#FreeCreativity

Devon Aoki-by Minjae Lee

Art used to be free. Art whether, that was music, books, sculpting, painting, drawing, etc. art media was freely exchanged and shared so that it could inspire others to create and build upon the art world. Now fast forward to present day, capitalism, where its all about the " bottom line" and profits. You now have a multitude of copyrights and laws that claim to "protect" the artists work and integrity from being "stolen" but in reality those laws are just used to increase the profits of the corporations and labels that feel they are the only ones who should benefit from said artist. In a world where ideas and inspiration can flow freely, art can progress and grow, but in this world where it costs you to be inspired by others, the creative culture has lost steam. These restrictions have not been placed everywhere in the art media world. In the world of fashion, fashion designers develop their original voice and style by the interchanging of clothes styles, silhouettes, and fabrics which are all used to inspire other designers. Examples of this are in the very clothing trends we follow everyday. The very first blue jeans were developed and created by Levi Strauss, but now we have all types of designs; boot-cut, straight, bell bottom, colored jeans,  etc. This variation and diversity was from years of freedom within innovation and design. A modern day small scale example freedom within 2D media was in Long Beach Museum of art, where street artists were given free reign to create whatever they wanted on the walls of the gallery. You can view the most of art here. Creativity within the music industry has really been curbed by copyright. In music there are only so many notes and even fewer combinations of those notes that create melodies and riffs within songs. So if you were to be inspired by a certain genre of music and want to write a song with a similar feel you now need to make sure that what you have written or created isn't similar to another artists music within that genre. In this Rolling Stones article the author, Will Sheff, talks about how artists creativity is being killed by copyrights and the artistic process isn't able to flow as freely as it is supposed to. The exchange of ideas and inspiration is something that just happens naturally within the world of art but the need for profits and sales has made parts of it a courtroom for "I did it first!"

"I realized that this is what artists are supposed to do – communicate back and forth with each other over the generations, take old ideas and make them new (since it's impossible to really "imitate" somebody without adding anything of your own), create a rich, shared cultural language that was available to everybody. Once I saw it in folk art, I saw it everywhere – in hip-hop, in street art, in dada. I became convinced that the soul of culture lay in this kind of weird, irreverent-but-reverant back-and-forth. And I concluded that copyright law was completely opposed to this natural artistic process in a way that was strangling and depleting our culture, taking away something rich and beautiful that belonged to everyone in order to put more money into the hands of the hands of a small, lawyered few." 

-Will Sheff