Re: <nettime> Sorry, there's no fee, c'mon it's just a link!

[Mike Leggett <legart@ozemail.com.au>]

on 1/5/01 1:17 PM, Peter Lunenfeld at peterl@artcenter.edu wrote:

>> Do you think that artists shoul be paid everytime their website is linked?
>> 
> Back in the 1970s, the structuralist filmmaker Hollis Frampton was offered a
> retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. ..... Frampton finally
> got paid (I think he did and that MOMA changed its policies as a result). But
> I do remember that concise and just letter.
> 

The same struggles were waged in Britain (and the rest of Europe) at the
same time over the same issues. The fraternity shared amongst the
film-makers including Hollis were conclusive in persuading the institutions
to not only include the work in their programs but also pay a rental for it.
A few began collecting but time-based work didn't really happen for most
places until U-matic video arrived.

One of the mainstays of the argument was the cost of producing the films,
even where much of the work was produced at a fraction of the cost of
commercial production. In London for instance, we ran our own processing and
printing facilities at the LFMC. The income from print sales and rentals
varied enormously but for the majority of 'artist film-makers', subsistence
derived from other sources, usually teaching or the dole.

Today the assumption among naive curators is that producing Web pages let
alone sites is something without material cost, and that exchanging 'spare
time' for 'exposure' (of ideas, attitudes and egos) is an enticing deal. If
we are to regard physical/3D public spaces such as museums as being
something more than nodes of connoisseurship then part of the process of
participating is advancing the levels of comprehension amongst the staff who
run them. 

Unlike linear media where dollar values were based on minutes duration, a
website is a place of residency and can be rented out presumably on the
basis of sliding scales of value - size, position, convenience, utilities,
period since last refurbishment etc etc...... Curators shouldn't be asked to
become brokers, cyberealtors, but concentrate on functioning in a similar
way to the gatekeepers of lists like this one which (expertly) filter the
raw and the spurious and group, provisionally, that which remains. The fee
paid for publicly exhibiting/linking the work should reflect the costs to
the artist, including time, of completing the work. How else are sites
offered to the public going to get beyond the initial stages we are
currently enjoying?

Mike Leggett

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