In part two of the two-part interview with Renée Vara, Angela Johnson and B Crittenden discuss with her sharing art digitally and some of the opportunities and challenges that can arise. They also talk about some changes and possibilities for the future of the arts. Renée is the founder of Vara Art. She is a cultural entrepreneur, advisor, curator, and educator. Her area of research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, art economics, and creative rights.
Part one of the interview can be found here.
Referenced Resources
Street Artist Revok and H&M Settle Dispute Over an Ad That Featured His Work Without Permission
Art Law: The Guide for Collectors, Investors, Dealers & Artists (Fifth Edition)
Artists Mentioned
Transcript
[Musical intro, fades out]
Angela: Welcome to an interview episode brought to you by the Arts Management and Technology Lab. My name is Angela Johnson, and I'm the Podcast Producer.
B: And I'm B Crittenden, the Technology and Interactive Content Manager.
Angela: This is part two of a two-part interview with Renée Vara. Renée is the founder of Vara Art. She is a cultural entrepreneur, advisor, curator, and educator. Her area of research focuses on the intersection of contemporary art, art economics, and creative rights. Renée is an art legal expert for significant cases, including the landmark VARA litigation, 5Pointz v. G&M Realty. She recently gave a guest lecture for the College of Fine Arts in Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University about this case. In part one, we discussed Renée's career and her take on visual arts landscape, as well as the 5Pointz case. If you haven't listened to it yet, definitely go and take a listen. In this episode, part two, we'll discuss sharing art digitally and some of the opportunities and challenges that can arise, and we also talk about some changes and possibilities for the future of the arts. Hope you enjoy!
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B: So I have a question going a little bit beyond 5Pointz. I wonder if you could talk about if and how street artists are embracing the digital landscape and what opportunities and challenges this brings up for those artists and their work.
Renée: Well, actually, I think that street art was recognized through photography and film before it was recognized by the fine art world. I mean, if you think of the movie "Wild Style," which was a documentary about Wild Style, you think about mass culture, Blondie included Fab Five Freddy into her "Rapture" video. This was before you were seeing anything appear in a museum and sanctified in art institutions. So, I think that history of photographers and filmmakers really embracing the art form early on as a movement, alongside with hip hop and the development of hip hop, I think steeped artists in this vernacular is they're accustomed to dealing with trying to translate their art into, you know, digital means. You know, I mean, for my testimony, one of the biggest sources of material and documentation was YouTube, because the artists have been so self-enterprising for so long, and, most importantly, their number one audience and their focus is the public. They're not making art for institutions, and they're not making art for institutional kind of values or validation. They are making art and, most of them that I worked with on 5Pointz, all of them reaching the public is of primary importance. So they have been using those kinds of, that media to reach directly to viewers and their audience for a very long time. And so I think for them, it's not a big pivot right now. And I think, actually, they've outpaced what now is becoming more common because in a traditional fine art world, much of the promotion was being done by a gallerist, right? Or a curator or museum. That's how an artist reached the public through a mediated source. And street artists were really early on to go directly to the public. So I think they're very well positioned. And I don't think their practices are changing much. And personally, I think, right now, street art and public art is the most relevant art we could have. You can drive by it in your car, you can walk by it, it doesn't require, you know, appointments or privatized access during Covid. I mean, it's an amazing anecdote to kind of our cultural woes, I suppose. You know, I'm missing the art world a lot, but I think it's the art of the moment.
B: I think that's a great point about it being unmediated, too. There's this sense that the artist themselves has more control and ownership at all of their work.
Renée: Yeah, absolutely. But at the same time, they have less control. I mean, one of the most difficult things is Instagram. I'm reposting—often times, people don't include the tag of the maker. So while digging deep, because I had never done that kind of method of research in terms of quantifying social media presence, which, you know, we engaged in on a kind of rudimentary level before social media scrapers had become sophisticated like they are now in terms of humanities studies. Those tools were really unavailable to us. My research predates that. So we had to dig real deep in terms of, like, literally looking to Google Images manually for pages and pages and pages and pages. So, at the same time, the artist has more control, they have less control, right? Because people are engaging with it on their own terms with their own experience and whether they acknowledge the maker or not, that experience is valid to them. And so in that way, you know, as I'm saying it's, you know, a kind of very relevant art form. And if you think about how museums and institutions and galleries have now set up, you know, Instagram spots to engage viewers, basically, street artists were doing that from the beginning.
B: One of the differences is that a museum might have someone solely dedicated to rights management for their collection and could maybe try and enforce and manage any of that replication that goes uncredited, or just try and oversee that whole process, while an artist, they don't have quite the capacity.
Renée: Yeah, institutions, in terms of their holdings, could assert reproduction rights and copyright because they're resourced and they are more in control than a street artist.
