A couple of years back one day I received a strange request from an unknown person from New York in USA to authenticate two works of mine. The work looked exactly of mine except it had some colour fading. It also had my name on left bottom in English as I often do. The only problem was I had no Idea of such a sale or transfer. On further enquiry, I learned that he sourced the work from a struggling Indian art student. During those days Google strangely would prominently show a popular Hollywood actress’s name, if anyone would image search my work. This smart Indian student made use of that opportunity and somehow managed to convince this poor chap that this actress is a big collector of my work. During that period I also had a website where I occasionally used to publish some of my exploration and it is being only explorations with the caption that “none of the works is for sale”. Our smart student made use of all these for his advantage to fleece this investor a cool four thousand eight hundred dollars with downloaded print. Since he began to have doubts about the signature in authentication letter that he contacted me for authentication. The entire drama gave me a hearty laughter. I informed the buyer that there is some colour problem in the print and if he sends me an undertaking to send those prints back and bear the courier expenses for a new set of works with my pencil signature, I will send him a new print of the same works. He happily agreed to that and I did not want our smart Indian student friend to get caught in a serious crime in the US, so I left it that.
This entire episode provoked me into a deep philosophical question of authenticity of authorship and ownership of an artwork. History of art is full of such stories where artist and their family died in poverty while their work, later on, made many others billionaires. If one search in goggle, one will find millions of photographs of the same artwork with million other’s copyright watermark on it. Cropped differently (composition) with colour scheme differently, digitally enhanced the qualities; most of them will make the original work into oblivion. Before one jump into an ethical or moral judgment about the entire affair, one may have to consider some serious philosophical artistic issues involved with image making in this entire affair. Allow me to explain in detail.
What is original in art : Labour/craft or concept?
This is a complicated question. In western art from the days of guild during Renaissance to today’s postmodern artists, a large section of artists would not be able to claim authorship of the craft of labour. Most of them are made to order or supervised. So one may have to safely discount that claim from the originality of art. Then comes conceptual authorship. Largely in an art, there are three ways an artist executes an artwork – translation, transformation and transgression. Considering these three areas are largely dealt by curatorial conceptualization in postmodern art, one leaves very little room for the authenticity of authorship of the artwork. Unlike in film, where director is only one of the authors in the creation of film with due credit is given to others in the process of filmmaking, in art, unfortunately, single individual as the artist often claims the whole authorship. One would not hear the name of craftsmen or other people involved in the execution of artworks. There are many conceptualizations involved in every artwork- technical, spatial, curatorial and finally aesthetical conceptualizations. In other words, it becomes a problematic argument when one considers the authenticity of authorship by a single individual.
Work of art and its image reproductions
As I mentioned earlier, on Internet one will find millions of image reproductions of same artwork with hundreds of copyrights for photography. In other words, the authenticity of authorship gets separated from artwork in its image reproduction as a photograph. Considering both are artistic mediums and artists execute both, one cannot claim the authorship of the other. In other words, one has the artistic liberty for a selective recreation of another artwork in its image reproduction!
From Greek time onwards, this viewer prerogative to reinterpret an artwork as observer in observer-observed and observation triangulation is already a settled subject.
This makes the authenticity of authorship complex phenomena in art world. If an artist makes claim of authorship on a craftsman’s labour in transforming a media( kindly note an artist is not selling art but sells its material transformation ) and a photographer claims authorship of its image reproduction and then a digital media artist claim authorship of reproduction’s reproduction, in today’s contemporary art world authenticity and authorship becomes a complex issue.
From that US-based Indian student (although I do not know who is this character) I started experimenting with transgressing into master’s works to transform them into historical and theoretical artworks for a long time. Still, I am as an old school ethics follower, do not claim ownership of these works. I only claim the viewer’s transformative inference authorship in such artworks. My experiments are still going on getting more and more insights into this complex world of authorship and ownership.
Considering no collector or buyer can claim ownership of art but can only claim the ownership of artwork, in today’s world these collectors cannot claim ownership of its image reproduction, unless and until they commission it or buy its rights. Considering artworks are reproduced in critique and reviews in textual format and it is legal, artists can not take away the viewers inference right in image format as well.
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