Anne Barron (2002), 'The Legal Properties of Art' conference paper, Marxism and the Visual Arts Now, University College London.


Copyright makes distinctions of property in terms of 'work' - to copy it, to sell it, and so on, after the making act. Thus it severely limits the possibilities of a radical practice, such as tying its making to a particular author. The idea of the readymade, distributed or interactive work, despite being an orthodoxy in contemporary artistic production cannot be comprehended. Creativity in this sense is tied to a conservative and fixed paradigm that cannot account for dynamic processes. Anne Barron describes this idea of a stable and unified work as an affinity between copyright law and Modernism's idea of purity and autonomy bound up with the outmoded institutions that support art's commodification:   

'The concept of the work - the notion that the work is an objectification, in a bounded expressive form, of human creativity - is similarly crucial to the capacity of copyright law to accommodate contemporary visual art, for it excludes any art practice that resists its own reification: conceptual art, some of which liquidates the object entirely; and performance art, which yields an event unfolding in time rather than a spatially delimited artefact. Finally, the concept of the work also imposes constraints on the kinds of objects in which the work can appear: the object cannot be a human being as such; the object must arguably be reasonably permanent; and it cannot be liable to decay, disappearance or continuous change.' (2002)