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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

"But you wouldn't have gotten money there anyway, if they had never produced the art." I argued.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean here, but I think you're overlooking the possibility that they might have been commissioned to produce an original rather than a derivative work.

Is art, similarly to science, not an iterative process based on the input of dozens, hundreds, thousands of people that came before us?

No. It's certainly influenced by prior art, and techniques like sampling, collage, and cut-ups certainly allow for art that is comprised of prior art but rearrange in a novel way. But a lot of art is original, and speaking of someone's originality is usually one of the highest artistic compliments one can pay. I think this discounting of original work is one of the flaws of postmodernist culture, in which the referential frame is accorded equal or greater semantic weight than the content within. I may be projecting here, though.

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> But a lot of art is original, and speaking of someone's originality is usually one of the highest artistic compliments one can pay.

Um, this is exactly true in science. But scientists are generally required to make clear and explicit the influences for their work.

> Um, this is exactly true in science. But scientists are generally required to make clear and explicit the influences for their work.

I think a lot of artists miss the trade-off. If others feel invited to improve on your work then they'll be more likely to credit you, because in the alternative where derivatives are not allowed, anyone inspired by your work will be afraid to credit you for fear of it being seen as an admission of wrongdoing.

I didn't express that very well. To me the difference is that in science you need to make good on your claim - it's no good announcing my intuition that the universe is has the interior of a foofaraw without defining exactly what I mean by that and how it might be tested, in terms that make sense to other people. In art it only matters that you engage the viewer (or listener or...) who need not necessarily have any critical understanding of a work in order to derive an aesthetic experience from it.

That's not much more helpful, sorry. It might give more context if I mention that I have an extreme antipathy towards postmodernism and critical theory in general, which colors my opinions on related topics.

Hm. I understand your individual points, but don't understand the argument you're trying to make.

Why does this difference between art and science justify art's comparatively hostile attitude toward "derivative" works?

Also, I don't agree that there is such a stark contrast. I think you over-state the role of testability in science (esp. the task of articulating theories) and under-state the importance of the social process in science.

Oh, it's worth noting that sometimes scientific communities do frown on "derivative" works. E.g. scooping other group's low-hanging fruit. But the general sentiment regarding these cases doesn't even come close to even contemplating something like litigation. (edit: oh, I guess there's some patenting in the natural sciences esp. in near-to-market research. But patents != copyright. And CS comes a lot closer to the nature of art, and AFAIK it's unheard of for a researcher to sue another researcher over derivative works.)

Why does this difference between art and science justify art's comparatively hostile attitude toward "derivative" works?

Because science is engaged in a search for truth, new actionable information. Art is expressive, so copying someone else's work (for display rather than to develop one's technique,of course) is a sort of freeloading.

It's also worth considering the economic incentives for science and art are also pretty different. For good or ill, there are few scientists who labor unrewarded out of compulsion, not least because there isn't a whole lot of science you can do without a budget, although I can think of a few mathematicians who fit that bill, eg Grigori Perelman. However, by mentioning the economic side of things I wouldn't want to give the impression that I support existing copyright regimes, which I think are actually economically destructive to individual artists in many respects - it's just that I don't support the opposite position either, of nothing being truly original and therefore nothing being deserving of copyright protection.

I do think testability, or rather falsifiability, is important in science insofar as it makes the differences between conjecture and theorem. But I see where you're coming from; there can be a lot of value in an elegant theory even if it turns out to be superficially wrong, because it can open up new vistas of intellectual inquiry - Riemannian geometry springs to mind, where the failure of [many previous mathematicians] to prove Euclid's parallel postulate by reductio ad absurdum opened up a whole class of non-Euclidean geometrical perspectives even though such geometries were 'wrong' in the Cartesian context.

But to get back to the main point, with science your aiming for results of some sort, whose value lies in their explanatory power (even if that opens up a host of new questions, like some empirical observation that points out a natural phenomenon does not behave as we thought it did, without offering any theory as to why that should be the case). Art, by contrast, is inherently subjective, and might as easily be constructed to alienate or frustrate analysis, or be indifferent to the possibility thereof.

I think there's a tendency today to see art as an accretion of communicatory techniques, but I'm deeply at odds with this view, and feel that it reduces artistic endeavor to the level of marketing. (This is a very personal perspective, obviously.) If you're working creatively you're often asked/advised 'tell a story' or 'articulate what you want to say' or 'identify your point of view'. In a postmodern world, art is treated as a lens through which to view the artist, and there's a great emphasis on context and explanation, such that 'artist's statements' are considered essential to the presentation of art. To my mind this is an awful state of affairs, reducing art from the trancendental to the transactional. Self-consciously derivative and combinatorial art exacerbates this.

