Martha Buskirk

If you have tattoos, who owns the rights to the imagery inked on your body? What about the photos you just shared on Instagram? And what if you are an artist, responding to the surrounding landscape of preexisting cultural forms? Most people go about their days without thinking much about intellectual property, but it shapes all aspects of contemporary life. It is a constantly moving target, articulated through a web of laws that are different from country to country, sometimes contradictory, often contested. Some protections are necessary—not only to benefit creators and inventors but also to support activities that contribute to the culture at large—yet overly broad ownership rights stifle innovation. Is It Ours? takes a fresh look at issues of artistic expression and creative protection as they relate to contemporary law. Exploring intellectual property, particularly copyrights, Martha Buskirk draws connections between current challenges and early debates about how something intangible could be defined as property. She examines bonds between artist and artwork, including the ways that artists or their heirs retain control over time. The text engages with fundamental questions about the interplay between authorship and ownership and the degree to which all expressions and inventions develop in response to innovations by others. Most importantly, this book argues for the necessity of sustaining a vital cultural commons.

Art, Copyright, and Public Interest

Is It Ours?

Intertwines a dual emphasis on evolving institutional priorities and major shifts in artistic production.

Contemporary Art Between Museum and Marketplace

Creative Enterprise

Clara Weyergraf-Serra

These documents from the public hearing and the court proceedings are an essential primary source for scholars of art and law, providing a complete and moving record of censorship in the arts.

Documents

The Destruction of Tilted Arc

Francesca Esmay

Virginia Skidmore Rutledge

Case studies / Francesca Esmay, Ted Mann, and Jeffrey Weiss -- Decommission. Lost and found : history, policy, works / Francesca Esmay, Ted Mann, and Jeffrey Weiss -- Endgame / Martha Buskirk -- Enforcing the work of art / Virginia Rutledge -- Where eoes the work reside? a conversation between Martha Buskirk and Virginia Rutledge -- Selected correspondence and PCI interviews.

Case Studies in Minimal Art-the Guggenheim Panza Collection Initiative

Object Lessons

Mignon Nixon

This expanded edition of the fall 1994 special issue of October includes new essays by Sarat Maharaj and by Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. It also includes the transcript of an exchange between T. J. Clark and Benjamin Buchloh which presents new responses to the problems raised by this immediately popular (and now out of print) issue of the journal. The Duchamp Effect is an investigation of the historical reception of the work of Marcel Duchamp from the 1950s to the present, including interviews by Benjamin Buchloh (with Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Robert Morris), Elizabeth Armstrong (with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner), and Martha Buskirk (with Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Fred Wilson) and a round-table discussion of the Duchamp effect on conceptual art. Contents Introduction, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh • What's Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?, Hal Foster • Typotranslating the Green Box, Sarat Maharaj • Three Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh • Interviews with Ed Ruscha and Bruce Conner, Elizabeth Armstrong • Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism, Thierryde Duve • Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg, Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse • Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louis Lawler, and Fred Wilson, Martha Buskirk • Thoroughly Modern Marcel, Martha Buskirk • Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp, October Round Table • All the Things I Said about Duchamp: A Response to Benjamin Buchloh, T. J. Clark • Response to T. J. Clark, Benjamin Buchloh

The Duchamp Effect

An exploration of transformations in the nature of the art object and artistic authorship in the last four decades. In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists' use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists' works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art. Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.

Martha Buskirk

Books

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