Mee on the News

A professor of mine referred me to a short article aptly titled "Copying Rights" on the current issue of Newsweek (March 26, 2007) which makes mention of Charles Mee. The article is not particularly insightful and focuses mostly on listing artists who are are taking similar steps in sharing their work with their audiences. Yet, it does emphasize how "the idea that appropriation and influence are inherent to the artistic process" is being promoted by many rising and established writers, musicians, and such.

This article is mostly useful for our work when we think of it in relation to the NPR profile on Mee that I mentioned a couple of posts back. This idea that the public domain should be expanded to include most (if not all) of the works that are in publication, that we should create a "cultural commons" in which we can share, appropriate, and reuse each other's work appears to be gaining popularity in the current art scene. The Newsweek article mentions a website called Creative Commons that is taking the needed steps for this to happen legally. The name of the website itself is already reminiscent of some of the ideas that Mee promotes with his (re)making project. Is this the future of writing? Of art? Like Mee says: this is how Shakespeare and the Greeks created their works. This is how James Joyce wrote Ulysses and how Kathy Acker wrote, well, every single one of the novels. If this sharing, this creative commons, did not exist, our work on this production would not exist either. Are we, by participating in this practice of (legal) appropriation, insuring that the explore the possibility of how art is actually created as we reuse elements in our culture and/or a dramatic/literary tradition?