From a new document and policy piece from the College Art Association. Here is the excerpt of the portion particularly relating to artists. (Other sections give guidelines for editors, analytic writing (reviews), museums, teachers. This excerpt is from the document Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, and is excerpted here as a teaching tool and within the guidelines of fair use! NOW let's debate what this means for textile artists and mixed media and collage artists!
(Note: graphics are also from the College Art Association site, and are screenshots that I made of the original materials.)
"FOR ARTISTS
"DESCRIPTION For centuries, artists have incorporated the work of others as part of their creative practice. Today, many artists occasionally or routinely reference and incorporate artworks and other cultural productions in their own creations. Such quotation is part of the construction of new culture, which necessarily builds on existing culture. It often provides a new interpretation of existing works, and may (or may not) be deliberately confrontational. Increasingly, artists employ digital tools to incorporate existing (including digital) works into their own, making uses that range from pastiche and collage (remix), to the creation of new soundscapes and lightscapes. Sometimes this copying is of a kind that might infringe copyright, and sometimes not. But whatever the technique, and whatever may be used (from motifs or themes to specific images, text, or sounds), new art can be generated.
"PRINCIPLE Artists may invoke fair use to incorporate copyrighted material into new artworks in any medium, subject to certain limitations:
"Limitations
• Artists should avoid uses of existing copyrighted material that do not generate new artistic meaning, being aware that a change of medium, without more, may not meet this standard.
• The use of a preexisting work, whether in part or in whole, should be justified by the artistic objective, and artists who deliberately repurpose copyrighted works should be prepared to explain their rationales both for doing so and for the extent of their uses.
• Artists should avoid suggesting that incorporated elements are original to them, unless that suggestion is integral to the meaning of the new work.
•When copying another’s work, an artist should cite the source, whether in the new work or elsewhere (by means such as labeling or embedding), unless there is an articulable aesthetic basis for not doing so. "
To see the entire document visit this site.
For analysis and some interesting data on effects of copyright rules on artists and others, see this post on HYPERALLERGIC, a great NYC based newsblog about all things art.