B: Yeah, that's essentially what I was going for. I wonder, do you have any advice for anybody either working in an institution or an individual artist who is trying to take more advantage of sharing their work digitally?
Renée: Well, I think, you know, just observing successful artists that are navigating the public and accepting that, if you make public art, you can't necessarily control either their interpretation or their kind of engagement through reproductions. I think where many artists draw the line is when knowing institutions and businesses try to profit off of that. And we saw that quite amazingly with Revok. That's another amazing case, the Revok case, where he had issued—H&M had done an advertorial, an advertisement campaign in front of a work he had just issued, you know, kind of a cease and desist on that advertisement campaign. They tried to over assert their rights, saying that this is not a legal work. And what happened? He said, “Okay, I'm not going to use the legal forum—I'm going to use the social forum,” and went out on his Instagram. And people, you know, retaliated against the label. So I think that's a really powerful tale, that artists can assert their rights in multiple spheres, not just the legal sphere. And that was a very successful case where H&M realized that, you know, maybe they were overstepping their bounds and, more importantly, was that really the brand they're looking for is taking advantage of somebody else's creative endeavors in order to create, you know, a sense of cool? So I think that is a great lesson. And what I would say is, you know, if you're creating art, if it's legal art, or permission pieces, you know, those are two different kinds of buckets. And you have to think very carefully about that. We'll see if there's ever a case where there's an illegal artwork that's executed in the public sphere that then gets protected by VARA.
But there are a couple basic, practical things you can do as an artist: one, you can tag your work, and, you know, make sure there's a sign or negotiate there's a sign. If you do have an active Instagram, that should be close, in the proximity. Public art usually has, like, some kind of tag, label, sign; make sure that when you execute it, that, you know, you properly label it as the maker. Some people with trademarking, you know, you can register a trademark very quickly when it comes to a brand. And if you're really prolific, like Futura, he didn't trademark his tag. And so that's something you can do very quickly on your own, and you can register a trademark for a minimal amount. And I think that, you know, as a viewer, you can be a responsible viewer, you could try to learn, you know, who is this artist? And tag them in your Instagram. It's a very simple thing. You know, there are a lot of regional arts lawyers councils—in New York City we have them, in Pittsburgh you have one—that you can access as an artist some good legal advice, maybe not representation for, like, a massive lawsuit, but at least guidelines. And there are many books. Judith Bresler's “Art Law” book is a very good book that was recently updated. And, you know, there's information online with the volunteer for the arts and the New York State Bar also has a committee, art law committee, and they do public programming and access to advice. So, there's a lot of resources out there that can help artists. I mean, I think the most important thing, though, is when you proceed and think about pursuing a legal path that you are very pragmatic, and you know enough to know what you don't know. Because you're an artist, you're not a lawyer. Same thing with arts professionals. You know, it's more important, kind of like, to know that you just, you know enough to know that you don't know enough. And that's the point when you're going to make sure you get good counsel.
Angela: Yeah, that was that was such practical advice. We don't usually get such straightforward "Oh, you should do these things," but that's really helpful.
Renée: If I might add one thing: also, if you're doing, you know, if you're a street artist or muralist working in the public sphere, I mean, with VARA, you know, you should consider if there's going to be an agreement with the property owner, and within that agreement, whether you're going to be okay if they ask you to waive your rights, so you should think very carefully about that, if they ask for that. And if the property owner doesn't necessarily want to put a piece of paper between you that maybe you'd be proactive and put a piece of paper. And it doesn't have to be a very cumbersome act. It could be, you know, a simple letter that just outlines the scope of the project, the duration of the project, and some of the basic copyright issues and VARA issues.
B: Yeah, and hopefully now that VARA seems to be coming further defined by these opinions and there's some precedents with them, that will help with, like, a broader understanding going into these situations as well.
Renée: Yeah, probably, that's what I think, you know, 5Pointz represents, as well. It represents, you know, artists learning about their rights, understanding that they do have rights, and maybe understanding the boundaries of those rights. I think the only thing right now, I think some artists may try to overstep, and that could be a rather dangerous thing. So that's where you have to think really carefully and pragmatically, because of the cost and the emotional labor involved in engaging in a legal battle. It just simply might not be worth it. There might be other ways to mediate the situation. I know several cases where actually mediation, the artist ended up really in a better place, in a much better place, because they found a solution that the artists had never considered, and their work was preserved in a very prestigious university setting. And had they gone down the opposite road of legal recourse, they could have lost the work completely. So you have to really be open and try to engage in a dialogue, I would suggest. Rather than battle, first try to talk about it. It's really a simple kind of notion.
B: But helps with that financial cost as well.
