." But I think we can learn from these mistakes. And we've got to--just look at the stakes: the "Dune" prequels, the Star Wars prequels, now a Star Trek prequel, endless reams of garbage video game-inspired "novellas", and worse yet to come. A cursory glance at the highest-grossing 100 films of all time is positively bone-chilling. We are in deep here, people.
I have some proposals. The problem mainly arises because people with copyright and (but not necessarily) a ton of money have free reign to do any amount of intellectual damage they can in order to profit financially. In the U.S., copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, or, in the case of a corporation, 90 years. A goddamn century. This is crazy. Crazier still is the reality that most of the financial value from raping a masterwork is actually realized within a brief span of time. Solution #1 would involve limiting copyright to 1 year. That's it. Then your bad ideas have to compete with potentially good ideas from other people. What if this isn't enough? Clearly, any form of pre-publication review board will inevitably result in censorship of one kind or another. Moreover, post-publication review (even on the level of Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes) doesn't seem to deter these perverts and criminals from from annihilating our cultural patrimony for a quick buck. What if such review were given some form of legal authority? We do it with banks and the financial sector: Moody's, S&P, Fitch, Experian, Equifax, etc. The government grants private companies the ability to evaluate the financial health of corporations and individuals. We don't even have to go this far, Solution #2 would involve finding a way to evaluate the "artistic health" of new works.* Maybe this can determine the duration of the copyright, or perhaps the level of profit the author is entitled to, or what level of government funding is available to the work. There's a lot we can do with this idea without necessarily diving into overt censorship (like limiting the distribution range of the work).
I know that was a lot, and a lot of it was crazy. Let me know how crazy.
*At this point, I know that some of you are thinking, "But, wait, Wolf, you're an idiot. Art's subjective, who's to say any art is bad?" A fair point and good question. The reality is that the law does worse all the time (what proceeding doesn't involve a subjective interpretation of a set of so-called "objective" facts?)--so I don't mind giving this a shot one whit.
So, I was walking down the street earlier today and I happened upon a street vendor hawking second-hand paperbacks. I saw that he was deeply engrossed in Kevin J. Anderson's seminal piece "Dune: House Atreides"--and then it occurred to me. There's got to be something we can do about bad art.
I know what you're thinking. Bad idea. Sure, we can try, but ultimately we're just going to end up with some garbage censorship system a la Victorian England or a glut of soulless, politicized hackery like the kind produced by Soviet flirtation with "socialist realism." But I think we can learn from these mistakes. And we've got to--just look at the stakes: the "Dune" prequels, the Star Wars prequels, now a Star Trek prequel, endless reams of garbage video game-inspired "novellas", and worse yet to come. A cursory glance at the highest-grossing 100 films of all time is positively bone-chilling. We are in deep here, people.
I have some proposals. The problem mainly arises because people with copyright and (but not necessarily) a ton of money have free reign to do any amount of intellectual damage they can in order to profit financially. In the U.S., copyright lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, or, in the case of a corporation, 90 years. A goddamn century. This is crazy. Crazier still is the reality that most of the financial value from raping a masterwork is actually realized within a brief span of time. Solution #1 would involve limiting copyright to 1 year. That's it. Then your bad ideas have to compete with potentially good ideas from other people. What if this isn't enough? Clearly, any form of pre-publication review board will inevitably result in censorship of one kind or another. Moreover, post-publication review (even on the level of Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes) doesn't seem to deter these perverts and criminals from from annihilating our cultural patrimony for a quick buck. What if such review were given some form of legal authority? We do it with banks and the financial sector: Moody's, S&P, Fitch, Experian, Equifax, etc. The government grants private companies the ability to evaluate the financial health of corporations and individuals. We don't even have to go this far, Solution #2 would involve finding a way to evaluate the "artistic health" of new works.* Maybe this can determine the duration of the copyright, or perhaps the level of profit the author is entitled to, or what level of government funding is available to the work. There's a lot we can do with this idea without necessarily diving into overt censorship (like limiting the distribution range of the work).
I know that was a lot, and a lot of it was crazy. Let me know how crazy.
*At this point, I know that some of you are thinking, "But, wait, Wolf, you're an idiot. Art's subjective, who's to say any art is bad?" A fair point and good question. The reality is that the law does worse all the time (what proceeding doesn't involve a subjective interpretation of a set of so-called "objective" facts?)--so I don't mind giving this a shot one whit.