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cory doctorow
National Portrait Gallery: it is implicit in the “No Photography”
signs prominently displayed throughout its rooms, including one
by the entrance to the Pop Art Portraits exhibition.
These signs are not intended to protect the works from the
depredations of camera flashes (otherwise they would read “No
Flash Photography”). No, the ban on pictures is meant to safe-
guard the copyright of the works hung on the walls — a fact that
every member of staff I asked instantly confirmed.
Indeed, it seems every square centimeter of the National Por-
trait Gallery is under some form of copyright. I wasn’t even al-
lowed to photograph the “No Photography” sign. A member of
staff explained that the typography and layout of the signs was
itself copyrighted.
If true, presumably the same rules would prevent anyone
from taking any pictures in any public place — unless you could
somehow contrive to get a shot of Leicester Square without any
writing, logos, architectural facades, or images in it. Otherwise I
doubt even Warhol could have gotten away with it.
So what’s the message of the show? Is it a celebration of remix
culture, reveling in the endless possibilities opened up by appro-
priating and reusing images without permission?
Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before
the UN set up the World Intellectual Property Organization and
the ensuing mania for turning everything that can be sensed and
recorded into someone’s property?
Does this show — paid for with public money, with some works
that are themselves owned by public institutions — seek to in-
spire us to become twenty-first century pop artists, armed with
cameraphones, websites, and mixers, or is it supposed to inform
us that our chance has passed and we’d best settle for a life as
information serfs who can’t even make free use of what our eyes
see and our ears hear?
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