Angela: Well, before we finish up here, is there anything that you would like to plug or direct our listeners to?
Renée: Yeah, on behalf of the artists, which I think is really important, because the 5Pointz artists, especially Meres One, it's their story and certainly their story is yet to be recorded in terms of the history of 5Pointz, and it's really good to hear from the artists themselves. And one great resource right now that exists to explore that is an installation called MOSA, the Museum of Street Art, which is at citizenM, the hotel, and it is accessible and free. It was conceived and curated by Marie Cecile Flageul, who has been a longtime advocate of 5Pointz, was an active participant, and works as a promoter and a curator of many of the artists. And it is installation through the stairwells, kind of “love note” to the Lower East Side with 21 artists that have or worked at 5Pointz. And it's really an incredible immersive experience. And I'm sure you'll hear more from the artists such as Meres One and Marie, so I would look forward to that.
In retrospect, with our more casual conversation prior to the recording, I would just say, you know, as difficult of a times that we're in, you know, in the arts, in particular, you know, New York City is a very different place right now for experiencing art. I think for creatives and producers in the art space, it's also a grand time to innovate and change and do things in different ways. Because nothing is a failure now, and just like some of the most amazing art has been created under the greatest cultural distress, I think, you know, we're at another moment where we can really rethink things and modes of possibility didn't seem real—everything's open-ended now and to just try to embrace that as much as possible. I know it's very difficult for people to sustain themselves. But I think the art world has gone through these moments. I experienced one early in my career, you know, with a great, very big recession early on, in the early 90s. After the savings and loan crisis, there were very few jobs. And, you know, that created some dynamics and a bunch of art dealers created art fairs. And now they change culture in America by creating art fairs and accessibility to relevant contemporary art, and they basically changed the face of collecting. And that really started with The Armory, which was on top of Gramercy Hotel and it changed my trajectory because I experienced these amazing installations in a hotel being done outside of institutional walls. And so, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to create innovation because you don't have to worry about failure. And I'd say, try to embrace that as much as you can now. That's my plug.
Angela: That's a very positive way to frame all of this stuff.
B: Yeah, that's a great plug.
Renée: Well, I think creativity across the board is needed now more than ever. And so creatives, who are always trying to look for solutions through imagination—that's what creatives do every day. And I would love to see, especially in America, more kind of cross pollination between creatives and more traditional business practitioners. Because I think the more that we do that, the more we can solve some of these very, very pressing issues, you know, and I wish there was more of the dialogue between creatives and policymakers. But I think that's the advantage of social media. The disadvantage of social media in the art world is I think it's reducing art and the experience of art to some extent. But right now, it's all we have. But, you know, I want to move beyond the rectangle of our cell phones.
B: Agreed. And, like, a museum space, too. You said rectangle, I immediately thought of a square room. Which, there's nothing was nothing wrong with it, but—
Renée: Right, that's what the art fairs did, right? They move beyond the cube, beyond the white cube, which Europe was doing through documenta, which, by the way, documenta in Europe was established by a bunch of artists—Joseph Beuys—and changed my life, as well. When I saw it, I traveled over there, and went on my own, and it really changed the way I could experience art and really was a game changer for me. It's actually what made me want to be involved in the arts. So, I think we have all those possibilities now. People just need to stay well and healthy and care about humanity and be respectful of others and try if they can to embrace change, because our world is always under change.
B: Yeah, and if it isn't, then it's a problem.
Angela: Yeah.
Renée: I think it's forcing a lot of change that's probably . . . it's long coming, you know. So, I'm trying to be hopeful with what we're going to see through that. I also think, in New York, as much as the difficult situation in terms of, you know, jobs and galleries and the art ecosystem, the upside is, New York was becoming so difficult to live that it was not allowing for young creatives to get the synergy—to come to New York, to live in New York. I mean, it is the center of the art world. Although, now, you know, you can be an artist anywhere, you know, and be engaged. That's amazing. But, for places like New York, I mean, it's allowing a new generation of young creatives to kind of rekindle and I think that energy and that synergy that comes out of and creates creative capital and movements, I think it's very ripe for re-blossoming again, so I'm looking forward to that.
B: Me too.
Angela: Yeah.
B: Well, we should thank you for joining us today. This was a really wonderful conversation.
Angela: Yeah, it was great.
Renée: Thank you. It was lovely to meet you both. Be well, stay well.
Angela: Thanks for listening to the AMT Lab podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and to leave a comment. If you would like to learn more, go to amt-lab.org. That is A-M-T dash L-A-B .org. Or, you can email us at amtlabcmu@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter at Tech in the Arts, or on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn at Arts Management and Technology Lab. You can find the resources that we referenced today in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
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