Legal art forgery, for the sake of movies (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Legal art forgery, for the sake of movies (2014)

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69 pointstheneedful35 comments

When my mom was an art student in the 1950s, duplicating a famous painting was a training exercise. In fact, the museum would let you bring in your easel and set it up in the exhibit hall. I remember seeing this done when I was a kid. Maybe they've gotten too prickly about security, or copyrights, because I don't see this being done any more.

As an art student in London in 1982, this was common practice. I remember doing a pastel copy of one of Degas' washing nudes at the Cortauld Institute. You would often see art students set up in a museum like that, though I haven't seen that again in many years.

Seeing just this taking place was one of the highlights for me when visiting the Musée d'Orsay last year - seeing people sketch and watercolour in several of the galleries made the museum become so much more alive.

I remember seeing this in the 2000s - students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the galleries, though not with easels. Usually pastels or pencils on a large drawing pad.

Surely today you’d just take a photo with your phone and paint at home.

Camera cannot capture subtle details that are visible only through naked eyes and a creative brain to process

The only thing a camera is not capturing is any 3D details and light reflectivity. Unless you are trying to create an absolute perfect replica, I’m not sure why you’d need that level of detail. As an artist you should be able to add that detail yourself.

There's plenty of reasons to not use a photo or a scan, but some trivial reasons are: translucent, metallic/pearl, and fluorescent paints and pigments.

Other reasons include gamut limitations, interactions with light (as you've noted already), and the point of the exercise is to capture minor details and attempt to understand the artist's original decision making processes. That can involve looking at the artwork under different lighting conditions, from different angles and so on.

Photos of course make good reference pieces, but snapping a photo or downloading a scan of a piece is going to leave many frustrating questions unanswered.

Despite the outcome the goal isn't to reproduce the piece. It's to emulate the process that led to the piece.

There are a million reasons why a photograph is not equivalent to an in-person artwork, but the most convincing one in my experience is scale. Computers make every painting into the size of your screen. Seeing a gigantic painting in person by an artist that specializes in scale is an entirely different experience.

As examples: Botticelli’s Venus is a much different experience in person, when you see it from across the room. Anslem Kiefer’s paintings don’t hit you nearly as hard via photographs vs. in person. And so on.

I think the process also involves focusing on and appreciating the craft of the painting through the process of redrawing it.

Otherwise that art-school lesson is rather that every impression in the world can be equally represented by a JPEG on some screen (and while painting is a fun exercise, it's just "a imprecise JPEG with extra steps")...

Even the best photography does a very poor job of capturing what many works of art actually look like. This is an area where tech is not the answer, and those that insist it is are just ignorant of the subtleties of actual artwork. BTW, this isn't some woo-woo claim, there are myriad things that cameras capture very poorly, if at all, starting with the obvious things like reflections (amny types), refractions (ditto), transparency and translucency (esp. in marble!), and many, many more.

Have you ever looked at a painting?

tbh the copyright stuff always feels way too long - I just want to look at cool art and make stuff without all this red tape

Most of the art in museums is long past the copyright date. This includes many artists who are considered "modern". Works by Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, M. C. Escher, Max Ernst and Constantin Brâncuși are some found on the recent lists of art entering the public domain.

Originally copyright was 14 years with the option to extend another 14 years if you registered your copyright. That seems a lot more reasonable to me, no idea how we ended up with 100+ year copyrights.

I'm also sure this inhibits digitization of art because the museums are balancing access and revenue.

(2014)

Added above. Thanks!

>Why This Movie Perfectly Re-Created a Picasso, Destroyed It, and Mailed the Evidence to Picasso’s Estate

Pablo Picasso died more than fifty years ago at the age on 91. Four of his children are dead and the one remaining alive is 76. It's really stupid that people have to go all of this trouble for work done so long ago. Intellectual property laws should not protect your work for the benefit of your middle-aged grandchildren.

A difficult to notice watermark that prevents it being sold fraudulently as real should be more than enough.

But, as the argument goes, nobody would ever make art without the guarantee of royalties going to the artist's next 3 or 4 generations of kin. They would just... never take up painting, composing, acting, and so on.

I can't tell if you're being hyperbolic.

Plenty of people make art to express themselves, not for the potential profit of it.

He is, but the idiocy of other people has made you question that fact.

That wasn't the point.

It seems like the the people making the film were happy to work with the foundation, for whom this was their first such request.

Even if they had an adversarial posture towards the foundation, the alternative would probably involve a court of law sorting this out, with all the costs of time and money that entails. Even if they were certain they were in their rights to just add a watermark, any risk that could potentially render the film unreleasable for an any amount of time would be unacceptable.

The explanation is simpler than that. Generational copyright is to the movie studio’s direct financial benefit.

Still pretty stupid that we as a society have created such a system. We rob the authors and artist of today to pay the estates of those long dead.

Stupid doesn't quite do it justice. Even Mark Twain who once argued for perpetual copyright compromised at the grandchildren: "let them take care of themselves". And yet here we are, watching an "estate" defend its state granted monopoly on the works of the dead for the benefit of grandchildren.

Macaulay is eerily prescient on the matter.

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

> even if I believed in a natural right of property, independent of utility and anterior to legislation, I should still deny that this right could survive the original proprietor

> even those who hold that there is a natural right of property must admit that rules prescribing the manner in which the effects of deceased persons shall be distributed are purely arbitrary, and originate altogether in the will of the legislature

> It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

> the evil effects of the monopoly are proportioned to the length of its duration. But the good effects for the sake of which we bear with the evil effects are by no means proportioned to the length of its duration.

> We all know how faintly we are affected by the prospect of very distant advantages, even when they are advantages which we may reasonably hope that we shall ourselves enjoy. But an advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we know not by whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action.

> At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. [...] Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.

> On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as “Robinson Crusoe” or the “Pilgrim’s Progress” shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller

I personally think copyright tend are to long. But at the moment it is essentially death plus 70 years, which means Picasso's work will enjoy another 17 years of protection, unless they were works for hire. As far as a watermark I'm guessing that works be between the new artist and the original artist/estate

Where did that seemingly arbitrary 70 number come from? I don't get the reasoning behind it, why not make it 10 for example?

Companies didn’t want to lose copyright on previously created works, most notably Steam Boat Willy.

US constitution says copyright duration needs to be finite, but it kept being extended in little increments. Nobody has succeeded in pushing for more than 70 years yet so slowly a few works have been entering the public domain every year including just recently Steamboat Willie.

IIRC it was bumped up whenever the Mickey Mouse got near the line.

Surprised Disney haven't managed to get it changed to death of the copyright holder + 70 years, rather than the artist. That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons even death may die.

Greed. When you're a trillion dollar industry and your monopolies are about to expire, you lobby the government to get them extended.

What's really stupid is the 12 monkeys lawsuit .

This happened in 1996 though.

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