> Self-consciously derivative and combinatorial art exacerbates this.

You are absolutely entitled to your artistic opinions and I have no interest in challenging those.

However, using the hammer of law to enforce your aesthetic perspectives is just unwise.

Copyright law is absolutely not the place to choose a best-possible-definition of what constitutes good art. We should instead take a broadest-resonable-definition and work from there. And I think most reasonable people -- who are attempting not to enforce their own aesthetic sensibilities -- will agree that if a significant subcommunity of well-established artists call some variation a piece of art (even if derivative or uninspired), then we can proceed assuming it's not an "exact copy".

> there are few scientists who labor unrewarded out of compulsion

There's up to a $40k split between what a top science student can make in industry and a first year grad student stipend at a top school. Plus the dent to future income potential. And even then they are not paid exclusively for the science -- the stipend typically includes lots of community work and/or teaching that is unrelated to the science. A lot of students at lower ranked universities get stipends exclusively for teaching and complete research in their spare time. In other words, completely unrewarded.

And "most scientists" are grad students.

So I respectfully disagree (and even resent) the implication that science doesn't involve significant personal sacrifice for most scientists, at least on the order of magnitude of the what most artists experience.

My point w.r.t. science was that a lot of highly derivative work is done (including "mashups" of theories, techniques, etc.). Although we realize this research isn't "as original", people aren't going around accusing these researchers of stealing their ideas. Of if they are, they certainly aren't even thinking about the hammer of law or lost profits. This fundamentally demonstrates that the artistic community is making an unnecessary and avoidable choice.

A tiny fraction of art is original. Compare 10,000 songs and you see a few patterns repeated over and over and over. Compare 1,000 high end fasion shows and you see the same repeating patterns. TV and movies are so drivitive you can often predict lines word for word ahead of time. The human body can twist in amazing ways but sculpture focuses on a miscule fraction of them. Etc etc.

Even abstract paintings tend to rectangles way more than say an octagon. I mean there explorations of form and color yet almost none of them cut the canvas into an interesting shape.

You're mixing up originality with novelty. Landscapes might seem like a boring subject to you, but the originality of a landscape painting lies in the choice of perspective (both spatial and temporal), the choice of framing, the choice of color palette, kind of brushwork and so on. Two works can treat the same subject but be significantly different.

Unfortunately, "the possibility that they might have been commissioned to produce an original" has nothing to do with it.

Take the case of Shepard Fairey's use of the AP's photograph of Obama. The iconic "Hope" poster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_%22Hope%22_poster

Now that photographer certainly never would have been paid or even heard of had the photo been used as inspiration. Yet, Fairey lost that case in Federal Court.

People are prevented from using a photograph of someones face to remix into a vectorized, colorized, cartoonized version of this face. A photo that would have died a quiet death as a newsroom archive. It is my opinion that Fairey's usage did nothing but add to our collective culture and that preventing use like this in the future is quite chilling for creatives of many fields. (For more on this topic, written much more eloquently see: http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/)

What happens when a company does a 3D scan of Briteny Spears and produces a model of every muscle movement possible, and then claims copyright over every single photograph and drawing of Ms. Spears that every gets produces hereafter? We already see a similar tactic being used with patent trolls, "patent everything, sue everyone."

Actually, truly original art would be nigh-near incomprehensible to the viewer, because it wouldn't be using the language of shared cultural experience to communicate with the viewer.

Read any of the great artists and they will admit that there are no new ideas. Shakespeare knew it. Even the Greeks knew it when they were ostensibly "inventing" theater.

So what? Art doesn't necessarily need to be comprehended to be engaging, indeed much of the art that I like is fascinating to me because of my limited understanding of the artist's thought process - particularly but not limited to visual art and music.

Incidentally, nigh means the same thing as near.

Read any of the great artists and they will admit that there are no new ideas.

C'mon, you know that's BS, for the same reason you pick a figure like Shakespeare as an exemplar of 'great'. If he actually thought that then why did he waste his time writing all those poems and plays, which are supposedly no different from anything that came before?

I hear this argument mostly from people who have never sat down and worked to produce something.

I've had quite the opposite experience, the only people who claim they've got original ideas--and entrepreneurs who want you to sign NDAs to protect their "great ideas"--are the ones who have never made anything on their own.

There are entire books on this subject. Austin Kleon's "Steal Like an Artist" is perhaps the most engaging one right now. Get it. Read it. Quit putting "ideas" on a pedestal.

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