This chapter interrogates how artists’ moving image has grappled with the increased ridigification of copyright that has occurred over the last two decades. Many artists champion the freedom to reuse copyrighted materials, but fail to interrogate the particular circumstances that it make possible for them to do so without retribution, while simultaneously avoiding an engagement with the significant encroachments on fair use and the public domain that have been implemented as part of new copyright legislation that seeks to control the unruliness of digital reproduction. As a counterpoint to such positions, this chapter examines Ben White and Eileen Simpson’s Struggle in Jerash (2009), a work made by repurposing a public domain film of the same title made in 1957 in Jordan. Simpson and White contest the increasing privatization of visual culture, insisting on the wealth of the cultural commons precisely as it is under threat.
The valuation of emerging media arts in the age of digital reproduction